Q: How do you help with social skills? How do you deal with anxiety and helping our kids cope with the pressure they place on themselves?

A: Actually, teaching social skills and helping children cope with anxiety and pressures are related. Young children are especially anxious to learn to do the right thing both as it relates to interacting with others and feeling comfortable about what they are accomplishing. Early childhood years are golden for their eager learning, because developmentally they want so much to please parents and other adults. Positive attention is powerful in teaching good social and work habits, and young children also copy the adult role models in their lives. They are definitely watching and listening to parents, but they don't read minds. Therefore, parents and teachers need to patiently and moderately praise, teach and model what they are thinking are good values for children.

Children's music and books help parents teach social skills, kindness, honesty and how to cope with fears and expectations. As parents, you will want to repeatedly explain how you dealt with similar fears when you were a small child. It won't be enough to acknowledge how you felt. You will also have to explain the steps you took to gain courage. If you don't recall exactly what you did, you can use your imagination to invent what you could have done in order to provide insight to your children.

An important key to teaching social skills is explaining the importance of children trying to think about how others might feel. For example, learning to judge the effect on others, children brag about what they've accomplished, or when others are left out of an activity, you can help your child tune into being sensitive to people's feelings. Most children don't have automatic insights.

As to anxiety, if children avoid what they are irrationally worried about, they become more anxious. If you can help them to take small steps in attempting what they are afraid they can't accomplish, that will lessen their anxiety. Please read my article on my website entitled "Guiding Anxious Children Toward Achievement and Confidence."

The pressures and expectations children internalize come from the praise words they hear about their accomplishments, their actual successful performances and comparisons of the performances to their siblings and peers. Thus, successful children do learn to cope with and can enjoy reasonable pressures. In order to avoid feeling too much pressure, be sensitive to not overpraise children with too many superlatives. High expectations are good for children when they're within reason. Too high of expectations become the internalized pressures that cause children to become defensive and avoid doing what they are no longer certain they can accomplish. Helping kids set realistic expectations encourages their motivation.

Positive and reasonable expectations can be set subtly by parent and teacher talk that surrounds them (referential talk). Being authentic is important, but being wise and deliberate in the talk that surrounds children is more important and can guide them toward motivation with less pressure.

For free newsletters entitled "The Pressures Bright Children Feel," "Teaching Social Skills" and/or "How to Parent So Children Will Learn," send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to the address below.

Dr. Sylvia B. Rimm is the director of the Family Achievement Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, a clinical professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, and the author of many books on parenting. More information on raising kids is available at www.sylviarimm.com. Please send questions to: Sylvia B. Rimm on Raising Kids, P.O. Box 32, Watertown, WI 53094 or srimm@sylviarimm.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.