What is pragmatics and social therapy?
Pragmatics refers to all the subtle and unconscious things we do while talking with others. Many of us are not even conscious of these things as we communicate. Pragmatics and social therapy deals with helping clients work on making conversation natural and easy. Social and pragmatic difficulties are characterized by difficulty with communicating in a socially appropriate manner, having difficulty making friends and maintaining or initiating conversations across a variety of contexts. Children with social pragmatic difficulties may talk too much or too little and be unable to interpret the non-verbal and verbal cues of conversational partners. Individuals with social pragmatic difficulties struggle with sarcasm, taking turns, responding to others and making friends.
It strikes me that possibly our digital culture is causing more social dysfunction as we shy away from the most basic human interactions. Even technology has pushed us towards a life of shopping online and avoiding basic human interactions. Our culture avoids simple tasks like picking our own groceries. How do we expect our kids to learn the skills of interactions when we sequester ourselves to our homes? Are we becoming less social in this day and age? We don’t even have to talk to people when we mobile order at Chick-Fila or Starbucks. We don’t have to look at or even acknowledge a cashier at the self-checkouts that are popping up everywhere. Our predisposition to texting instead of talking to a person has become the norm.
Our responsibility as parents and teachers is to teach the skills that our society is putting less and less emphasis on. Communication and conversation are very important skills that forge relationships and allow the subtle skills needed to be caring individuals.
TE