Why Won’t He Play With Me?: Facilitating Sibling Interactions

Social and play skills are important developmental tasks for young children. Typically developing children learn appropriate social skills quite naturally and without specific intervention while interacting with other children in playful environments. Young children with disabilities, however, usually need social skills interventions, and these are most likely to be helpful when provided as play-based activities in natural environments with other children, including siblings. Siblings can be taught to interact with their brother or sister with a disability during play activities, and to model appropriate social behaviors for them at home and in the community. Children with disabilities learn to respond socially and interact with their siblings and further generalize those social skills with other children as they enter school. This article presents a framework for the sibling training which is based on the "stay-play-talk" model developed by English and colleagues (1997). This model includes a series of behaviors that lead to an ultimate skill for helping typically developing children (i.e., siblings in this article) facilitate social interactions with children with disabilities. The first one or two basic lessons help siblings learn how to use these three steps consistently to elicit social interactions from their brother or sister with a disability. The subsequent lessons provide siblings some specific ways to help their brother or sister with a disability become involved in play or social interactions. (Contains 2 tables and 1 figure.)