--- title: "How to Improve Children's Social Skills | Parent Marriage" description: "Children's social skills are learned by watching the two adults in the house. What that means for your child, and why this is really a marriage question." lang: en json-ld: | [ { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "LocalBusiness", "@id": "https://parentmarriage.com/#business", "name": "Parent Marriage Coaching", "description": "Emotionally Connected Couples and Marriage Coaching for parents. Miami office and by video across the U.S.", "url": "https://parentmarriage.com", "telephone": "+1-305-986-2905", "email": "Matt@ParentMarriage.com", "image": "https://parentmarriage.com/favicon.png", "priceRange": "$$", "address": { "@type": "PostalAddress", "streetAddress": "12755 SW 116th Terrace", "addressLocality": "Miami", "addressRegion": "FL", "postalCode": "33186", "addressCountry": "US" }, "geo": { "@type": "GeoCoordinates", "latitude": 25.6599319, "longitude": -80.4012802 }, "areaServed": { "@type": "AdministrativeArea", "name": "Miami-Dade County, FL" }, "founder": { "@type": "Person", "@id": "https://parentmarriage.com/#matthew" } }, { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Person", "@id": "https://parentmarriage.com/#matthew", "name": "Matthew W. Hoelscher", "jobTitle": "Marriage Coach", "url": "https://parentmarriage.com/matthew-hoelscher", "worksFor": { "@id": "https://parentmarriage.com/#business" }, "hasCredential": [ { "@type": "EducationalOccupationalCredential", "name": "Professional Certified Coach (PCC)", "credentialCategory": "certification", "recognizedBy": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "International Coaching Federation" } }, { "@type": "EducationalOccupationalCredential", "name": "EQ-i 2.0 Certified Assessor", "credentialCategory": "certification", "recognizedBy": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "MHS Assessments" } } ], "alumniOf": [ { "@type": "CollegeOrUniversity", "name": "Iowa State University" }, { "@type": "CollegeOrUniversity", "name": "University of Miami" } ] }, [ { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Service", "serviceType": "First-Time Discovery Call", "provider": { "@id": "https://parentmarriage.com/#business" }, "areaServed": { "@type": "AdministrativeArea", "name": "Miami-Dade County, FL" }, "description": "The welcome call for first timers only, free and on Zoom. Tell me what's going on and get an honest answer about whether the work is a fit. Existing clients book a paid session instead.", "offers": { "@type": "Offer", "price": "0.00", "priceCurrency": "USD", "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock" } }, { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Service", "serviceType": "Three-Session Package", "provider": { "@id": "https://parentmarriage.com/#business" }, "areaServed": { "@type": "AdministrativeArea", "name": "Miami-Dade County, FL" }, "description": "The path most couples take, three sessions to get the pattern named, interrupted and replaced. Booked as a package rather than one session at a time.", "offers": { "@type": "Offer", "price": "700.00", "priceCurrency": "USD", "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock" } }, { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Service", "serviceType": "Standard Session", "provider": { "@id": "https://parentmarriage.com/#business" }, "areaServed": { "@type": "AdministrativeArea", "name": "Miami-Dade County, FL" }, "description": "The core coaching session, built for one person working on the relationship, in person or by video.", "offers": { "@type": "Offer", "price": "175.00", "priceCurrency": "USD", "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock" } }, { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Service", "serviceType": "Extended Session", "provider": { "@id": "https://parentmarriage.com/#business" }, "areaServed": { "@type": "AdministrativeArea", "name": "Miami-Dade County, FL" }, "description": "Ninety minutes for both partners together, with room to work through something bigger.", "offers": { "@type": "Offer", "price": "315.00", "priceCurrency": "USD", "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock" } }, { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Service", "serviceType": "Marathon Intensive", "provider": { "@id": "https://parentmarriage.com/#business" }, "areaServed": { "@type": "AdministrativeArea", "name": "Miami-Dade County, FL" }, "description": "A single three-hour in-office session for urgent, relationship-threatening situations that need a lot of ground covered in one sitting.", "offers": { "@type": "Offer", "price": "630.00", "priceCurrency": "USD", "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock" } }, { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Service", "serviceType": "Short Zoom Session", "provider": { "@id": "https://parentmarriage.com/#business" }, "areaServed": { "@type": "AdministrativeArea", "name": "Miami-Dade County, FL" }, "description": "A brief video session for one person, useful between longer sessions.", "offers": { "@type": "Offer", "price": "87.00", "priceCurrency": "USD", "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock" } }, { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Service", "serviceType": "Long Zoom Session", "provider": { "@id": "https://parentmarriage.com/#business" }, "areaServed": { "@type": "AdministrativeArea", "name": "Miami-Dade County, FL" }, "description": "Two hours by video for both partners, a deeper working session without traveling to the office.", "offers": { "@type": "Offer", "price": "420.00", "priceCurrency": "USD", "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock" } } ], { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://parentmarriage.com/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Social Skills", "item": "https://parentmarriage.com/how-to-improve-childrens-social-skills" } ] }, { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "FAQPage", "mainEntity": [ { "@type": "Question", "name": "Can a marriage coach help with my child's behavior?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "Not directly, and I would be careful with anyone who says otherwise. I do not assess or treat children. What I work on is the two adults and the household they run, which is the environment your child is learning in. Plenty of parents find that when the temperature at home changes, things at the kitchen table change too. That is a side effect of the real work, not the service." } }, { "@type": "Question", "name": "Should we argue in front of the children or not?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "The hard ones, no. The ordinary friction of two people living together, in a normal voice, with a visible ending, is genuinely useful for a child to see. A house where adults never appear to disagree is not teaching peace, it is teaching that disagreement is unmentionable. What matters far more than whether they see the argument is whether they see the repair." } }, { "@type": "Question", "name": "My spouse and I parent completely differently. Is that damaging?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "Different styles are workable. What causes trouble is undermining, where one parent quietly reverses the other, because the child learns very quickly that rules are negotiable depending on who is in the room. That is a marriage problem wearing a parenting costume, and it is exactly the kind of thing coaching is good at." } }, { "@type": "Question", "name": "When should we see a licensed professional about our child?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "If a teacher has raised a concern, if there are questions about development, attention or speech, or if your child seems genuinely distressed rather than having a rough month, go to your pediatrician and to a licensed professional who works with children. Do that first. I am the adults, they are the child, and the two are not interchangeable." } } ] } ] --- [![Parent Marriage](/__l5e/assets-v1/323329b7-bfb6-4413-bc32-07161cb70b98/parent-marriage-logo.png)](/) [Home](/)[The 8 Stages](/help-me-save-my-marriage)[About](/about)[Marriage Straight Talk](/free-marriage-advice) [305-986-2905](tel:+13059862905)[Book a consultation](/book) [Book](/book) 1. [Home](/) 2. Social Skills Guide # What Your Kids Learn About People by Watching You Parents ask me how to teach a child to handle other people. The honest answer is that the lesson is already being taught every evening in your kitchen, by the two of you, whether or not anyone intended it. ![A couple talking together during a coaching session in a warm Miami office](/assets/session-couple-DOvXOasL.jpg) This question usually arrives sideways. A parent books a call about their marriage and 20 minutes in mentions that the 6 year old is having a rough time with other kids, or will not share, or melts down when a game does not go his way. Then they ask me, half joking, whether any of that is connected. It is, and not in the way people expect. I am a coach, not a child psychologist, and I am not going to make developmental claims or tell you what is going on inside your child. What I can talk about with some authority is the environment two adults are running, because that is my actual job. Kids raised in a house learn what people are like from the sample available to them, and for the first several years the entire sample is you and your spouse. That is not a guilt trip. It is the most usable piece of leverage you have. In this article 1. 01 [Your marriage is the sample size](#the-sample-size) 2. 02 [What they actually pick up](#what-they-actually-see) 3. 03 [The move is on the marriage, not on the child](#the-marriage-move) 4. 04 [The other half is play, and you are probably rationing it](#play) 5. 05 [Where I stop](#my-limits) 6. 06 [Talk it through](#talk-it-through) 7. 07 [Questions couples ask](#faq) ## Your marriage is the sample size Before a child has friends, a teacher, or a single opinion of their own, they have two adults in a house showing them what human beings do with each other. How a disagreement starts. Whether it ends. Whether someone apologizes, and what that looks like. Whether a person who is upset gets approached or avoided. Whether anybody in this house ever says the thing they actually mean. None of that is taught deliberately. It is absorbed the way accents are absorbed. This is why the advice you find online about teaching turn taking and eye contact tends to underperform. It is not wrong. It is just competing against 3,000 hours a year of demonstration, and the demonstration wins. I say this to parents constantly and it lands hard the first time, so let me put the good news next to it. You do not have to be a calm and flawless couple. You have to be a couple that repairs, out loud, where the kid can see it. A child who watches two adults get it wrong and then fix it is learning something far more useful than a child who watches two adults who never appear to get it wrong at all. The thing they are copying Children do not copy your best behavior. They copy your default behavior, which is whatever the two of you do at 6:40pm when everyone is tired, hungry, and nobody is performing for anyone. ![Two young children playing together in the water](/assets/people-1560569_640-C1Z4TQEc.jpg) Most of what a child learns about other people is learned in ordinary play like this. ## What they actually pick up When parents describe their child's social difficulties to me, I am usually not listening for the child. I am listening for the house. Three things come up over and over. The first is what happens to conflict. In some houses conflict is loud and unresolved, and the child learns that disagreement is dangerous and unbounded. In others conflict is invisible, everything gets absorbed silently, and the child learns that disagreement is unmentionable. Both produce a kid who has no working model for a normal disagreement, which is most of what social life at 7 consists of. The second is what happens after. Repair is the piece almost nobody demonstrates. Two adults have a sharp exchange in the kitchen, then go quiet, then reappear an hour later being pleasant, and the entire middle section happens off camera or does not happen at all. From the floor, that reads as: bad things happen and then are never mentioned. It is not surprising when a child then has no idea what to do after they have upset a friend. The third is whether anyone in the house says a plain, direct thing without wrapping it in three layers of protection. Kids who grow up around hinting become excellent hinters, which reads to other children as either confusing or manipulative, and they do not know why it is not working. What the child sees At the kitchen table What the child concludes Out in the world An argument starts and gets louder until someone walks out. Disagreement has no floor and no ceiling, so avoid it or go first and go hard. An argument never happens because everything gets swallowed. Wanting something different from another person is not sayable. Nobody ever names the repair out loud. Once you have upset someone, there is nothing to be done about it. Requests come wrapped in hints and sighs. You do not ask for things. You signal and hope, then get resentful. ![Two small children hugging each other](/assets/children-1869265_640-D4xcOKHE.jpg) Warmth is copied long before it is taught. ## The move is on the marriage, not on the child So when a parent asks what to do, my answer is not a curriculum for the kid. It is two things about the two of you, and they are unglamorous. Have your disagreements in a form that a child could survive witnessing. Not in front of them by design, and certainly not the hard ones. But if the ordinary friction of a marriage cannot happen in a normal voice within earshot, that is worth knowing about your marriage independently of parenting. If yours currently cannot, that is fixable, and it is the entire subject of [how to stop constant arguing in a relationship](/how-to-stop-constant-arguing-in-a-relationship). Then do the repair where it can be seen. Not a performance. A sentence. I was sharp with your mother earlier and that was not fair, so I told her that. It takes 8 seconds and it teaches something no role play at bedtime will teach, which is that the aftermath of conflict has a shape and the shape is survivable. If you want the mechanics of doing that properly between the two of you, that is [conflict resolution strategies](/conflict-resolution-strategies). What to actually change 1. Pick the one recurring fight and get it out of the hallway at 6:40pm. Same fight, different time, different volume. 2. Do one visible repair a week. Out loud, brief, no theatre, no explaining it to the child afterwards. 3. Replace one hint a day with a plain request, so somebody in the house is modelling asking. 4. Notice who your child copies when they are angry. It will be one of you, and it will be informative. 5. Give it a full term before you look for changes in the child. This is a slow instrument, not a switch. ![Two children playing football together in the park](/assets/park-6688951_640-Medium-CWOLpEjR.jpeg) A game is where a child practices losing, waiting, and going again. ## The other half is play, and you are probably rationing it The second thing I ask about is play, and I mean the two adults, not the toys. Houses where the grownups are still capable of being ridiculous with each other produce children who find social life less frightening, in my experience and for reasons I would not attempt to explain clinically. The couples I see 7 to 10 years in with small children have usually deleted play entirely. It went the way of everything else that was not urgent. The evenings became logistics, the weekends became errands with a birthday party in the middle, and somewhere in there the two of you stopped messing around. The child now lives in a competently run operation with no lightness in it, and then we wonder where their ease with other people is supposed to come from. This is the shape of what I call [the parent marriage](/what-is-a-parent-marriage), and it is the most common thing in my practice. It is not a failure. It is drift. But it is worth knowing that the atmosphere of a house is one of the few parenting inputs you can change this week without anybody's cooperation but your spouse's. ![A boy with a butterfly net and a girl running through a sunlit field](/assets/kids-6521604_640-Medium-D7GlZZ46.jpeg) Lightness at home tends to show up outside of it. ## Where I stop I want to be very clear about my lane, because this is a subject where a lot of people online are happy to sound authoritative about children they have never met. I do not assess children, I do not diagnose, and I do not treat. If your child is genuinely struggling, if a teacher has raised a concern, if there are worries about development, speech, attention, or anything that feels bigger than a rough patch, that belongs with your pediatrician and with a licensed professional who works with children. Getting that assessed properly is worth more than every article on the internet including this one, and it is not something a marriage coach should be improvising on. What I do is the adults. If the two of you are running a cold house, arguing constantly, or not speaking at all, I can help with that, and the household your child grows up in changes as a result. That is the honest scope. If you are weighing coaching against the clinical route generally, I compared them straight in [marriage therapy vs marriage coaching](/marriage-therapy-vs-marriage-coaching). This is not my call to make - A concern about development Speech, attention, learning, anything a teacher has flagged. Start with your pediatrician. Do not start with a marriage page. - A child in real distress Withdrawal, ongoing anxiety, aggression that frightens you, or a change you cannot explain. A licensed professional who works with children, not a coach. - Anything unsafe at home Abuse of any kind, an active addiction, or an untreated mental health condition. That goes to a licensed professional and I will say so on the first call. ![Two girls sitting in a grassy field playing a hand clapping game](/assets/girls-2564803_640-Dms1WZz2.jpg) Turn taking is a small thing that carries a long way. ## Talk it through If you started this page worried about your kid and finished it thinking about the two of you, that is the right end of the thread to pull. [Book a free 25 minute call](/talk-to-marriage-coach). It is for first timers, it costs nothing, and if what you describe belongs with someone qualified to assess your child, I will tell you that instead. ![Two cyclists riding together through a green park](/assets/cyclist-8693890_640-Medium-DhutOjHg.jpeg) Ease with other people starts with ease at your own kitchen table. ## Questions couples ask ### Can a marriage coach help with my child's behavior? Not directly, and I would be careful with anyone who says otherwise. I do not assess or treat children. What I work on is the two adults and the household they run, which is the environment your child is learning in. Plenty of parents find that when the temperature at home changes, things at the kitchen table change too. That is a side effect of the real work, not the service. ### Should we argue in front of the children or not? The hard ones, no. The ordinary friction of two people living together, in a normal voice, with a visible ending, is genuinely useful for a child to see. A house where adults never appear to disagree is not teaching peace, it is teaching that disagreement is unmentionable. What matters far more than whether they see the argument is whether they see the repair. ### My spouse and I parent completely differently. Is that damaging? Different styles are workable. What causes trouble is undermining, where one parent quietly reverses the other, because the child learns very quickly that rules are negotiable depending on who is in the room. That is a marriage problem wearing a parenting costume, and it is exactly the kind of thing coaching is good at. ### When should we see a licensed professional about our child? If a teacher has raised a concern, if there are questions about development, attention or speech, or if your child seems genuinely distressed rather than having a rough month, go to your pediatrician and to a licensed professional who works with children. Do that first. I am the adults, they are the child, and the two are not interchangeable. [Book a free call ](/book) ![Matthew W. Hoelscher, marriage coach in Miami](/__l5e/assets-v1/793ff08a-677d-4393-a950-cb99a7968138/matt-portrait.jpg) Matthew W. Hoelscher, PCC ICF Professional Certified Coach and the marriage coach behind Parent Marriage, in Miami. He is a coach, not a licensed therapist, [Book a free call](/book) Book a consultation ## 25 minutes. _Honest answer._ Tell me what's going on and I'll tell you honestly whether I can help. No pressure, no sales pitch. [Book a free call ](/book) Or call [305.986.2905](tel:+13059862905) ![Parent Marriage](/__l5e/assets-v1/323329b7-bfb6-4413-bc32-07161cb70b98/parent-marriage-logo.png) Emotionally Connected Couples Coaching in Miami and by video nationwide. Coaching, not therapy. 12755 SW 116th Terrace Miami, FL 33186 Explore - [Home](/) - [About Matthew](/matthew-hoelscher) - [The 8 Stages](/help-me-save-my-marriage) - [Marriage Straight Talk](/free-marriage-advice) - [Book a Call](/book) - [Stage 1: Constant Fighting](/stage-1-stupid-arguments-constant-fighting) - [Stage 2: Infidelity & Betrayal](/stage-2-infidelity-betrayal) - [Stage 3: Stay or Go](/stage-3-stay-or-go) Resources - [Marriage Coaching in Miami](/couples-counseling-marriage-coach-miami-life-coaching) - [Common Questions](/couples-therapy-relationship-counseling-faq) - [Coaching Services](/marriage-coaching-questions-services) - [Talk to a Marriage Coach](/talk-to-marriage-coach) - [Conflict Resolution](/conflict-resolution-strategies) - [Fix a Struggling Marriage](/how-to-fix-a-struggling-marriage) - [Love, Marriage & Family](/love-marriage-family-problems) - [10 Common Marriage Problems](/top-10-stable-marriage-problem-example) - [Privacy Policy](/privacy) Contact - [305.986.2905](tel:+13059862905) - [Matt@ParentMarriage.com](mailto:Matt@ParentMarriage.com) - Miami · Office in Kendall, FL - By video in all 50 states & DC © 2026 Parent Marriage Coaching. All rights reserved. Coaching services provided by an ICF-certified coach. Not therapy, counseling, or medical care.