Social Skills Need Practice

Why difficult conversations are part of how we learn to relate to other people

When I was younger, if I wanted to call a girl I liked, there was a good chance I had to call her house. That meant someone else might answer. Maybe her mother. Maybe her brother. Or, perhaps most uncomfortably, her father.

There was no direct message, no private notification, and no carefully edited text. You had to speak. You had to introduce yourself. You had to ask whether she was there. You had to tolerate the awkwardness of the interaction long enough to get through it.

And sometimes getting through the phone call was only the beginning.

At one point as a teenager, after watching far too many movies, I decided that the obvious thing to do was declare my undying love to a girl I had a crush on. The movies had prepared me for a very particular ending. Reality was completely different.

It remains one of the most embarrassing moments of my adolescence.

But I survived.

I had to sit with embarrassment. I had to see her again. I had to figure out how to act afterward. Life did not end. The relationship did not unfold the way I had imagined, but I learned something that would have been difficult to learn without the experience itself.

I am not suggesting that teenagers today need to recreate awkward landline calls or badly executed declarations of love.

But both experiences provided something that is easy to overlook.

Practice.

We sometimes talk about social skills as though they are things children simply acquire as they mature: listen carefully, take turns, read social cues, communicate clearly, show empathy, resolve conflict. But human development has always depended on repeated social interaction.

Humans evolved as an intensely social species. From very early in life, children participate in patterns of back-and-forth exchange. Infants and caregivers take turns vocalizing. Children follow another person’s gaze. They look to familiar adults when they are uncertain about a new person, object, or situation. They imitate expressions, gestures, and actions. Long before children can explain the rules of conversation, they are already practising reciprocity.

Developmental psychologists describe some of these processes as turn-taking, joint attention, and social referencing. 

As children grow, those interactions become more complex. Turn-taking becomes conversation. Social referencing develops into increasingly sophisticated ways of interpreting other people’s reactions and using those reactions to understand social situations. Simple reciprocity develops into negotiation, perspective-taking, disagreement, humour, apology, and repair.

Knowing what good communication looks like matters. Doing it when the moment turns uncomfortable is a different thing.

It is one thing to know that you should listen. It is another to listen when you feel criticized.

It is one thing to understand that conflict should be repaired. It is another to apologize when you are embarrassed, angry, or convinced that the other person was also wrong.

It is one thing to know that you should speak up for yourself. It is another to find the words when your heart is racing and you are unsure how the other person will respond.

Social competence develops less like knowledge and more like a skill. Social skills need repetition.

Those repetitions happen in thousands of ordinary interactions: asking someone to join a game, joining a group yourself, ordering food, introducing yourself, disagreeing, telling someone no, asking a teacher for help, recognizing that a joke did not land, navigating an uncomfortable silence, apologizing, clarifying something that was misunderstood, or returning to a relationship after a conflict.

Difficult conversations provide a different kind of practice

Easy conversations matter. They help build connection, belonging, confidence, and enjoyment.

Difficult conversations require several capacities to work together at once. We notice what we are feeling without letting it dictate what we say. We listen while preparing a response. We read tone, expression, pauses, and context. We weigh another person's perspective while still representing our own.

Sometimes we have to tolerate being misunderstood long enough to clarify what we meant. We may have to recognize that our intention and our impact were not the same. We may have to hear something we do not like without immediately leaving the interaction. And sometimes we have to come back after getting it wrong.

These are developmental capacities, not communication techniques: emotional regulation, perspective-taking, inhibition, and flexibility. 

That is partly why these conversations are uncomfortable. It is also why they can provide such valuable practice. Social skills are not the absence of awkwardness. They are the growing capacities to function within it.

What happens when practice disappears?

The COVID-19 pandemic provided an unusually clear, if extreme, illustration of what can happen when opportunities for social practice are suddenly reduced.

For extended periods, schools closed, extracurricular activities stopped, gatherings disappeared, and ordinary peer interactions were disrupted.

Young people remained connected in many important ways, including through digital communication, and experiences varied considerably from one child to another. But many young people also lost countless ordinary social repetitions.

There were fewer opportunities to walk into a classroom and find a place to sit. Fewer moments of joining a group at lunch. Fewer informal conversations before practice. Fewer chances to read someone’s expression after saying the wrong thing, work through a disagreement in real time, manage awkwardness, take turns, negotiate rules, or figure out how to enter and leave a conversation.

In the years that followed, educators, parents, and researchers reported concerns about social-emotional functioning and social behaviour among some children and adolescents.

The pandemic affected far more than social interaction, so it cannot explain those changes on its own. It does illustrate a principle: 

When opportunities for practice change, development can change with them.

Digital communication changes the practice environment

COVID removed many opportunities for social practice abruptly. Others have been changing more gradually. 

Consider how many ordinary interactions can now be completed differently.

We can order food through an app rather than speak to someone.

We can send a message instead of making a phone call.

We can email rather than walk into someone’s office.

We can edit a message repeatedly before sending it.

We can leave a group chat rather than address a disagreement.

None of this is inherently problematic. These tools are convenient, accessible, and useful, and young people have rich social lives in digital spaces: they argue, joke, flirt, collaborate, apologize, and keep friendships going online every day. Digital communication is real social interaction. But it is not always the same kind of interaction. 

A face-to-face conversation unfolds in real time. Once you have said something, you cannot pull it back and rewrite it before the other person hears it. You have to respond to facial expressions, pauses, changes in tone, and the other person’s reaction as it happens.

If a conversation becomes uncomfortable, leaving is possible, but everyone sees you do it.

As a teenager, I got my reps whether I wanted them or not.

Digital communication gives us more control over timing, wording, and exit.

Sometimes that control is extremely useful. Having time to think can lead to more thoughtful communication. A young person who becomes overwhelmed in face-to-face interaction may be better able to express themselves in writing. Distance can provide necessary protection in unhealthy or unsafe relationships. And there are many conversations that do not need to happen immediately.

The developmental issue is that the same control can make some forms of avoidance easier.

If I can delay every difficult response until I feel completely comfortable, I get less practice thinking while uncomfortable.

If I can leave whenever disagreement becomes tense, I get less practice staying engaged through disagreement.

If I can communicate only after carefully editing what I want to say, I get less practice finding words in real time.

If I can quietly disappear from an uncomfortable interaction, I get less practice ending conversations directly, clarifying misunderstandings, or repairing what went wrong.

The key developmental question is about the pattern. When manageable discomfort appears, do young people have multiple ways of responding, or does escape increasingly become the easiest one?

Escaping brings immediate relief. It also removes the chance to practise what to do with that discomfort.

Avoidance can get reps too

Practice works in both directions. When we repeatedly stay with manageable discomfort, clarify, adjust, and try again, those responses receive practice. But avoidance can receive repetitions too.

If the repeated response to social discomfort is to delay, disappear, withdraw, or find a way around the interaction, those responses can become easier to reach for the next time discomfort appears.

Psychologists call the underlying mechanism negative reinforcement: relief strengthens the response that produces it. 

None of this means withdrawal is always wrong. Sometimes leaving is wise. Sometimes a pause is regulation rather than avoidance. Sometimes a relationship is unhealthy enough that disengagement is exactly what should happen.

That distinction matters because staying with manageable discomfort teaches something that avoidance cannot.

Social confidence is partly built by discovering that you can cope

Difficult conversations can teach young people that discomfort can be tolerated. A conversation can go badly and then improve. A misunderstanding can be repaired. Someone can disagree with them and still care about them. Embarrassment passes. And they can enter a conversation without knowing exactly how it will end.

Those lessons are difficult to teach directly. Most often, they are learned through experience.

That is what social practice provides.

Not a guarantee that the interaction will go well, but practice navigating the fact that sometimes it will not.

Facing that is part of how social confidence develops.

We have the conversation. We stay with the discomfort. We learn something. And the next time, we have one more experience to draw from.

Sometimes the conversation does not go the way we hoped. We survive it anyway.

And that, too, is practice.