Are Children’s Social Skills Disappearing?

Why the Real Change Is Practice, Not Capacity

One of the most common concerns I hear from parents, teachers, and clinicians right now is that many children and adolescents are struggling socially.

Some fear that children are losing social skills altogether. But before we assume that social ability is disappearing, it’s worth asking a more precise developmental question: What kinds of social experiences are children getting to practice?

Social Skills Are Central to Human Development

Long before schools, writing, or technology, human survival depended on cooperation, trust, emotional attunement, and the ability to read others accurately. Our ancestors needed to detect threats, infer intent, and coordinate action within small, interdependent groups.

Our brains didn’t evolve primarily to solve abstract problems; they evolved to read people.

Social cognition, or interpreting facial expressions, tone of voice, posture, and emotional shifts, is foundational to how humans navigate the world. And like any complex system, it develops through experience.

Reading Faces Comes Before Reading Words

One of the earliest and most powerful human abilities is reading emotion from faces.

Infants don’t need language to understand emotional meaning. Through a process known as social referencing, babies look to caregivers’ facial expressions to decide how to interpret unfamiliar situations. Is this safe? Is this dangerous? Is this something to approach or avoid?

Across thousands of these moments, children learn how emotions work, including how they appear, change, and resolve.

These early experiences are supported by secure attachment. When caregivers provide consistent emotional signals and predictable responses, and when children feel safe to explore the world both physically and socially, children learn that emotions, even uncomfortable ones, are manageable. This supports emotional calibration, empathy, and social confidence.

Social Interaction Has Always Included Uncomfortable Situations

Face-to-face interaction often includes uncertainty, silence, missteps, and emotional risk. These moments are not developmental failures. They are the training ground for developing social skills.

I sometimes joke that my kids will never know the sheer terror of calling a girl’s house and having to talk to her father before I could talk to her. And it really was terrifying. You assumed the person on the other end of the line didn’t like you. Your voice tightened. You rehearsed what you were going to say. You stumbled through it anyway. And you stayed on the line because hanging up wasn’t really an option.

What mattered developmentally wasn’t the phone call itself. It was what the situation demanded. You had to tolerate discomfort. You had to read tone and pacing. You had to respond respectfully to someone who wasn’t particularly warm. You had to regulate your nerves and continue the interaction anyway.

That wasn’t just an awkward experience; it was social practice.

The same principle applies to emotionally difficult moments in adolescence.

Breaking up with someone face-to-face forces you to witness disappointment, sadness, or anger in real time. You have to manage your own emotions while responding to someone else’s. You have to repair, clarify, or at least sit with the impact of your words.

Breaking up by text or online changes that experience. It is faster. It is cleaner. And it is far less uncomfortable. But it also removes a powerful learning opportunity, the chance to stay present with another person’s emotional response.

In situations like this, the developmental cost comes from reduced emotional exposure. When discomfort is avoided, the nervous system learns less about tolerance, repair, and emotional accountability. But this is only part of the picture. In some cases, social learning is reduced because emotionally difficult interactions are avoided altogether. In other cases, even when children and adolescents do engage socially through screens, the nature of that interaction changes in another important way.

When Emotional Cues Disappear, Cognitive Load Increases

When social interaction is mediated through screens, it doesn’t become simpler; it becomes cognitively harder.

In face-to-face interaction, emotional understanding happens quickly and largely automatically. Facial expressions, tone, timing, and posture work together to guide interpretation. The brain integrates these cues with little conscious effort.

When those cues are missing, however, the brain has to work harder.

Instead of reading emotion directly, children and adolescents are forced to infer it. That inference increases cognitive load, pulling mental resources away from things like emotional regulation, perspective-taking, and thoughtful responses.

When cognitive load rises, misinterpretation becomes more likely. Ambiguity is often read as rejection or threat, especially in young people whose executive control systems are still developing. Social interaction can begin to feel exhausting, confusing, or risky because the cognitive load of interpretation has increased.

Are Kids Losing the Ability to Read Emotions?

Some emerging research suggests that children and adolescents may show reduced accuracy in reading subtle facial emotions, particularly when social interaction is limited or heavily mediated. Post-pandemic cohorts, in particular, appear to show slower recovery in social-emotional comfort during unstructured, face-to-face interaction. This doesn’t mean children are losing the capacity to read emotions; rather, it suggests they may be getting fewer opportunities to calibrate that ability through repeated, embodied social experience. The capacity remains. What’s missing is consistent practice.

Why This Feels Like a Social Skills Crisis

Social skills develop through repeated exposure to social situations and to manageable discomfort. When children and adolescents constantly avoid uncomfortable social situations (either by escaping or parents jumping in), the nervous system learns that relief comes from escape and avoidance rather than endurance. Social situations begin to feel more threatening, not because they are objectively harder, but because the system has had fewer chances to adapt and has learned that avoidance is easier.

Supporting Social Skill Development at Different Ages

Because social development unfolds in tandem with brain development, support must be age-appropriate. The goal at every stage is the same: help children stay socially engaged through manageable discomfort, without overwhelming them or removing the challenge entirely.

Early Childhood (Ages 3–6): Learning Through Co-Regulation

At this stage, children are just beginning to interpret emotions, manage impulses, and stay engaged when interaction feels uncertain.

Helpful supports:

• Stay physically nearby during social play
  Presence provides regulation without direct interference.

• Narrate emotions and intentions
  “She looks surprised.”
  “He’s waiting for a turn.”

• Normalize short social bursts
  Parallel play and brief interactions are developmentally appropriate.

• Model repair immediately
  “That didn’t work. Let’s try again.”

What matters most at this age isn’t smooth interaction; it’s exposure to emotional signals in a safe context.

Middle Childhood (Ages 7–11): Practicing Staying With Discomfort

This is when social comparison increases, and mistakes start to feel more personal.

Helpful supports:

• Preview social situations
  Explain what might happen and where discomfort might show up.

• Encourage staying slightly past the urge to quit
  “Try one more minute.”

• Avoid solving social problems too quickly
  Ask, “What do you think you could try next?”

• Praise effort and recovery
  Not popularity or ease.

Children at this age are starting to build tolerance for awkwardness, frustration, and uncertainty. That tolerance supports later confidence.

Early Adolescence (Ages 12–14): Reducing Pressure While Increasing Exposure

During this period, social awareness intensifies, but emotional regulation is still developing. This makes social situations feel high-risk.

Helpful supports:

• Lower the stakes
  Small groups are better than large ones.

• Validate discomfort without endorsing avoidance
  “Being nervous about this [experience] makes sense, and you can handle it.”

• Encourage face-to-face interaction in predictable settings
  Shared activities reduce conversational pressure.

• Teach repair explicitly
  Adolescents often assume mistakes are permanent.

At this stage, social withdrawal is often protective, not oppositional. The task is to keep exposure possible, not forceful.

Later Adolescence (Ages 15–18): Supporting Autonomy and Emotional Accountability

Older adolescents have more independence but still benefit from scaffolding.

Helpful supports:

• Discuss the difference between comfort and growth
  Help them reflect on when avoidance feels good but limits development and growth.

• Encourage difficult conversations in person when possible
  Especially for conflict, apology, or repair.

• Talk openly about digital communication limits
  Text is efficient, but emotionally incomplete.

• Model respectful disagreement and emotional ownership
  

This is where social skills become less about learning how to interact and more about learning when and why to stay engaged.

Across All Ages: What Matters Most

Regardless of age, social development is supported when adults:

• tolerate awkwardness

• resist over-rescuing

• normalize emotional discomfort

• model repair

• protect opportunities for face-to-face interaction

For readers who want a quick reference, I’ve put together a one-page summary that outlines these age-based supports in a simple visual format. You can download it here.

Social confidence doesn’t come from avoiding hard moments; it comes from discovering, repeatedly, that hard moments are survivable. 

Social skills are not disappearing, but the conditions for practicing them have changed. With the right support, however, those skills can grow again because they are a key part of human evolution and are deeply ingrained in each of us.