I’m the eldest child with two younger brothers who aren’t likely to have any children soon. I unfortunately have no friends with kids, much less kids my daughter’s age. My cousins are all 15 years old and younger, and therefore, are also not likely to have kids soon. Seeing my daughter watching other kids warily out in public has prompted me to the fact that I need to socialize her with other kids, and I didn’t want to wait for preschool.

What I’ve done:

• I’ve signed her up for at least one class that runs a month or so geared to her age. You can sign up for Gymboree or similar types. I opted to scour our more affordable Community Recreation class offered by the city. These range from $35-100 a class for 6 to 10 week classes.
• I take her frequently to the local mall’s play area or the playground, where I encourage her to wave hi to the kids. Since she’s not yet old enough to do active play with other children, this is our first step for now.
• I have signed up for a Mom’s Meet-up group. Granted I don’t go that much what with my busy student schedule, I have access to a calendar that gives me great ideas on where to take her. Often they’re free: library events, fairs, etc. Try going to Meetup.com where you can search for your local playgroup.

What about you? How do you socialize your only child?

Build self-esteem and self-confidence. Strengthen rapport with peers. Increase empathy, sensitivity, the whole package of emotional connectedness. All these you can do by simply exposing your child to other children. Expose them early and they will be less jumpy, frightened, or angry when strangers are near. Train them well enough to recognise whom to trust and whom to be careful around and you help establish a child’s stable sense of self in relation to others. Lock the child away, limit his playtime with other children or interactions with people, and you just might be planting the seeds of paranoid behaviour and insecurity in him.

When it comes to teaching your child to relate with others, they are no different from any other warm-blooded mammal that roams the earth. They need to interact, to mingle, to develop their relational skills in order to lead healthy and emotionally satisfying lives. It is a world where one is constantly in contact with another, where one needs to be relating to others, transacting business with others, merely co-existing with other people. The sooner you start your children on the journey of discovering not only their inner traits but their abilities to reach out and communicate with others, the better you equip them to deal with what we would like to call the “real” world, aka life-on-your-own.

So savour those invites from pre-school or kindergarten, as well as those from the local government, as when our local city hall sent letters to all 5-year olds (children born in 2002) to join in the annual tree-planting on the outskirts of the city. It was an excellent opportunity to not only have our son mingle with children his age (he did run into some of his classmates from school while lugging around his shovel), but to also support the natural instinct of the child to want to nurture a life into fruition. Play time was not as fun as this when I was 5; I was busy shimmying up the neighbors’ trees instead and getting chased out of backyards.