When I first saw this book, I was interested in the nonverbal communication aspect. Yes, there are lots of parenting books about helping your kids make friends and navigate social circles, but the nonverbal factors gave this book a bit of an OT edge.
I downloaded this audiobook and listened a chapter at a time, getting into each nonverbal path of communication. I really enjoyed how Dr. Nowicki gave each element a thorough examination and how each pertains to kids in the early elementary years. I was able to bookmark sound clips that resonated with me, and I’ve re-typed and shared in the post. eBooks get the extra point for at least giving me a cut+paste option.
Here are my quick takeaways.
The Six Types of Nonverbal Communication
Rhythm – Timing, cadence, time management, synchopation, awareness
Facial expression
Personal space
Physical touch
Vocalics – Tone, pitch, volume, intonation, intensity, everything besides actual words
Body Language
I won’t get into all six but will touch on those I found surprising.
The book gives a short intro to communication in the infant years, but it really focuses on the elementary years; the years where kids are getting out of their family environments and creating their first real friendships.
When you think about it, pretty much the first two years of a child’s life is nonverbal. Babies create full, attached relationships with their caregivers solely through rhythm, facial expression, tones of voice, personal space, and touch.
“If infant caregivers are consistently sad, angry, or anxious and reject an infant’s cues for attention, those infants will more likely to develop negative self concepts.”
By age two, children have developed a wealth of nonverbal knowledge about others. So even though toddlers can understand spoken language, it’s still the nonverbal elements (tone of voice, intensity, inflection, volume) that hold the communicative weight.
“Nonverbal skills are fundamental, just like basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. Basic nonverbal skills provide the foundation for more complex social and emotional skills later on.”
As kids get older and their brains mature, they develop more sophisticated forms of nonverbal communication and subtle neurological signals create more emotionally-mature responses.
Big point here: “We decided to conduct a study in which we administered tests to measure children’s ability to identify emotion in facial expressions and tones of voice. We found that the poorer the children performed on the assessments, the more trouble they had making friends and feeling good about themselves. The children were much more likely to make friends and succeed socially if they could correctly identify and interpret nonverbal cues.”
Did You Know?
- Humans can produce 700K+ physical signals that functional as nonverbal communication cues.
- There are at least 19 different types of smiles, only 6 of which communicate that someone is having a good time. Kinda remind you of Tim Roth in Lie to Me?
- People whose walking strides were longer or shorter than typical, or who shift their weight more or lift their feet higher than typical, are more likely to fall victim to bullying or assault.
- Individuals who are prone to engage in bullying seem to be especially adept in recognizing non-typical walking styles.
Rhythm
While rhythm seems to be something out of our control, there were more instances of arrhythmia than I realized. When I think of rhythm, I think about if my kid can dance or if they have trouble following music on the radio. Nowicki brings up the importance of recognizing the rhythm of a classroom. Can your kid follow along in conversation? Are they aware of when it’s their turn to speak? If they aren’t “in sync”, does it create an interruption?
Nowicki then expands this to being aware of time: Is your kid perpetually late? Are they slow or fast to finish their meal relative to others at their table? Do they lose track of time and have trouble finishing their assignments?
Being able to sense and interpret the rhythm of what’s going on around you is important to being able to adapt to expectations. If they are unaware or “out of step”, then they might called out frequently by teachers, affecting their confidence.
Throughout the book, Nowicki frequently brings up the pandemic and how social isolation has had an affect on how kids decipher nonverbal communication. In this case, teachers and kids didn’t have as much structure in a remote-learning environment and they couldn’t look to their peers to establish a rhythm. Coming back into the classroom, teachers had to be more explicit when it came to establishing a schedule, times to talk and stay quiet, how to take turns, even how to correctly line up single file.
Personal Space
Four types of public spaces: Intimate, Personal, Social, Public. These concentric circles have different distance ranges with you in the center, and all have different “rules” of interaction.
Children learn the rules of personal space, as well as other nonverbal skills, through trial and error. If kids have trouble interpreting the rules of personal space, then the chances of them violating someone else’s personal space unknowingly is very high. Also, they may not know how to act if their own personal space is encroached on.
When we look at the pandemic and those forced rules of 6′ personal space, we can see how the skills of reading and judging people became harder for younger kids. Kids who already had trouble reading nonverbal cues pre-pandemic now may have even more difficulty. This creates a learning gap for this type of communication.
Along with personal touch, this is where it’s important to teach consent and setting/maintaining boundaries.
Vocalics
Vocalics = 7% of emotional meaning is carried through words
38% is through volume, tone, emphasis, pitch, rate
55% is a combination of other nonverbal channels (facial expression, body language, personal space)
Immediately, do you hear your kid getting upset because their sibling apologized “but didn’t really mean it”?
While Z was at tutoring, her tutor was telling me that in first grade, reading is so important because you have to read aloud. If you are having trouble reading, other kids can hear it in your voice; your shakiness, mispronunciation, your frustration. This opens you up for the judgement of others and can have a negative impact on your self-confidence socially and academically.
Younger children mostly rely on facial expressions to decipher emotion. But as they get older, around the end of elementary school, this changes dramatically. Learning to interpret vocalics is one of the most important nonverbal skills and is going to be paramount to kids making friends. It’s what was said versus what was meant. Consequently, this is when kids start to understand and experiment with sarcasm.
Body Language
Hands, arms, shoulders, gestures, gait, general posture. There are 5,000 different meaningful hand positions. There are over 1,000 isolated body postures. However, it’s the body language of our parents that create the baseline of what we think is normal movement.
“When nonverbal channels send conflicting messages (like when you have a smiling face but slumped posture), body language cues win out. The brain receives and processes social and emotional information from the body faster than it does the face.”
Think about power posing at work or using bigger hand gestures during public speaking. In response to the earlier stats about walking, when you walk more confidently with your head held taller, you can avoid being singled out as a victim. Same with walking fast, keeping eyes down, and avoiding eye contact when walking at night. Body language conveys a message.
Objectics also fall into this category because they are an extension of our body: clothing, accessories, scent. The things we intentionally wear indicate our personalities, likes/dislikes, etc. So please don’t pretend like clothes don’t matter. As early as elementary school, kids begin to understand that what you wear plays a role in where you fit in. Our body and the things we put on it communicates social information to our peers, whether we like it or not.
Conclusion
I wondered how all of this nonverbal knowledge was going to come together for parents. So much of it was not explicitly taught by either my teachers or parents growing up. Luckily, Nowicki gave this sentiment in the final conclusion, and I absolutely love it. I listened to it three times:
Keeping kids busy is great, but spending time with your kids, “face time”, is invaluable. These one-on-one relationship activities give them time to learn from you nonverbally. Having a conversation, taking a walk, having a game night; unstructured face-to-face time with family and in the community gives them an education to this “language” and they gain so much. All parents can help their child learn to communicate nonverbally.
This book really brings home that so much of our child’s success isn’t just academic or athletic. How we communicate nonverbally and how we learn to perceive others can make so much of an impact in early childhood. This “stealth” communication brings in so many complex systems; from the body-brain connection, to social and emotional development, to how we mirror and model others.
I wish I had bookmarked more stats about the different nonverbal forms. They really speak to how much we unconsciously do with our bodies and how much information we’re giving away.
On Thursday, I’m sharing another focus of this book: Making Friends. It complements all of this work we’ve been doing on social and emotional development. Overall, I really appreciate this book and recommend it. It brings awareness to how we act and interact nonverbally, and how much nonverbal communication plays a role, even for adults.
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