By Donna Shea
“Dude, stop it!” “Hey dude, check this out.” “Seriously dude?”
I hear kids use the word dude when speaking to each other. A lot. I don’t personally have anything against the word itself. It is a fun word. It makes me think of Crush the turtle in Finding Nemo. It has a very laid-back and predominately friendly meaning in our culture.
What I find more often than not, is that the kids I have in social groups use the word dude as a substitute for learning and using other people’s names. Some kids with social challenges lack the interest in learning details about other people, while others may have trouble with this type of memory. Personally, I am better with faces than names myself, so I understand the difficulty.
We are working on this name thing in my fall groups. I started by telling the kids the reasons we are working on this. First, most of us like to have our names remembered and used by other people. Maybe not so much in a brief encounter as with the cashier that calls us Sir, Miss or Ma’am (although if a cashier has a name tag on, I try to thank him or her using his or her name), but with people we see more frequently. I tell the kids that they are interacting in a friendship group with each other and will be week after week, so learning names is important.
I also talk to the kids about it being my job to help them with these types of skills. I joke (but I’m serious) that when the parents come for pick-up, their parents will almost always ask, “who did you play with (or hang out with) today?” I do not want that answer to be “some kid.” I tell the kids that their parents will think I am not doing my job, so they have to help me too.
When kids use the word dude with each other, it can also cause confusion as to who someone is actually speaking to. It could be any number of dudes in the room. When we use proper names, there is a little room for confusion and you have a greater chance of the person you are speaking to responding to you.
I’ve been doing a little introductory exercise with the kids with the goal of learning names, finding common interests and making connections that help us remember who each other is and what we’re about. Here’s a printable on Friendship Files. I don’t make the kids write if they don’t want to, they can just talk when it’s his or her turn. Not only is it helping us learn and retain each other’s name, we are finding things in common and learning things we didn’t know about each other before. As a social coach, these friendship files offer me the opportunity to build bridges and foster those connections and interests that kids have in common.
For now, I have implemented a no-dude calling rule and reward the kids each time I catch them using someone’s name. This simple use of names has a happy side effect of seeing connections form faster and real pleasure in not feeling ignored, invisible or insignificant. Using a real name recognizes a real person.
