How to Help Your Children to Make Friends

One of the hardest things to hear as a parent is that your child doesn’t have any friends. The idea that they could be in the playground during the school day feeling lonely and not talking to anybody is as upsetting as anything else. It can make a parent feel helpless and worried that either their child doesn’t have the social skills necessary to make friends or other children are bullying their child. Neither of those options is a particularly good one.

You want your child to have a thriving social life, and even if that social life is limited to the school playground, you want to know that they have a whole group of friends that they can talk to and rely on when they want to. Playing independently is so important, especially for younger children, so that they understand how to deal with friendships and relationships on their own. It’s a part of growing up and you want your child to have that positive experience. Sleepovers, birthday parties, meals out with friends, they’re all available to children who have friends in the first place. So, how can you help your children to make friends so that they don’t feel alone when you’re not there?

1. Try not to fix the problem. The tempting thing to do as a parent is to go full Lioness mode, barrel in, and start demanding that children play with yours. That’s not how anyone’s going to win. Instead of trying to fix your child’s problem, you have to give them the tools to fix it themselves. Sometimes just listening to our children and acknowledging their feelings with the right amount of empathy is more than enough. When they’re feeling rejected by their classmates, some extra love from mum and dad can help to fill that gap. You can discuss strategies together on what they could be doing differently and how they can approach other children to be friends with them.
2. Don’t rush to overreact. As we said, lionesses like to overreact to protect their young, but in this instance, it’s up to you to not overreact. It’s very hard to see our children hurt. You don’t want them to feel any kind of sadness, but they do have to learn to work through these social issues themselves. Kids lack perspective and they haven’t lived long enough to be able to understand the broader context of events. Some children are fickle and that’s just what happens at the age of 3 or 4 years old. They don’t have it in them to build meaningful relationships but they do like to have recognisable relationships. If a classmate has been mean to your child, it may be very tempting for you to step in, but it’s even more tempting to empower them to be able to handle that meanness themselves.
3. Help them to become emotionally aware. As we said, children are fickle, so if you want to help to fuel your child’s development and help their friendships to blossom, then they need to learn to understand somebody else’s perspective. This is a difficult thing for a child to do because children are inherently selfish, of course. They don’t ever have to be in a situation where they have to put anybody but themselves first. But when it comes to friendships, it’s up to them to learn, give and take, and that’s where growth happens. It’s hard to imagine somebody else’s point of view when you’re that age. So empowering your children to become emotionally aware and flip the script to help them to understand where other children are coming from can help.
4. Get some more information about the situation. If your child is telling you that other children don’t want to play with them, it’s not the first thing that you should rely on. You should speak to other parents and speak to other children to find out why they don’t want to play with yours. There’s usually never just a ‘no reason’.It doesn’t mean that you don’t believe in what your child is telling you, it just means that you need to have more than one account. As we said, children don’t often have a broad range of perspective, and children being inherently selfish can often mean that they’ll skip over the details that put them at fault for any reason and talk about what the other person has done wrong. That’s just a natural way of gaining sympathy from parents and that’s what they’re supposed to do. That’s your child, but you need to make sure that you’re getting the full story before you decide to barrel in and interrupt.

Helping your child to make friends will take some time, but once you get there, everybody will be happier.