14 Ways to Help Your Child Build Friendships

Whether your child is shy, has moved to a new area, or is struggling to make friends, you can help! While you cannot create or sustain your child’s friendships for her, you can teach her about and encourage her to employ skills, behaviors, and attitudes that are more likely to lead to friendships.

1. Encourage and assist your child in finding an interest that he enjoys. Whether it is baseball, orienteering, collecting trains, tap dancing, or playing the piano, participating in an activity can build your child’s self-confidence, give him a sense of identification, and provide a common interest he can share with others.

2. Nurture your child to be empathetic. If your child is unkind or if he observes another person being unkind, process with him how others’ feelings may be hurt. Try asking: "How would you feel if someone said that to you?"

3. Teach your child to take an interest in others. When playing together, have him ask his friend what games he likes to play or about his favorite toy.

4. Provide opportunities for your child to play with a peer. You control your child’s social calendar. Set up a successful playdate by noticing who your child talks about from school or church and ask if he would like to have a playdate with him. Keep the initial playdate short and planned around activities that your child enjoys.

5. Let your child observe your interaction with your friends. As a parent, you not only give instructions about how to relate to others but you also serve as an example.

6. Teach your child social graces such as smiling and saying "hello," "please," and "thank you." Children are more comfortable around others who are friendly.

7. Nurture your child’s self-esteem and confidence. Affirm his positive qualities and abilities. Let him know that he is a likable person.

8. Encourage your child to reach out to the child who is shy in Sunday School or to invite a new child over to play. Children often make friends by association — those who sit next to them in class and like the same things. Challenge your child to make friends with the "new kid" who likes to draw rather than play soccer.

9. Make the biblical value of treating others the way you want to be treated a standard in your home. Doing so will carry over into your child’s friendships. Discourage an attitude of superiority.

10. Teach your child how to approach a group that is playing. Children who successfully interact with peers avoid tactics that are disruptive or that draw attention to themselves. Teach your child to observe what the group is doing, engage in eye contact with a child in the group, make a group-oriented statement about what the group is doing, and then ask if he may join in the play.

11. Talk to your child about the experiences he has with his peers. Consider not just the actual experience but how your child perceived it and the emotions that followed.

12. Encourage your child to form positive expectations about future social encounters. What does your child expect from his peers? Research has shown that children who are taught to be positive going into a new situation are better liked by play partners. [Marlene J. Sandstrom, Antonius H.N. Cillessen, and Abbey Eisenhower, "Children’sf Appraisal of Peer Rejection Experiences," Social Development 12 no. 4 (April 2003)]

13. Help your child work through negative experiences. Repeated negative social experiences may lead a child to deal differently with social information. The child may ignore a positive interchange with a peer because it does not fit the beliefs he has formed about relating. When you notice a child interpreting a positive experience as negative, help him to process his thoughts and not make automatic judgments.

14. Teach your child to be a "detective" and to examine negative encounters. Sometimes children intentionally are unfriendly to peers. However, even as adults, it is easy to assume that every negative interaction is a personal rejection. Perhaps the other child was upset about something and that is why he did not want to play.


By Amy Ivey Source: http://www.lifeway.com/

Amy Ivey has a Ph.D. in Psychology and Counseling from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. She is a stay-at-home mom and a freelance writer. She and her husband, Keith, are the proud parents of Jacob, Katharine, Laura, and John Mark.