It can be heartbreaking to watch your child struggle through friendship issues during pre school and primary school. Maybe someone in their group is being mean, maybe they feel they don’t have many friends, they feel excluded, they fight, or maybe they want to switch friendship groups. Whatever the challenge, it can be hard to know how best to guide them, when to intervene, and how not to put your own experiences and emotions into the situation.
Host Amelia Phillips and parenting educator Gen Muir discuss the common friendship challenges kids experience, how we can best react in the moment and support them. They discuss the major friendship skills needed, how we can teach these, and daily strategies to try with your kids (for example the friend detective exercise).
About the guest:
Gen Muir is a parenting educator, obstetric social worker, Mum to four and founder of Connected Parenting, a 1:1 and group coaching service for parents. She works with families all over Australia educating on connection and attachment with their children.
Website: https://www.connectedparenting.com.au/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/connectedparentingau/
Below is an unedited transcript of the podcast episode:
My daughter’s a bit of a loner. I ask her who she played with at lunch, and she often says, No one. She likes to go to the library. She likes to color in. She says she likes to sit in the library, talk to the older kids. She also says that sometimes the kids say mean things about her, but she kind of seems fine about it all.
She just kind of like wore off her ducks back, at least for now. But what about in a year or two or maybe deep down? She’s actually not so fine.
This is healthy Her with Amelia Phillips. It can be heartbreaking to watch your child struggle through friendship issues. Maybe someone in their group is being mean. Maybe they feel they don’t have many friends. They feel excluded. Maybe they fight or maybe they wanna switch friendship groups, but they find it really hard.
Whatever the challenge, it can be really hard as a parent to know how to best guide. When do we intervene? How do we not put our own childhood experiences and emotions into that situation? So to help me navigate this tricky water, I’m joined by parenting educator, obstetric social worker, and mom to four Jen Muer.
Jen, thanks so much for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me. So you run one-on-one sessions with families, you do group workshops, you speak regularly on the topic. So let’s lay out the common scenario. You ask your child how their day was, and they tell you that so and so was mean to me. They wouldn’t let them play together, wouldn’t let the other kids play, or some kind of similar situation.
What’s the best way to approach this conversation? Such a common one, and it’s one I’ve had , like one of my kids came home with this like this week. So look, the first thing is, let’s think about what our knee-jerk reaction is. Who is that child? I am calling their mom right now. How? Yeah, so tell me their names.
I’m going to get them is one. And the second one is sometimes we go in from that perspective of, Oh look, I’ve told you you need to share better. Or if you just went with the flow a bit more, maybe this would work out. Oh my gosh, I’ve done that too. . So these are our two big kneejerk reactions and neither really teaches resilience.
So what to. Dead is really put yourself in the perspective or the shoes of your child and think if I’ve had a bad day, if I come to you today, Amelia, and I say, I’m having this real struggle with my friends. It feels like they’re catching up without me and I feel left out. Now, if you went. Who are they?
I’m gonna get call them. Or if you or if you said, Well, I mean, think about the role you’re playing, Jen. Um, neither one of those would make me feel good. What most of us want when we’re having a hard time is to be heard. So 99% of what we need to do is actually stop, stop talking. Listen. Open your body.
This is such an important bit of this. So in in terms of our kids are taking in when they’re upset about two and 10 of our words. So what we do with our body is so important. So a lot of our open listening is just like if my child gets in the car and says all this. I’ve gotta bite my tongue, sort of maybe do this or just go, Oh, that sounds hard and you wanna pause, because that is allowing our child to feel seen and heard.
And it’s only once our child feels seen and heard and listened to. That they can be coached, which, and I will talk about some coaching you can do, but it’s only once we do that and as parents, because as you said in that intro, we rush to the kind of our own agenda. Our own feelings are being left out as a kid.
There’s so much going on. We wanna fix it, we wanna solve it. I don’t wanna see my child in pain. This is the really hard stuff. But we’ve actually gotta hold that in and really allow them to. I too know what it’s like to have a feeling like that. What I love about what you just said then is not only does it signal to your child that you really get them and that you are listening to them and you’re open to this, but it also is that.
Pause for us to just stop the knee jerk. So it’s actually that stopping and pausing for a moment and that I guess mirroring by saying, Yeah, I can see that would be really hard. It does those two things, which I think are game changers if we have the self control to do it. One of the old school reactions that you might remember, you know, sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me.
Yeah. You know, that was the old school way and again, that’s emotionally dismissive. It came from a good place. I’m teaching my child how to be. But actually what we need to say is, Oh, that sounds hard. Words can hurt. I too know what that’s like. And then once we’ve kind of maybe connected and we’ve paused and we’ve chilled a bit, you might say something to your child like, Hmm, I’m wondering, do you wanna talk about what you might do if this happened again?
And that’s your coaching. So that’s where you start to get on the same page as your child. And you can definitely do some coaching around these sticky social situations, but our kids will not, cannot hear us until they’ve been heard. And that’s the hardest bit. Yeah, I love that. And it’s quite common amongst, you know, whether you’re talking about these friendship fires and friendship issues or tantrums in general.
It’s definitely that pausing and connecting is so, So I. Can you give us some background into the common age appropriate social issues that our kids will probably need to work through, or that we’ve probably already experienced with our kids as well? So let’s start at two . Okay. That’s when the train goes off the tracks.
I get calls from parents at two. Like either you’ve got the hitter . Yeah. You know the Snapchat, the biter, the bit I’ve had one hands up. Yeah. Or raw. The worst. Or I get calls from parents saying, You know, my child’s not joining in. They’re shy and they seem to be a bit of a walkover. They’re just hand off that toy to that more extroverted child.
And equally, parents will worry both. So we have unrealistic expectations of what kids can do at two and three and four. We’re constantly saying, you know, you need to share. And the truth is they are not capable of sharing at two, not capable. Like it’s just . It’s not in their framework. So they’re going to need our help to do it.
And the truth is, the way we handle it is probably that we intervene a bit much or slightly in the wrong way. So often we get too in it. As parents, often we make our kids apologize. Evidence shows that doesn’t teach empathy and it doesn’t make them feel sorry. And we also do things like we’ll step in and we might set a timer and say, I’m gonna give you a turn and in 30 seconds I’m gonna give you a turn.
What that’s doing is it has the parent at the center of the conflict and negotiation between these kids. And that’s fine if you wanna stay in the center forever. But quite frankly, with four kids, , I wanna get outta. Yeah, Plus you gotta teach them. You’re not gonna be in the playground with them, so Well, that’s right.
So what we can do instead is know that some kids are gonna read social cues quicker and better than others. I’m gonna say as a mom of four boys, they are generally slower to learn to read social cues. And so what we can do is coach them, and that might look like this. Wow. You know, there’s one toy and there’s two of you, and I’m wondering how are we gonna work this out?
What’s a fair way? And we actually let our kids problem solve. This wouldn’t be intervening and forcing sharing. I wouldn’t be forcing apologies. And then as our kids get older, obviously as we’re talking about today, we are gonna have more complex situations that come up where they are. The normal social experience of being left out of all of those things that can happen, and that’s where we are doing that.
We are not there to coach them through it, and so we probably have to do that. Empathy followed by that, what do you think you can do? And helping them to problem solve is kind of how I would approach that. And so with those school age kids, I mean, some of those challenges are they things like someone in my group’s not very nice to me.
I don’t wanna play with this person anymore. I now wanna be in more than one group. I wanna play with someone else. Some of my friends we’re not getting along very well, or I don’t feel like. I fit in. I mean, are these all pretty normal experiences for kids to be going through? Yeah, I think they definitely are, and we wanna stay really calm and same as all of these situations.
We’re always starting with just listening and empathy and curiosity is such a great strategy with this stuff. Like tell me more about. Tell me more about how that makes you feel. I think our kids can come home and they can say, you know, we can even know, we can be observing. For example, my child’s trying to play with these kids that are not really including them.
They’re not being very nice to my child, and yet my child keeps trying. And you wanna say, Don’t play with those kids, But if you do that, you know, They’ll do the exact opposite. . Yep. Yeah, exactly. So instead, you might sort of connect with your child first, get on the same page as them, and then say, I noticed they didn’t let you play that game.
How did that make you feel? And then you might say, What do you look for in a friend? What do you think a good friend does? That’s a great question to ask. You know, you just sort of lead them down this path, but you can lead a horse to water. . The primary goal of primary school, I believe, is learning how to navigate this stuff.
And I think we’ve gotta get out of the way. Yeah, and I guess that’s a really interesting point for us all today to really know that these friendship fires, and I love this analogy of it being a friendship fire. These little grass fires that light up are totally normal. You don’t need to remove your kid from the school.
Yeah. At this level, we’ll get into bullying a bit later on. You don’t need to remove the kid from the school. It’s totally normal for a kid to feel excluded at some point. And some of those things are rattled off earlier because as a mom, that makes. Especially if this is your oldest child or your first child at school and they’re coming home with these things, you’re sitting here going, Is this normal?
Have I got my kids in a rotten year? Or whatever. So I guess that’s a really key take home that I hope that we’re all feeling. Yeah. Do you wanna talk about friendship groups and kind of clicks and fitting in? Like friendship groups in cliques can be excluding and they can be alienating, and that’s where we see stereotypes emerging.
Like the mean girls, or whatever it might be, peer pressure could be at its worst, kids might start to mold to fit a certain group’s reputation and rules. But then on the flip side, being part of a group must feel good as well. So it’s this kind of balance between, I guess, avoiding social isolation where they might make poor choices in their friendships.
So not to be seen alone. So how can we best support our kids to try to break down these invisible walls around kind of clicks and groups? I think one of the first things that is really important to get a handle on is the kid you’ve got. What I mean by that, if you know the beautiful Maggie Dent, Oh yes.
We love Maggie Dent. . Yep. So she’s my hero. We know that Maggie would talk about roosters and lamb. So you Rooster is that really extroverted, socially driven child. They’re more likely to make lots of social mistakes and they’re more likely to be that kid that gets called the bully, that makes that more quieter, introverted child feel.
then we’ve got our beautiful lambs and, and they’re all quieter and they might be the child that’s more likely to experience some of that other stuff. I think that having a sense of who my child is and therefore how I need to shape them a little bit. So I know I have a very, very extroverted barista at home , and I saw I have spent many, many.
Sort of just guiding him. Like, I, I wonder when, when you did this, when your friends came over, I wonder how that made them feel. Look at their faces. So we’re trying to teach social cue reading from a really young age. If our kids can read social cues, they’re gonna go a lot better come all of those situations.
And then in terms of fitting in and groups, it’s about modeling it. Like if you want your kids. Good choices around who makes them feel good. You need to model it, and you’re really trusting that they need to navigate that stuff and work it out. A lot of it is just knowing that temperament and then really modeling yourself the values that you want.
Which can be hard to do if you have had a challenging friendship group when you grew up, or if you’ve recently moved and you don’t know as many people and you are trying to fit in as well. Have you found when you’ve coached parents that you’ve seen a lot of emotional, baggage is a bit of a loaded word, but people bringing their own emotions into inflaming a situation with their kids.
Yeah, of course we do. And I think it starts as young as, you know, we have that slightly quieter, shy child who is the child that’s being snatched off and we think, Oh my gosh, she’ll never stand up for herself. And often our baggage is that’s me and it’s, I relate to this and I don’t want that for my child.
And we are kind of over-emphasizing it and diving in. Yeah. So yeah, we definitely do. We bring our baggage into those situations. For sure. It’s funny, I am so lucky. I’ve got three best friends that, one of them we met when we were three years old, and the others I met in year five at school. The four of us have just been so blessed to have had this amazing friendship.
And I look at my kids and they’re hitting these milestones that I, in my head, I’m like, Well, I had Sammy then and she doesn’t have her. Sammy, where’s her? Sammy, I’ve got this other thing where I’ve set this bar in my head so high and I can feel my. Is it normal that she doesn’t have a best friend? And then I know that people say that we’re not tending to wanna use words like best friends anymore because it pigeonholes friendships
So I can feel myself bringing that emotional expectation on you do. And a lot of parenting as a journey is kind of letting go of the vision we had and accepting the the child that we have and kind of like, yes, we are molding them. That child that doesn’t have that best friend may have a really different social style and she’s actually part of lots of groups and so she’s having a really different experience and there’s so much richness in that.
Um, or she’s that introverted person that is enjoying, you know, herself and what an amazing ability to be able to self entertain and yeah, and, and kind of be comfortable in your own. Skin. I never learned. I never learned that . Well, that’s why you had four kids, right? So you could be constantly entertained.
Totally. This reminds me of actually something Brene Brown was talking about in all her research on vulnerability and shame, she talks about the difference between fitting in and belonging. Yeah. And I think this is a really interesting concept when we are in that coaching mode with our kids, that a child might feel like they really belong in their school and in that broader group.
So just because you are not fitting in because you didn’t get invited to that particular birthday party or because as the kids get a little bit older and they get more freedom, you are not allowed to go out on your own. But this kid is, it doesn’t mean you don’t belong. I love when she talks about. You can still belong even if you missed out on that particular activity or you didn’t make the cheer team or, or whatever.
A hundred percent. I mean, I think it comes up all the time and we find as parents, my son came home the other day and he’s in year seven, and he really wants TikTok and what he said to me was, Mum, every single person I. Has TikTok, everyone, like absolutely everybody, all of my friends, I am the only one.
Only one. Yeah, of course that knee-jerk reaction is, Oh, am I, am I causing a social problem for my son? And that fear of like, Oh my goodness, I, I think I’m making the right decision, but what if this is impeding him socially? So that definitely sort of plays out. What I did in that moment was I. That sounds really hard.
I would’ve hated to have been the only one without something, and I kind of said, Look, you know, you know, my decision is based on kind of what I think is right, but let’s keep talking about it. And we talked about it later. Oh, you must be the most annoying mom in the world. I was like, Damn, mom, you’re so levelheaded and you make so much sense.
I can’t get mad at you. But it’s the same. When this child was in kindy, he had a bit of trouble joining social groups. Like he’d get a bit overwhelmed at the start of the day. And again, as a parent, you’re thinking if he doesn’t learn to join in, like he won’t do the right thing. And I didn’t know what I.
Sort of know now then. And so I would constantly go, Go play, go play. You’re fine. Go, go, go, go join in. And I’d be sort of shaking him off my leg in the playground. Mm. And one night I was listening to something by Bne Brown and it hit me, Oh my goodness, he needs to be brought in. He needs to know I’m that safe face before he can move out.
So the next day at school, I went in and I said, You know what? I love time with you. You can hang with me till the bell goes if you. Or if you wanna join him with friends, that’s fine, but I’m here and he was off me in a minute. Isn’t that amazing? It was amazing. Just that shift, that paradigm shift for him.
Mm-hmm. . Like when you think about what’s the underlying feeling for my child? He’s worried it’s hard to join in. What does he need in that moment? Probably more love, not less, you know? And we’re trying to do the right thing, but like you say, we are, we are running on these. Programs that are in our head.
Well, let’s talk about that. Like as parents, is there anything we can be instilling in our kids that will really help set them up for good friendships? I mean, the obvious one for me is that taking turns and sharing, if your kid goes to school and they haven’t learnt that skill, it’s gonna make friendships harder.
But are there more than just those obvious ones? Yeah, look, I think the biggest thing always, and it’s so annoying and I, I go on and on about it, you’ve gotta model it like you’ve got, Our kids are taking in so much more of what we do than what we say. So you can teach and teach and teach, but they’re watching what you do.
So how you share with others, how you communicate with others, how you take turns. All of that is being modeled and that’s the biggest thing. But in addition, I think, and we’ve touched on it here, but for little. Teaching them how to see their impact on others by gently just coaching them through situations.
Though, for example, two of my kids might be on the trampoline. One of them’s having a great time, the other one is not. And as a parent, you know that feeling and you can feel it’s about to, you know, have explode. What you can start to do with the kids, rather than say get off him, which is providing too much scaffolding for that situation, you can say, Oh, you know, I can see you are having a good time, but I’m looking at his face and he’s not.
That’s how we teach social cue reading, and that’s the biggest thing our kids can learn because then they’re gonna make mistakes. But if they can go into the playground and rather than blindly make mistakes and not realize, Oh, when I snatched off that person, they didn’t like it, I won’t do that. Um, they won’t be able to read that queue and learn.
So I think that’s one thing. And then for primary school age kids, I think we can talk to them if they are making poor choices or we’re not so sure we’re worried. And it happens. You might talk to them about being a friend, detective. You kind of create a bit of a narrative around it. Like if they come home and say, I’ve got no friends, nobody’s nice to me, or that kind of thing.
And you might say, I wonder if you could go to school tomorrow and be a detective. Look around for who else is not playing with anyone and who smiles. Who seems interested in you, who makes you feel good? Great. I love this. It’s really effective. I’ve used it. . Let’s be a friend. Detective. Yes. Oh, I love that.
Talking about your coaching, and again, you’ve just reiterated to me today, Jen, which I love so much, is that as parents. We very quickly become these beautiful coaches for our kids, and to feel like you are there as this coach. That would be after you’ve paused, after you’ve mirrored and empathized and you go into that coaching mode, how great would it be to, Let’s play a game tomorrow.
Let’s do friend detective. It gives them something like, Okay, like I could do that. And it’s incredible what they can come home with. And then just when you’re having a good time together or you’re walking together, you can just talk about what do you think makes a good friend? And we are also modeling consent.
Even like, just because someone is your friend doesn’t mean they have to do everything that you want them to do. And just because someone is your friend, you know, vice versa. So that kind of stuff. You know, it’s so important in their relationships and just sort of modeling that in, but always starting with connection just so that they can hear us
and. With talking about that modeling, you can say things like, you know, mommy’s friend so and so. I love hanging out with so and so. Because she’s a healthy friend, she makes me feel respectful. She makes me feel happy. We trust each other. We have fun. But if I ever hung around with someone, you know, an unhealthy friendship, I might feel hopeless.
I might feel sad when I’m hanging around that person. I might feel angry or alone. That’s an unhealthy friendship. Yeah, for sure. And then who of your friends do you feel respects you and you respect them? Who makes you feel happy? Who do you trust? Who do you have fun with? I mean, that stuff is so much more effective than don’t play with that kid.
that kid’s a little turd. Stay away from them. And you want to, I remember when my son, he was planning his birthday party and he had a group of friends that were just lovely and loved him and then some other friends that he was trying to fit in with. And I could see it was never gonna work. And he really wanted them all to come to this party.
And I was like, Okay, you can have who you want. You just think about who makes you feel good and we’ll do it. And it was just before we sent the invite. He came to me one night and he said, Mom, I’ve been thinking about it. And on the day, I wanna have just these six, not the extra four. These guys all make, And he got there on his own and I was just like, yeah.
Ah yes. Parenting, when my coaching paid off. Oh, you know, some kids need more coaching than others and he was a kid that needed a lot of coaching to navigate that social stuff. The brother that came after him, he’s just easy. He hasn’t needed any help ever. Like . Yeah. And I’ve got that my number one son.
Absolutely fine. I’ve never had to worry about this. And then number two, daughter and I always thought it would be the other way around. I love this question as well of asking them if they come home and they say that someone was mean to them, trying to establish is it a little friendship, fire, or were they being mean on purpose?
And I think this mean on purpose question is a great one to ask your child as well, because so many kids, as you’ve just said, they’re learning on the go. They may not have the social cues and they didn’t realize that by excluding your child, that they were being mean, they were just too busy in their own world.
That’s right. And I love this like mean on purpose because, and I see it with my kids when they’re just being forgetful or when they actually did something deliberately to hurt one of their sibling. Which happens? , . All right. Is it normal for kids to come home and say that they didn’t play with anyone at lunch?
Similar to my chat at the start. Is it okay? Should I be worried that she’s perfectly happy playing alone? Oh my God, it is normal. good. Okay. I feel like that sometimes still normal, particularly in the early. In primary school, and there’s lots of reasons for this. One is that sometimes when they study kids in the hour that is lunchtime, sometimes they might have been alone for four minutes of an hour of lunch.
And what they remember, what was significant for them was the four minutes. And that’s when again, we are stepping into that empathy and just saying, Oh, that sounds hard and you don’t have to do much. Just know it’s normal. We do stress about it with our eldest that as you and I would know, by the time your fourth is navigating it, you’re like, Whatever, , whatever, you’re fine.
The other thing to know is that often kids are sort of playing alongside each other a bit like parallel play in younger kids, and they don’t realize they’re playing together, but they actually are. And so often that’s happening. So I think unless your child is coming to you, Really repeatedly distressed.
And then it’s like, okay, well let’s find out what’s going on. And you might wanna ask what’s going on, but generally all our kids need is that empathy. This is relationship, this is socializing. There are times you feel left out, there are times that you’re just not feeling it. And really it is that empathy generally, and us not stepping in to do anything about it.
You wanna kind of just sit back until it’s a different situation. Like if we’re talking about a situation where it’s more like bullying. Targeted and repetitive and deliberate and on purpose, like you said before. Well, that’s something we’re sort of stepping into faster. Well, let’s talk about that because the word bully does get used a lot these days.
And what are your thoughts on balancing the risk of a kid being labeled a bully? Versus calling out that bullying behavior. I think we are really overusing the term bullying . Yeah, I agree with you and maybe it’s cuz I’m looking at my number three thinking that, gosh, I might be heading down the path cuz he’s a bit of a bulldozer and a bit of a rooster.
But yeah, I feel like we do use that word a lot. Yeah. We’re really quick to call anything that was uncomfortable for our kids, bullying, when in fact we know that bullying is more than a fight or it’s okay, someone can dislike your child. That’s, they’re right. I can dislike someone. That’s my right. That’s fine.
Bullying needs to be, you know, ongoing repeated. It’s about power. It’s on. And I think we need to be really careful that we are not labeling small children as bullies when they’re children. They’re all doing the best they can. Like I just, I’m really don’t like it. They change from day to day. And I saw this earlier on when my kids first started school, and I pulled them up on it because they were using the word bully.
And I’m like, No, that is absolutely not bullying behavior. And don’t say that about that child. We use that word when it’s serious. And I think when you see something that is like that, we’re absolutely stepping in to do something about it, but we really want to keep stepping back as much as possible and trusting our kids to work things out.
Cuz general teasing and being left out, like we’ve said, it’s really normal. It’s part of growing up and learning how to navigate social situations and the more we step back and just do that coaching rather than intervening, our kids will learn faster and better How to navigate. Stuff, and they do need that help and support, but really almost, we’re always trying to do as little as possible and really trying to get the solutions to come from them.
You know, What do you think you should do? Oh wow, that’s a great solution. That really should be our approach. There’s a bigger picture here. There is a culture of over parenting. But we are living in and it’s probably a whole other other podcast. It’s a whole other segment. And I struggle with this because me too.
I don’t know if I’m that person or not. I’m really torn and maybe we need to do a whole other show, a whole other episode on this because in some ways I am so hands off and some of my friends can’t believe. I let my kids walk to school on their own or ride their butt to school on their own. But then I can be that parent that emails the teacher and says, Hey, what’s going on?
I mean, it’s not what today’s chat is about, but I guess can you give me your high level view on how we should approach this over parenting? Yeah, look, I think the culture’s sori that, I mean, I often question myself a lot cause I feel like I’m underdoing it in this culture of over parenting. If you talk to educators, parents are intervening way too much.
What we really want to do is kind of back our kid, like actually back them to work this stuff. More than we do. And the hardest thing is that we are in this culture where everybody’s doing it. So it seems normal. Yeah. You seem like the odd one out. Yeah. But it’s actually probably better for your child to step back.
Totally. I remember with one of my kids, you know, they were doing these topic talks in like year one or year two, and everybody else is on the WhatsApp chat writing out the parm cards for their kid every week and, and getting really involved. I would say to him, Do you want help with that? Because I was noticing everybody else do it.
And he was like, No, mom, I got it. It’s in my head, . Wow. And he did it. And it’s better. I know it’s better, I know the evidence, but I felt really guilty not being there, writing the palm cards, even though I know the skills he got and the confidence he got. And he’s a really independent homework doer. It is better to intervene less, but it is hard, I think, to step back and not get involved.
So when it does come to friendships, friendship, fires, potential bullying. Yeah, but I’ll say more friendship fires. When do we intervene? What’s the trigger? My approach is, Not intervene. Where possible really let the solution come from my child, Gently coach, you might say, What about this? What about that?
They come up with an idea and then the next day say, How’d it go? Did you do your idea? But I think when your child comes home and it. Clearly it’s a bullying situation where it’s targeted and it’s damaging. Then I would be absolutely getting the school involved. I would getting any help. I’m such a big believer of, if in doubt, check it out.
Like I’ll be pulling in the psychologist and the, you know, I’m a big fan of just get help with it. Don’t sit and try to navigate it alone. I wouldn’t be gonna to other parents ever. I just don’t . I don’t think that’s okay. That’s not a professional opinion. That’s just, I’ve seen that play out, just not go well.
And what about the other parent? What about if you know the other child’s parents, Do you approach them? I would always take it to this. School. Okay. I would not approach another parent. Get that mediator involved. Yeah. And I just think also you, you need to understand that it often takes two to tango and even in a really challenging situation for your child, we wanna be thinking, well, it always takes two to tango in any kind of social situation.
So what is the role my child is playing? and what do they need to learn? And sometimes if our child is being repeatedly picked on, there is some resilience and some standing up for themselves that they need to build. We can help them with that at home. But then we might step in and ask the school could they keep an eye on that and have them be aware of it.
But I would never, I would not. It’s just that I wanna go to our parent . I’m just imagining how this is gonna play out, stomping up the steps, banging on the door. I mean, I don’t know about you cause you’ve got boys and girls. I’ve only got boys, so self-feed, I don’t see as many friendship fires as my friends who have girls and I feel like people get more involved with girls’ friendship fires as well.
My sons have had issues, but I find parents don’t get as involved on the whole. Okay, well let’s watch this space. Um, my kids are a bit too young, . We purposefully haven’t delved into online bullying and that teenage space yet today, and we’ve decided before the session to not go there because again, that’s a whole other topic in and of itself.
And I loved what you said earlier as well to me, that basically if you focus on those primary school years, it really helps to set them up for high school because once they’re in high school, you are no longer the primary. Influence. The friends are, I mean, it’s not like it’s over in terms of parenting, of course it’s not.
But your real influence is the younger years. Yeah. Yeah. . Oh gosh. Okay. Time’s running out to meet up, for sure. The pressure’s on. Well, finally, Jen, for a parent listening today who is worried about their child’s friendships, what’s one conversation start or maybe a conversation that they could have with their child?
I think the most important thing is start by noticing what’s my child into, what my, what’s my child doing? So when a young child, they’re playing in an old child, they’re reading. You come in and you start with what are you reading? What are you doing? What are you interested in? And that’s connection. So you just gotta get in there first with that.
Lose the agenda. Nine times out of 10, if you just slow down and connect over a shared. If something is going on, you won’t have to ask. They will tell you because you’ve connected, and so the issue just bubbles out. If they don’t, you might gently notice and get curious about what you see. Like I noticed the other day that you looked a bit down when you came home from school.
Is everything okay there? So it’s just curiosity and noticing what you’re seeing. If you notice something playing out with friends and you don’t like the way someone’s treating your child, you might say, You know, I noticed that they didn’t let you join in. How did that make you feel? And you’re trying to stay really neutral.
You’re not saying. I’m gonna tell you that that friend is not good for you. You’re just saying, how did you feel when that happened? Was that good or bad? And kids will be often like, Yeah, bad. And okay. And you just wanna follow up with, do you think he was being a good friend? Did that feel good? What could you do?
And you just always staying at that curious point. Once we go to directing, we usually lose them. So I would always just start. What are you reading? And often that will lead to this happened at school. If not that I notice you look a bit down tonight and you know, you know something’s going on and you might say, Your eyes look a bit sad.
This is what I see. And often they’ll be like, I’m having a bad time at school. It comes out. So it’s, it’s really talking about what you’re seeing on your child’s body or what they’re interested in. That leads to the conversation. Oh, I just wish we could have you in my ear. I wish I could have a little earpiece like the producers on the Today Show.
Don’t say that. No, no. Backtrack. Retreat. Retreat. . Oh Jen. Such a wealth of knowledge. I could talk to you all day, but great advice for our friendship fires out there. Thank you so much. My pleasure.
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