Encouraging resilience in friendship: how parents can help their children to make and keep friends
The Tassomai team recently caught up with Emma Yentis, an experienced PSHE teacher, about resilience and friendships. As parents it can be hard to watch your child go through social ups and downs as they make friends at school, but did you know that many of the resilience lessons that improve their mental wellbeing also help them to maintain these friendships?
Be resilient. Don’t give up and keep trying.
It seems easy, right? For many children, it is easy but for some it is very difficult. When things are challenging, it is really tempting to stop and give up when the going gets tough.
Encouraging our children to become more resilient isn’t a one-time thing, but a process that develops over time. Being resilient or knowing how to be resilient can be so vague. For many children, the ability to be resilient comes from whether they have the right tools to refer back to when things become more difficult, whether they are feeling happy and confident, or whether they have strong and positive friendships or relationships.
So how can we help our children to use their resilience tools to develop friendships? And how can we help them to maintain these friendships through the social struggles of school life?
Ask questions
It is important to encourage our children to think about mistakes, or things that have not gone their way, as positive things. This doesn’t always refer to challenges during a lesson but to any differences or disputes with friends. ‘What mistake did you learn from today?’ might initially be answered in reference to a spelling mistake or a wrong answer in geography for example, but it is equally important to ask these questions in reference to friends.
Acknowledging that perhaps they made a mistake, or something was challenging with a friend, is allowing your child to recognise that friendships need work too. We mustn’t take our friends for granted and just like a spelling mistake that needs practice, so do our relationships with people.
We can ask follow up questions like ‘What will you do next time you are in this situation?’ This offers opportunities for our children to think about what tangible responses they are actually able to give, based on real contexts that are meaningful to them.
Be interested
We want our children to be interested in things and show curiosity. Let’s inspire them to ask questions by modelling this and showing our own interest in learning about the world and things around us. By encouraging our children to have interests, we are allowing them the space to learn. Once children are excited by something, we can support them to try new things and perhaps join a club. This will boost confidence and expose them to opportunities outside their comfort zone.
In developing children’s confidence to try new things like art, sport or chess, for example, we are enabling them to start an activity they may not be very good at, so that progress can be made. It is in these moments that we can highlight the importance of how starting something new is hard and it is okay to feel like they aren’t very good at it yet.
We have the power and ability to help reshape our children’s thinking through what we call a growth mindset. This means that whatever we might be feeling towards a skill or challenge, this isn’t how we will always feel towards it. Rather than saying ‘I am not very good at swimming’, you can encourage them to rephrase it as ‘I am not very good at swimming yet’.
By allowing our children to take on new things, they will not only meet other children but also be able to share their experiences with their friends back at home or in school. It gives them something to be proud of and something to share with others.
Be honest
We can talk about our feelings openly with our children. Rather than only asking them how they are feeling, encourage them to ask and listen to how you are feeling too. This relationship between you and your own child will develop and will give your children the skills to have similar dialogues with friends.
For children to engage, it is important that they can relate to what you are talking about. Find something that they find difficult that you can relate to (possibly from your own school days), and allow them to hear that you also found it hard. What did you do to help? What would have helped you? Perhaps there was an issue you had with a friend during your school experience and there was something you learnt from it, that you can share with your child. Conversing with your child about an issue like this, can provide them with relatable solutions to a situation.
Be patient
We often find that our children struggle with patience and are quick to become frustrated when something isn’t going their way. As adults, it is sometimes difficult to manage too! It is important to encourage patience and to give them strategies to regulate their emotions.
Counting to 10, taking yourself away from the situation or stopping the task for a break, are all different tools for our children to use for support when something is challenging. Then, when they are ready to return to the activity, discussing what it was that they found hard is a good way to identify specific areas to work on, rather than the thing as a whole, which can sometimes be overwhelming. Breaking things down for our children into steps can really simplify a task.
Then it is really important to praise our children positively for being both patient and resilient. Using language like ‘I can see you are finding this frustrating but I’m so impressed you are trying again’, is really valuable, as it not only recognises their frustration but also praises them for having another go.
These tools can also be used when dealing with any conflict or difficulties with friendships. For example, children may be reassured through language like that above, highlighting that developing friendships takes time. ‘I can see that X has upset you; you are being really brave but it might be good to see how they feel about it too’. Additionally, just like a challenge in class, sometimes it is easier to walk away for a while and to have some time to think about which specific things were challenging. This again encourages our children to narrow down what is upsetting them and what specific thing they are expecting from their friend(s).