You will feel bad if you notice your child not having enough friends at school. You know that having excellent social skills is crucial to succeeding in life. While there’s an opportunity to help, you should do it. These are some tips to prevent your child from struggling with having friends.
Take time to observe
Before you conclude that your child doesn’t make friends easily, you need to observe first. Your child may be very selective in making friends. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s even a good idea that children know whom to be friends with and set standards. Don’t feel alarmed if there’s no reason to do so.
Be a role model
You can’t expect your child to be friendly if you’re the opposite. You have to check if you also make friends with others. If you love being alone and don’t like talking to other people, your child might think it’s okay to do the same. Model the correct behaviour so that your child can follow in your footsteps.
Talk to your child
It helps to have an open line of communication at home. Your child needs to feel comfortable talking to you about making friends. If you know the reason, it’s easier to help. Please don’t ignore the problem and pretend it’s not happening. Your child might also raise other issues that you should try to solve.
Play at home
There’s difficulty in playing with other children because your child didn’t practice at home. If you want to help, you need to spend more time playing with your child. You can buy new educational toys to have fun playing with. The good thing is that you will eventually have the chance to go out and play in other places. There are establishments with soft play equipment that your child can benefit from. It doesn’t matter where you play as long as you spend time doing it.
Talk to other parents
You can use this as a last resort if you don’t know how to help your child. Try to talk to other parents and set up a play date. The good thing about it is that you can choose whom to trust. You might also want to partner with parents whose children are also having a difficult time making friends. It should be the last resort since you don’t want your child to receive assistance from you all the time. If it’s possible to make friends without depending on you, it would be great. For now, setting up a play date is understandable.
Praise positive behaviour
When your child makes friends at school or in other places, you have to praise it. Remind the child that it’s a good thing to make friends and help reinforce positive behaviour. You can say that your child did an excellent job making friends or reward the behaviour in other ways.
Hopefully, you can help your child improve in this regard. When children have a hard time making friends at first, they might never recover. They grow up and find it hard to talk and socialize.
