There are several strategies you may find helpful to practice with your child in order to help them make and keep friends.
The following are important when teaching your child to handle situations independently.
l. Role—play specific friendship problems with your child. You can pretend to be your child and they can pretend to be the other child. Act out the problem and then act out what your child can do to solve the problem. This strategy helps children actually see the step process in managing a conflict.
2. Invite your child’s friends over to your house to write, act out, and practice conflict management skills. Sit back and see how your child handles each situation. This can help you know what areas your child needs to work on when her friends leave.
3. Watch programs on television together and point out friendship issues, whether positive or negative, and discuss each. Many sitcoms, and even cartoons, have some type of relationship issue to be solved. These are perfect opportunities to engage your child in conversations about appropriate and inappropriate methods of conflict management.
4. If your child comes home everyday with friendship stories that are negative, such as, “Guess what she said to me, and guess what she did to someone. ..”, then you may want to try the following: when your child arrives home, ask her to spend several minutes writing in a journal a positive and a negative thing that happened at school that day. Later that evening, sit down and spend 20 minutes discussing the day’s journal entry. When that time is up, move on to another activity.
This strategy helps to alleviate the negative comments afterschool. The more you listen to negativity, and the more reaction the child receives from you, the less positive the child will be and the negative comments could go on endlessly.
5. Friendship issues are very common at this age. It is quite normal for children to be best friends one moment and enemies the next. Remind your child that what they say and do cannot be taken back and cannot be forgotten. Remind them to be careful what they say when they feel angry and to begin sentences with “I feel...” or “I want...” and not “You are...” or “You did...”.
In the past, the above strategies have proven to be beneficial when teaching children friendship skills and how to deal with conflicts.
Please let me know if I can be of further assistance.