Social connection, making friends and social homework
Making Friends and Social Communication
Whether it is a goal your child has chosen or a goal set my school or a hope/wish of a parent it can be really hard to know where to start in supporting your child in finding their tribe.
Some children find this the easiest objective and there is no thought to it, they may need support with conflict resolution on occasion but overall finding friends is never a problem. Some children find it easy to find a friend, or at least a pal for the time at the park, the time at a summer camp or on holidays but sustained friendship is really difficult. For others all aspects of finding a friend is difficult, may not be related to social interest, this may be related to their skill level or just the children they have met, or a combination of social interest, skill and their peer group.
First and foremost, you cannot make your child a friend! It is an unrealistic, potentially doomed to fail goal for your child. The failure, they may feel responsible for, that has potentially absolutely nothing to do with them.
How often have you as an adult attended a party, been a regular attendee of an exercise class or share space and time with work colleagues but you don’t have a friend in those environments. I can have a great time at a party but not have found a friend or even called the people I met an acquaintance. That is possibly not my fault or my responsibility, I had a nice time but the other people who were perfectly lovely, shared a great experience are not going to be part of your tribe.
This is true for children, we expect that when they go to school they will find their tribe. That may not be the case so when we think of finding friends we need to not assume that they will find their friends at school. The children at swimming may be the children your son or daughter has more in common with. It may also be the case that the children at dance or performing arts are have more shared interests. The children they meet in the park every Saturday morning have the same energy levels and love the fleeting Saturday less pressure social chat friendship that involves lots of running around and shared space of the climbing frame.
So after we accept that we cannot set the goal for our child to make a friend we then need to see how we can support them in exploring friendship and start by looking both within and outside the school environment.
Step 2 is Social homework. Social Homework is something we all do, we watch the programmes our friends are watching so we can join the whatsapp group and feel part of the conversation. We may all read the same books, follow the same social media accounts, watch the same team. Our level of interest may be different and in some cases it may not be our favourite thing but we do it to chat to our friends and we know it is important to them. Social Homework is a great first tool for parents to support their children. Find out what the others are playing, listening to, watching and engaging in. There is nothing worse than struggling to be part of the group and you also don’t know the topic of conversation and have nothing to contribute. It is important to note that the child does not have to enjoy the activity they just need to know what it is, so if it is a series of books looking at the synopsis or reading together the first book in the series, watching the 2 minute sports highlights can be a hook in to a conversation.
It can seem unfair that your child does the social homework to be part of the group and potentially others do not reciprocate the effort but perhaps between supportive parents you can encourage other children to be aware of some of their preferred interests.
In a recent discussion about social homework a question was raised about games on ipads/devices. What do we do when the child is not allowed access to a device and all the others are playing a certain game or using a certain device. This can be really difficult and often needs the support of the parents to engage in alternative activities for playdates and can be isolating for your children. This can also be true for foods and attitudes for treats/sugar etc. I do not suggest compromising on your familiar values/rules. The rules can be hard but should be respected. If the others are interested in Minecraft then the children can watch snippets of the movie to at least know the characters but not engage in the game or have Minecraft top trumps. When devices are involved and you are the non device household then often more parental support is needed to reinforce the alternative activity. Maybe your house is the house that allows camps to be built in the living room out of every cushion available or you sped longer in the park or playground.
Providing the alternative to the football loving class can also be difficult if the majority of children love football and all play it can be particularly hard for the boys who are not football focused. This is another request for supportive schools and supportive parents, schools having only certain days for each class to play football allows for other days when the children do not need to compete with football for time with peers.
Step 3 – Skills – we can not make someone be friends with someone else but we can teach the skills of friendships, there are a number of programmes including Michelle Garcia Weiners Social Thinking and Social Detectives. The University of Manchester has a new programme on supporting social communication which can be implemented by a speech and language therapist or someone similarly trained (Personally I think it is really accessible to parents). We can help and support, brain storm and problem solve friendship strategies with our children and when they are ready or when they have found someone that they feel could be friends they have the skills ready to use with their new found tribe.
Please remember as I see so many parents tell children to go up and introduce themselves to others as a way to initiate play, it all has a formal feel, other children rarely formally introduce themselves they start conversations in the middle and find out each other’s names over time or through teachers/staff, they don’t ask each other lots of questions potentially age but they talk often in statements initially and figure it out from there. You see this so often when two children who do not speak the same language can spend hours playing together and you wonder how do they do that? But they figure it out and it is clear to them.
Final note on friendship – playdates and regular social engagements can be easy going, quick and low demand, post school hot chocolate – brought in flasks and shared in the park or in a local café, date in the local park – just make sure there will not be lots of other children that could potentially take over or not let your child join in, it is ok (if allowed) for children to come over and watch a movie, have a snack and go home. Climbing walls if available and not too expensive are a low demand when it comes to chatting/socialising you need to focus on what you are doing, sending your child with their favourite activity to someone else’s house to get a playdate started is perfectly acceptable. Short playdates that happen regularly are better than really intense long playdates that only happen sporadically.
A very successful hang out that has blossomed into a really lovely friendship that I know of is two children eating their packed supper post a swim lesson while they waited for their siblings, started with packed suppers and games of top trumps and now is a consistently evolving friendship.
