Here's how to help if your child finds it hard to make friends at school

Helen O’Callaghan talks to child experts about strategies to help children who find it difficult to make friends at school.

YOUR heart breaks when you find he spent play-time on his own. You overhear his classmates’ mums arranging play-dates but he’s never invited. Birthday party invitations circulated recently — he wasn’t included.

When a child isn’t making friends at school, it’s a major worry for parents, says psychologist Jenny Ryan (www.mylifesolutions.ie).

“It becomes the overarching worry about school. There’s a sense of no control or input that parents can take to assist in the issue.”

In California, speech-language pathologist Michelle Garcia Winner is pioneering a new perspective on children’s playground social difficulties.

Just as some have trouble distinguishing between their letters, she believes less popular kids have a kind of ‘social dyslexia’ — they struggle with reading social cues.

Her approach isn’t just for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) — it’s for any who are invariably out-of-sync with their peers’ social interaction.

Garcia Winner points out that only 25% of communication is language — the remainder is facial expression, body language and stance, volume and tone of voice.

Slowness at interpreting social cues — resulting in a child having trouble joining in with the right comment at the right moment — can put them seriously on the back foot.

In the 1990s, two psychologists based at Atlanta’s Emory University tested several thousand children and found 10% had one or more problems giving or understanding non-verbal communication.

They called this dyseemia — but their heartening take-home message was, no matter how complex the difficulty, children can be helped to communicate better on a non-verbal level.

Child psychotherapist and author of Cop On Colman Noctor believes most children negotiate the social politics of friendships without catastrophic difficulties.

“But some struggle to master the skills and may need some social scaffolding to [help] overcome their awkwardness.

“Children’s development has different trajectories — they develop socially, emotionally and intellectually at different rates. They may benefit with a leg-up in certain areas.”

Clinical psychotherapist Joanna Fortune (www.solamh.com) agrees making friends is a natural process for most children but says some will struggle to socially integrate into large groups.

“Some children do better with one or two friends rather than a group — there’s nothing wrong with this.”

2016 British research into young children’s friendships and how schools can support them found five categories of peer acceptance among five and six-year-olds:

— Popular: children selected most often because they’re most liked

— Controversial: they’re either liked or disliked depending on context and the specific group of children selecting them

— Rejected: Least liked by peers

— Neglected: often ignored or overlooked by peers

— Average: not in demand by peers as popular children are, nor are they as unpopular as ‘rejected’ children can be.

So, points out psychologist Jenny Ryan, “only one category really finds it easy to approach people and develop friendships. Most need some guidance and strategies”.

The same study — conducted by Dr Caron Carter and Professor Cathy Nutbrown — highlighted the social minefield of children’s friendship.

They cited findings that children were sympathetic and responsive to peers if they were physically hurt but socially they insulted one another verbally: ‘you can’t play’, ‘don’t sit by me’, ‘stop following us’, ‘I don’t want you for a partner’, ‘go away’.

Ryan says some children hold back because they’re worried about a group’s dynamics.

“More sensitive children will get a feeling off a very strong character and, out of safety, pull back. This changes their body language and can make them look passive — like targets for more powerful, social status-needy children.”

She believes children need “real nurturing” in friendship development skills.

“Friendship’s tricky to navigate. It’s full of twists and turns and, depending on who we meet, can be easy or complicated. Kids need to understand when someone’s cruel or kind — they need to know what to do in these situations. We teach them what to do if they fall, what to do if they need the toilet.

“We tend not to teach them what to do when someone’s mean — apart from the negative advice of ‘give as good as they get’, which never helps.”

The 2016 British research reported that children’s friendships impact significantly on their academic achievement. Yet, says Ryan, teachers aren’t always comfortable dealing with friendship issues. “Teachers need to be creative in finding ways to mix the group — rotating desks for example or giving passive children more sociable jobs.”

So, what’s the difference between children with ASD and those who don’t ‘get’ the tricky rules of friendship?

“Children with ASD don’t just struggle with friendships alone — it’s a more complex issue,” explains Fortune. Noctor agrees: “ASD affects a series of developmental challenges that aren’t just social.”

Ryan warns against labelling children who struggle to make friends as having a diagnosable condition.

She suggests society has ‘social dyslexia’ when there’s failure to understand that children need nurturing in the skill of friendship-making. And, she says, children with ASD are very capable of making friends.

“It just has to be the right one with empathy and understanding. This is the same for all of us. The right friend is hard to find. Maintaining the friendship is harder.”

She also cautions against jumping to conclusions about children’s friendships based on our own childhood experience — for example, if we had difficulty making friends.

When she recently asked her son why he didn’t play with anyone at break-time, he replied ‘because they couldn’t catch me’. “He was so excited to start school he raced around the playground.”

Visit www.playworks.org for inclusive play ideas.

Social cues

Clinical psychologist Joanna Fortune:

Children learn to read social cues from parents. They learn about their own emotional world from how parents reflect back to them: “I know you’re angry because you don’t want to share your toys but we don’t throw toys in this house.”

Use ‘wondering’ to help them consider things from other’s perspectives: “I wonder what you’d do if you saw a child sitting alone in the playground?”

Psychologist Jenny Ryan:

Remind children about alternative reasons for someone’s behaviour instead of always assuming the worst about themselves: “Just because Amy seemed distracted when you were telling her something doesn’t meant she doesn’t like you – it just means she had a lot on her mind.”

Encourage self-empathy. Teach positive ways to deal with emotions like anger, sadness, frustration: “It’s OK to be angry but what are we going to do about it? How about jumping on the trampoline?”

Role-play effective body language, eye contact and conversation starters. Many children keep their heads down, avoiding eye contact. Even if eye contact is difficult, get them to look up, head up, shoulders back. Take photos/ video to show difference. If they do it and it feels good, they’ll run with it.