It is never easy to navigate friendship breakups, especially when it involves your kids

Dealing with your kids falling out with friends is one of the parts of parenting I most dread, because, even now, I haven’t quite learned how to navigate the heartbreak of losing friends just yet

Julie Jay: "It is never easy when friendships end. Even as an adult, my worst heartbreak was never rooted in romantic love, but in the ending of a friendship." Picture: Alamy/PA.

When Number One came home and casually informed me last week that a little boy he had previously been obsessed with was no longer his buddy, my heart broke a little. Not just for him, but also for the boy he had decided was no longer clicking with his special interests (currently Spiderman, colouring, and cycling down slides).

I always fret about exclusion, not just when it relates to my children, but when it comes to any child, because to be isolated is a feeling I know all too well. As a child, I often felt the cold shoulder of my peers, because it turns out that liking poetry in the latter half of the 20th century didn’t carry quite the social currency in Irish secondary schools WB Yeats would have led us to believe.