What To Do When Your Child Says ‘I Have No Friends And I’m Going On A 3-Day School Trip’
It’s 8 p.m. the night before Leo’s 7th grade 3-day outdoor school trip, and I’m folding thermal socks into his scuffed duffel—the one with the broken zipper I’ve been meaning to fix for two months. Leo leans in the doorway of his room, one shoulder propped on the frame, a crumb of peanut butter granola stuck to the knee of his gray sweatpants. He’s twisting the hem of his dinosaur skeleton hoodie, and says it so quiet I almost miss it: “I don’t want to go. I have no friends. There’s no one for me to sit with on the bus, or share a cabin with. It’s three whole days.”
My first impulse was to blurt out “Of course you have friends” or “It’ll be fine, I promise” — the things everyone says when you mention your kid is lonely. But I caught myself. I’d heard those lines so many times over the past few months, after we moved for my husband’s job and Leo started a new middle school, and they never felt right. So I sat down on the pile of packed clothes, patted the spot next to me, and asked him what part sounds the worst.
He sat, and talked it through: The worst is the bus pairing. Everyone texts their friends the night before to claim seats, and he’ll be the last one standing, everyone watching while he gets stuck next to a teacher or an empty seat. Then cabin groups — everyone splits off with their people, and he’s the odd one out. Then the full day of free time on the second day, when everyone hikes in groups or plays gaga ball together, and he’ll just wander around alone. He says everyone will know, and it’ll be awkward forever after.
I nodded. I knew he’d struggled since the move — he’d rather draw dinosaur anatomy in the library than play soccer at recess, and he only texts one kid from his old school once a week. This wasn’t out of the blue, but it was the first time he’d spelled out just how scary this trip felt.
First, we talked about what he wanted me to do. The school counselor had suggested asking the teacher to force a popular kid to buddy up with him, and Leo shut that down immediately — said that would make everyone feel weird, like he was a charity case. So we agreed on a low-key intervention: I’d email his homeroom teacher, Ms. Henderson, explain that he was still settling in, ask her to keep an informal eye out, and give him a small, low-pressure job that gave him an easy out from awkward pairing. No big announcements, no forced friendships. Ms. Henderson wrote back an hour later, said she had just the thing.
Then we put together his personal escape plan. We packed his brand new set of fine-liner markers he’d gotten for his birthday, the ones he’d been hoarding for a special project, and tucked his sketchbook in the side pocket of his duffel where he could grab it fast. I told him if free time felt too awkward, he could sit on a stump by the creek and draw for as long as he wanted. No one was going to make him join in every activity. I also told Ms. Henderson that if Leo said he needed a minute alone, that was fine, no questions asked. We agreed that if it got so bad he wanted to come home early, I’d come get him no questions asked, no fuss, no “I told you so.” The last thing I said was, I don’t need you to have fun, I don’t need you to make friends. I just need you to be safe, and I’ll have a stack of chocolate chip pancakes waiting when you get home, whatever happened.
The next morning, in the school parking lot, I watched him stand by the bus, shoulders hunched, scanning the crowd. Then Ms. Henderson walked over, didn’t make a big deal out of anything, just held up the big blue first aid kit and said “Leo, I need an extra pair of hands to carry this up front — can you help me out? You can have the seat next to me if you want.” He relaxed immediately, grabbed the kit, and climbed on. I didn’t see anyone stare, no one whispered. It was perfect.
He came home Sunday afternoon, sunburned across the nose, duffel full of dirty laundry and a crumpled trail map covered in pencil drawings. He didn’t run in yelling that he’d made a best friend. He dropped his bag, grabbed a pancake off the stack I’d kept warm, and said it was fine. The bus ride was quiet, he shared his sour gummies with the student teacher who sat up front. His cabin had three other quiet guys, one of whom also liked drawing, so they drew dinosaurs on the back of that trail map during free time. The campfire sing along was boring, so he sat on the edge and drew the pine trees, and no one bothered him. It wasn’t great, it wasn’t terrible. It was just fine, and he was glad it was over.
What I’ve learned from this, that I wish I’d known a few months ago, is that we don’t have to fix the “no friends” problem in one weekend. The goal of a trip when your kid is lonely isn’t to force them to connect, it’s to help them get through it without feeling humiliated or trapped.
A lot of the advice I see online says to just push your kid to put themselves out there, or fix the friendship issue immediately. But small, low-key steps work better for most quiet kids who are already feeling self-conscious. Ask your kid what they’re comfortable with — don’t intervene behind their back, don’t refuse to intervene at all, meet them where they are. Work with the teacher to do invisible interventions, not obvious ones: a small job up front, a reason to be near people without forced pairing. Give your kid control over their own escape plan, so they never feel stuck. And don’t promise them it’ll be amazing, or that they’ll make friends. Just promise them you’ll be waiting when it’s over, with whatever makes them feel at home.
Leo still doesn’t have a lot of friends at school. He still eats lunch in the library once or twice a week. Next year there’s another 3-day trip, and we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. But he knows now that he can get through three days of being uncomfortable, that I’m not going to force him into situations that embarrass him, and that there’s always a pancake waiting for him at the end. That’s enough, for now.
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