How to Help Your Kid Make More Friends: Practical Tips From an Elementary Teacher
The blacktop is still warm from the noon sun when I head out to recess after lunch last month. A soccer ball whizzes past my elbow, a group of second graders scream as they chase a butterfly across the playground, and there’s Mia, just like she is most days: leaning against the red brick wall, one sock with a hole at the toe pulled down over her ankle, flipping slowly through her beat-up scratch-and-sniff sticker book. Her mom had emailed me the night before, voice tight with worry: Mia cries in the car every afternoon, says no one wants to be her friend. What can we do to help her make more?
I’d gotten this question at least once a month for the eight years I’ve taught third grade, and almost every time, it comes from a parent who’s already tried the standard advice: Just go say hi! Just join the game! Be more outgoing! Mia’s mom told me she’d repeated that line every morning before school, and all it did was make Mia hide in the backseat and refuse to get out.
I walked over to Mia that day, sat down on the warm asphalt next to her wall, and nodded at her sticker book. “That strawberry one smells way better than the garbage can by the slide, right?” I said. She looked up, surprised, and flipped the page to show me the blueberry one. When I asked what she wished she could play at recess, she mumbled that she liked Four Square, but she was too slow, so the big groups never let her join.
We spent 10 minutes after school that day talking through one small change, instead of pushing her to build a whole new personality. The standard advice tells kids to walk up to a group and blurt “can I play?” which is terrifying for anyone, let alone a kid who’s already nervous. Instead, I told her, you don’t have to ask to join anything first. Just find people who are doing something you like, and say one specific thing about that thing. We practiced for the two girls who draw rainbows on the pavement before recess every day: Mia loves sparkly stickers, so we practiced the line: “Your purple rainbow matches my new sparkly purple sticker. Can I show you?”
It took her two days to work up the courage to say it. On the third day, I watched her hover by the chalk drawing for three minutes, shoving her hands in and out of her overalls pockets, before she blurted the line. One of the girls looked up, said “cool, let me see,” and they spent the next 12 minutes trading stickers on the brick wall. By the end of recess, they asked her if she wanted to draw a sun next to their rainbows. That was it: no instant best friends, no big dramatic play date, just one small conversation that worked.
Mia’s mom made one small change at home, too. She’d been asking “did you make any new friends today?” the second Mia got in the car, which put all this pressure on Mia to have a big win every single day. I suggested she swap that question for something casual, no stakes: “What’s the silliest thing that happened at recess today?” She told me a week later that Mia started talking more just from that one swap, no other changes. When Mia has a bad day, no one turns it into a big conversation about being lonely or how she needs to try harder. She just talks about the silly thing, and that’s that.
Another thing I’ve seen work over the years is stop pushing big group play right away. A lot of parents think their kid needs a whole crew of friends to be happy, but most shy or anxious kids are way more comfortable building a connection with one person at a time. I tell parents to help their kid look for the other kid who’s also hanging back, the one who’s playing alone with Legos in the classroom or reading a book under the tree at recess. It’s way less scary to talk to one person than it is to crash a group of four or five kids who already know each other. Last week, I saw Mia sitting on the bench next to Javi, the boy who brings a stack of Pokemon cards to recess every day. She mentioned she had a Bulbasaur sticker in her book, and they spent the whole recess matching her stickers to his cards. That’s a slower start than joining a big soccer game, but it’s a real connection that sticks.
I don’t tell parents that their kid needs to be the most popular kid in class, or that every interaction has to work out. Mia had a bad day two weeks ago, where she said her line about the rainbow and the girls were in a hurry to get to Four Square, so they just nodded and ran off. Mia came back to the brick wall, and I just sat with her and flipped through her sticker book for five minutes. I didn’t give her a pep talk, I didn’t tell her to try harder, I just said “want to try that sticker trick with Javi tomorrow?” When you make a big deal out of a failed interaction, you turn making friends into this scary, high-stakes test that your kid can fail. Most of the time, the other kid wasn’t even being mean—they just were excited to play their game. That’s all.
Today at recess, Mia got out after three turns in Four Square, so she didn’t push to stay in and get upset. She just grabbed her sticker book and walked over to Javi’s bench. No one forced her to be outgoing, no one made her feel like she was doing something wrong if she wanted a quiet minute. Her mom told me last week that Mia still comes home and wants to sit and sort stickers alone after school some days, and she doesn’t panic about that anymore. Mia doesn’t have a dozen friends, but she has three people she likes to talk to, and that’s enough right now. Some days she still leans against the brick wall alone, and that’s okay too. More often than not, someone wanders over to see what stickers she’s got that day.
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