How to Help Your Child Find Their Friends
My 6 year old daughter complained about a girl at school. She often plays with her, but lately she’s upset with the way she interrupts her when she speaks and ignores her need for “space.” I tried to give her the tools to express my feelings, but the other day, when she again expressed the same concern, I told her, “You know, you don’t have to be her friend.”
She fell silent.
It’s such a simple fact, isn’t it? That in this short life, we don’t have to give our limited time and emotional energy to those who drain us. Yet I’ve only learned this myself in the last five years.
I want to teach my daughter that – despite all the bracelets “best friends forever”, which it stores in its Caboodle, – friendship malleable. In any healthy relationship, you must constantly check – not only with each other, but also with yourself. But how to explain this to a child? Tina Roth-Eisenberg, founder of the popular design blog Swissmiss , asks her daughter this question. This is what I love. She talks about unusual routines :
I’m really trying to educate my kids about how people make you feel. After playing dates, I often ask my daughter: “How are you feeling now? Are you feeling full or empty? At first she said: “Mom, what are you asking me about?” But now she will come up to me and say: “Mom, I don’t feel overpriced now.” This is something that really needs to be taught to children, or at least this is something I would like to learn before because I had really unhealthy friendships because I felt bad for someone or felt like I was manipulated into friendship. I try to have really good people in my life: I know that I fill them, and they fill me, and we are happy for each other’s successes.
(I know the answer to this question can be frustrating as an adult. Maybe that childhood friend, the one you spent every summer with in high school, the one whose family took you in when things were tough at home. .. no longer fills you. It’s okay. You can be kind to them and love them from afar. And maybe there is a woman in your area that you hardly know, but every time you see her, you have a conversation that energizes you. It’s a scary thing to ask if she ever wants to have coffee, but having her as a friend might just be everything.)
With young children, you can tell when they are full – they giggle on their own. But with older children and adolescents, everything is more difficult. Therefore, this question is even more important for them. “Do you feel full or empty?” Ask them enough times and they’ll start asking it themselves, creating a circle full of people who take them higher.