Dr Kathy Weston shares some top tips.

It is the hardest experience as a parent, watching our children muddle their way through friendships, knock backs, being included then excluded, invited to parties and then kept at bay. We have all been there and it can feel emotionally painful and sad. When they find a friend at school, it feels like we can make a sigh of relief only to find a few weeks later, the sands have shifted and one of them has moved onto a different friendship group or dropped the ball on a friendship your daughter considered ‘everything’. When they find a friend at school, it feels like we can make a sigh of relief only to find a few weeks later, the sands have shifted and one of them has moved onto a different friendship group or dropped the ball on a friendship your daughter considered ‘everything’.

First things first – reflect on your own feelings about the situation.

Does this bring back painful memories for you? Perhaps you remember feeling let down, rejected or left out by friends during your own school days? Also consider, is there anything happening in your child’s life outside of school that means you are particularly sensitive to how things are going in school? It is normal for friendships to have lots of ups and downs (particularly at this stage and age), but consider why this might feel particularly acute for you. Talk to a friend about how painful it feels for
you and see if any helpful insights emerge. Try to put the friendship difficulty into context. Research tells us that adolescent girls’ friendships can be particularly rocky so what she is experiencing is a common experience in many schools.

Validate your daughter’s feelings.

Don’t assume how she feels, but check in and ask. Notice and wonder. “I have noticed you seem a bit more cheerful today about everything, is that the case?”, “I have noticed you seem sad today, do you need to talk?”. By simply being there and attuning to how she is thinking and feeling, we are doing our very best. The feelings she expresses can be akin to a grief of sorts, because she has lost a central friendship and, as such, it is likely she will move in and out of ‘grief puddles’. One day it seems ok, the next day it might feel harder. One idea that might help is giving her a diary to write everything in? This can help her to process those feelings and that grief. Alternatively, she might choose to write a letter that she doesn’t send to her former friend, but which allows her to get it all out, tears and all! Then the letter can either be put away, binned or buried!

Give her tools and strategies.

Perhaps her former best friend is having a birthday party and your daughter finds out that she isn’t invited. That will sting. Perhaps she can see her former best friend enjoying herself with other girls in the year on the school trip. That will hurt. Such incidences are inevitable as they are at the same school. It's important to note and to explain to your daughter that there is nothing she can do in these instances, because the friendship is not longer progressing.

Teach your daughter that she needs to distinguish between the things she can and cannot do anything about. There is a fantastic resource in the Tooled Up platform that can really help with that conversation about life’s ‘controllables’. Within that conversation, you can coach her into considering the things she CAN do something about. For example, she can choose to be kind no matter what. She can choose to smile at others in school. She can choose to make new connections with other children in class. She can make new friends outside of school. She can start a new hobby or interest. She can focus on friendships that DO feel good and start considering investing in them.

If she starts to worry about anything, help her turn that worry into a ‘wonder’. “I am worried I have no one to sit with me at lunch” could turn into, “I wonder if I could ask someone before lunch to sit with me?”. We want her to think about the fact she does have tools and coping strategies that she can lean on during the school day and that she simply isn’t just ‘waiting’ for things to happen but can be proactive.

Another lovely idea to help build her resilience is to promote daily gratitude at home – gratitude for what went well, gratitude for a positive and kind conversation she had, gratitude for a good lesson or for some positive feedback from a teacher. By collating these together over mealtimes, it can help your daughter start to see that positive things do happen and that things are going well for her.

We want to continually empower her until she feels she is better able to cope, manage and come up with strategies that feel good no matter the situation. This template for conversations with teens about friendship difficulties can help support you over the coming years. It is designed to support young people’s problem-solving in a way that makes them feel confident and ready to work through any relationship difficulty with aplomb.

Best of luck to both of you.