What’s the craziest thing you had ever tried with your friends during your schooling years?
I remembered getting friends to join me on a discovery of the haunted lane behind the staffroom that ended with everyone running away when the school bell rang.
This happened during my primary schooling years and surprisingly, I still remember it vividly until now.
Though we can now make friends freely via social media, I still believe that school is always a perfect place for everyone to make new friends.
We get to interact with our friends face-to-face at school and we can explore the surroundings different from our family setting.
Besides having interaction, we actually benefit a lot from the positive friendships that we foster.
Therefore, it is equally important for our children to understand how they can make friends at school.
Let’s find out the four tips you that can share with your children on how to make friends at school!
4 Tips For Your Children to Make Friends At School
#1 Show sympathy and offer help to friends in need
Have you ever been in a situation where you desperately need help from a family member or a friend?
If so, you would certainly understand the gratitude you feel for those who help you during those difficult times. Thus, the first step of teaching our children to make friends at school is learning to help.
Our children need to learn to observe their surroundings and be able to offer their help to those who need it.
They can start with helping friends to carry heavy books and to hand in their books. They can even guide friends in their homework and accompany friends who are sick to seek help.
However, it is equally crucial to discuss with our children the appropriate type of help that they should offer.
Our children need to understand that they should be helpful, but not over pleasing their friends.
They should not commit to negative behaviours such as stealing or cheating during the examination due to peer pressure.
To prevent our children to be over pleasing towards their friends’ demands, what our children need is high self-esteem and strong emotional resilience.
You can try out some of the tips shared in this article on how to build our children’s emotional resilience.
#2 Be willing to share
Which friend would you prefer to have a long-lasting friendship with – the selfish one or the generous one?
The answer would certainly be the generous one. Thus, it is important to guide our children to learn to share their belongings.
They should learn to share their stationeries and colouring tools with the tablemates and other classmates too.
With this, they would be able to foster a good relationship with others and it would be easier for them to start their conversations with their classmates too.
Here’s a reminder for your children to share their stationeries: They need to get their belongings back and keep them in the stationery box once their friends have finished using the stationeries.
This is extremely important as they need to learn to appreciate their belongings.
Keeping their own belongings in place is also one way to train their responsibilities.
Besides that, it is also to prevent the loss of your children’s belongings so that they are willing to share more with their friends in the future.
How about sharing money then? Is it fine for our children to lend their money to their friends?
It depends on whether their friends are truly in need and trustworthy or they are just taking advantages of our children.
We need to be open with our children about this matter so that they would not be in a dilemma when their friends ask for money.
Have a discussion with them when is appropriate to lend their friends some money (for instance, not having enough money to buy food) and guide our children on how to get their friends to promise them when to return the money.
#3 Learn to listen and praise friends
Most of our little children would always like to talk and share about their days and feelings, but only a few would really listen to their friends. (This is somehow similar to some of us as adults too!)
However, interaction is meaningless when both parties are simply talking about themselves.
Thus, how can our children really make friends at school?
Teach them how to listen and to take turns during a conversation.
You can first model to pay full attention during your daily conversation with your children at home.
No looking at your phone and having other tasks at hand during the conversation are very important in modelling full attention.
The next step would be to teach our children not to interrupt their friends when they are sharing their problems and stories.
Let their friends finish their words and then our children share their thoughts and feelings.
On top of this, our children should also learn to praise and motivate their friends. It is not about flattery, but it is about giving sincere and positive verbal support.
Instead of making negative comments about their friends’ appearance and behaviour, we should educate our children to say things like, “You look good today”, “I believe we can do this together”, or “I think that you did very well in class”.
As time passes, you will see that your children are surrounded by peers who are of a similar mindset.
#4 Learn to extend invitations
One of the issues that shy children fail to make friends at school is that they do not know how to start a conversation and to invite their classmates to join a classroom activity.
They are usually one of the last to have groupmates during classroom activities. It is not that they do not wish to join the others, it is just they are too afraid to take the first move as they are fearful that they will be rejected.
How can we help if our children are really too shy to make friends at school? Practise how they can start a small talk with their tablemates first with our children at home.
Have a little gathering at home for your children and their classmates so that your children can start their first step to invite others.
It is equally important to tell our children that it is fine to be rejected and we should never take rejection personally.
It simply means that the other party do not share a similar preference with us.
Our Children Can Make Friends At School
The simplest way for your children to make friends at school is certainly being a good friend in the first place.
Get our children to list down what they would expect from their friends and ask them what they would do in order to have their ideal friends.
With this, our children would certainly be able to start and maintain a long-lasting quality friendship that would benefit them positively in various aspects.