How can parents help their children make new friends?

Parents cannot make friends for their children, but they can build the skills friendship runs on: empathy, communication, cooperation, apologising, and handling big emotions. Five practical helps: never force friendships, steer toward common interests, encourage sharing and turn-taking, role-play the hard hellos, and host the playdates that let bonds form.

“Every new friend is a new adventure, the start of more memories.” Imagine childhood without friends; school friends hold a special place in our lives for good reason. And while old friends keep their place in our hearts, making new friends in each new environment, a new class, school or city, is a life skill in its own right. For some children it comes easily; for others, every playground is a wall.

Making friends is a deeply personal business, but underneath it sit learnable abilities: emotional skills, self-regulation and social competence, and parents shape all three. Home is where the toolkit gets packed.

The friendship skills that start at home

• Empathy: the master skill of every relationship, best grown at home.
• Communication: technology quietly erodes conversation even inside families; shut the devices off and talk to each other.
• Cooperation: family responsibilities teach turn-taking and valuing others’ input long before a classmate ever does.
• Curiosity: encourage sharing thoughts and caring about someone else’s.
• Knowing when to apologise: how to own a mistake, make amends, and forgive the mistakes of others.
• Handling emotions: strong, conflicting feelings are normal; help your child name and manage the big ones. (Being truly listened to is where they learn this.)

Five ways to help the friendships happen

1. Don’t force it

Kind and polite to everyone, friends with a chosen few: that is a healthy social life, not a failing one. Pressure to befriend everybody teaches performance, not connection.

2. Find common interests

Encourage your child to notice classmates who share their interests, and teach them to spot the cues: the dinosaur bag, the football at lunch. Approaching a child with shared ground feels safer and works faster, and the circle widens naturally from there.

3. Encourage the positive behaviours

Sharing and turn-taking are friendship’s currency, and respecting others’ space its etiquette. Where your child struggles with these, teach through personal examples and games rather than corrections.

4. Role-play the hard moments

Many children freeze at the approach: how to greet someone new, how to ask to join a game. Rehearse it at home: simple greetings, joining an existing group, inviting a single child to play. And rehearse rejection too, because sometimes the answer is no, and a child who has practised shrugging it off will try again tomorrow.

5. Build relationships yourself

Playdates and family friendships put children together often enough for bonds to form, and children learn social dynamics by watching yours: how you welcome, include and repair. Your friendships are the textbook.

You cannot hand your child a friend. You can hand them the confidence to say hello twice, which is usually all a friendship needs to start.

The goal is never to make friends for them, but to equip them to interact well and find their own people. For a child with learning difficulties, whose school days can be socially bruising, these skills are protective armour, and the friendships they produce are half the confidence recovery.

Dr. V.S. Gayathri is a Certified Dyslexia Therapist, an Orton-Gillingham trained literacy specialist, and the founder of Flourishing Kids. She has delivered over 4,000 hours of one-to-one reading and spelling intervention, helping children across multiple countries build stronger literacy skills. If friendships are the hard part of school for your child, get in touch for a free 15-minute conversation.