Woman's Hour - Parenting: Making Friends

Episode Date: March 20, 2019

Friendship battles between children have always existed – but how can you support your child if you feel they aren’t fitting in? How do you help your child make friends? And how much can friendship be taught anyway - or should adults leave children to work it out for themselves? Jenni talks to Tanith Carey, author of ‘The Friendship Maze’ and Dr Angharad Rudkin, Clinical Child Psychologist at the University of Southampton.

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, Jenny Murray welcoming you to this week's Women's Hour podcast for parents where we discuss the subject of friendship. As parents we assume our own lovely children will have lots of friends and there'll be plenty of playdates and sleepovers galore to accommodate. But what if they don't? What do you advise if your daughter comes home and says she's the only one in the class who doesn't have a best friend, or your son says he's known as Billy No-Mates? I spoke to Dr Angharad Rudkin, a clinical psychologist

at the University of Southampton, and to Tanith Carey, who's the author of The Friendship Maze. What do parents worry about most when it comes to their child making friends? Well exactly what you've said Jenny that they're going to come home and say they don't have friends because parents find that incredibly painful to deal with the thought that their child might be socially isolated and what we've been led to believe is that there's nothing we can really do and we have to kind of watch them from the other side of the school gates and it's just something children should magically know or not know how to do and now I think we're realising there's a whole body of fantastic social science research which can actually help parents decode and understand the dynamics of their children's relationships and then also teach them social

skills if they need it to form better peer bonds. And Harrod, some people, some children just seem to have it sorted. What makes a child popular? Well, there's many, many factors, but I think the most important factor is having an easygoing temperament, being someone who can take the rough with the smooth, have a thick skin, I suppose we would also describe it as, and being someone who is able to communicate what is going on for them. So if you've had a bad day at school, you can come home and say to mum, I had a rubbish day, they were really nasty to me. Or you can say to your teacher, I'm a bit bothered by what they're doing in the playground, so that you've got lots of different skills that you can use to both deal

with the friendship difficulties, but also be able to talk about them as well. Now, Tanith, you include a kind of who's who of girls' cliques in the book. What sort of stereotype characters did you spot there? Well, it's really interesting that whenever humans get together into groups, they start to organise themselves according to their sort of talents and temperaments. And what the research out of america shows that within cliques girls kind of cast themselves in different roles within their friendship groups so at the top obviously we'll have the queen bee who is probably the most charismatic or the most influential or the socially powerful most socially powerful or the most feared

girl then she'll be accompanied by her sidekick who basically does her bidding then you'll get the messenger who will transmit sort of bits of gossip and information about the girls between them. You'll have the wannabe, the girl who's desperately trying to stay on the inside of the clique. So, I mean, I think these sound brutal, but actually when girls start to understand how they're part of this machinery, they can understand how to cope with it when things go wrong and then it's not something personal to them but it's something that just happens within all sort of human interactions. We've all been girls and we know that girls can at school be absolutely horrible to each other. What about boys, Angharad? Do they have cliques and be horrible to each other? Yes, they do but they do it in a very different kind

of way I mean when we think about the research which says that the more laid back you are the easier it is boys in general at least for for most of childhood are a bit more laid back than girls so actually the conflicts won't bother them quite so much but also boys are very active in their play so whereas girls in a primary school you'll look around a playground and you'll see girls huddled together near a wall and you'll see boys off somewhere in the field running around playing with a ball. So actually all of these differences

mean that they play together differently and they have different kinds of friendships. But just as Tanith was saying, we all tend as humans to categorise. We like the shortcuts that categories give us. So even within boys, you'll get the sporty boy, the nerdy boy, the funny boy, the alternative boy. So even within boys, you'll get the sporty boy, the nerdy boy, the funny boy, the alternative boy.

So it still cliques, but I think it comes with slightly less edginess than it does with girls. Talith, you describe a group of mothers who deliberately set out to make their children be friends because they are the same type of families, same sort of house, same sort of house same sort of holidays and all of that how good an idea is it to try to engineer your child's friendships well i think the thing that children love about their friends is that they get to choose them it's the first piece of autonomy they really get it's a chemistry of friendship is something very intangible and is impossible

to create. So I think that if a mother does or a parent indeed feels the need to do that, I think they need to search their reasons why. I mean, is it because they want to protect their child? Is it because as a child, they had difficult social experiences and want to buffer them in some way? Do they feel that sort of there are children who are going to be bad influence which are going to influence their child negatively? I think that as parents we rank social status as increasingly important as a way to get on, but I think that if we interfere too much we take away a child's individual choice, which is really important to their maturing and their growth. Anne-Garrett, you've been full of praise in endorsing Tanith's book. What do you make of

parents who try to engineer friendship? Like Tanith says, I can see where it comes from. All parents are trying to do their best for their children. But I think what's very difficult sometimes as a parent to do is separate your issues from your child's issues. So if you were someone who had real difficulty with friends, found that you got in with the wrong group, for example, or that you were quite isolated as a child, you are more likely to try and manufacture positive relationships for your child or push your child into friendships

that maybe they don't particularly want, but because you think it's going to be the best thing for them. And we know with children, the more you try and control them, the more they're just going to rebel at some point in childhood. And if you see a child's kind of childhood and adolescence as a move towards independence, you're trying to build them up to be an adult on their own two feet. That actually them choosing their own friends and getting on with the good and the bad bits of the friendship is all an essential part of that growth. Tanith, why is it that some children always seem to be on the sidelines? Well, that's a really, really interesting question. And I think we understand more about

that than ever. It seems that some children have real difficulties understanding social cues as quickly as others. So while the average child may take one second to understand the body language of a kind of invitation to come and play or a comment it seems that other children take longer to kind of decode those signals so they may come over as awkward or they may make they may make the other child feel uncomfortable and when children feel uncomfortable they tend then to call that child weird but I mean I think what's really the encouraging message of the book is that there are ways that we can really teach those children ways to interpret those cues quick more quickly and also how do you teach that well it's very it's with practice really there's lots of different ways great ways to practice the

first thing is we need to do is think about what skills what unwritten skills it takes to be a friend for example it really is important to see the world from the shoes of other people. So maybe talk to your child about seeing the perspective of other people. Say, oh, how do you think Johnny felt that he couldn't play football because he broke his leg? Or how do you think your auntie feels now she's starting a new job? Let them kind of develop that theory of mind where they think about how the world looks to other people. And then they can play better. They can learn to compromise.

They can meet in the middle rather than just see the world from their fixed perspective. I was talking to Tanith Carey and Dr Angharad Rudkin, someone who didn't want us to name her, emailed, in my daughter's third year at senior school she was left out of a party which included a large group of girls who I had thought were her friends. This was a tipping point and she explained very tearfully how unhappy she was and said she had no real friends. It was awful. There were a couple of girls she did see, but she was very lonely.

We talked about it. There was one girl who I'd noticed seemed to be a good friend of all the girls in that group, had known them a long time, but wasn't one of the super cool girls, but seemed very genuine. I suggested she call her and tell her how she felt. To my amazement, she did just that. It took a lot of courage on her part. She's never looked back. I'm sure it wasn't quite as straightforward as it appeared, but it worked. She has a fabulous group of very good friends who've lasted well after school. I don't think the girls were being deliberately unkind. It just hadn't occurred to them to think about how those on the periphery were feeling. And another email came from someone else who didn't want us to name her.

I was particularly struck by your discussion about children's friends. My daughter started having friendship problems when she went into secondary school. She didn't like any of the cliques that formed and stood back, choosing not to be a part of them. This has now left her, after a year and a half, isolated and more alone, as although she gets on with individuals in the groups,

the leaders prevent them from forming relationships with her. She's remarkably astute and sees all this, understands it, but it still doesn't make it easier when she comes home saying she has no partner for pair work or had no one to talk to at lunch. She's good at making friends and has many outside school. It's clever, very sporty, and you would think she'd be one of the popular ones. I think this makes her more of a threat to the clique leaders, so they close her out even more. She's resilient and managing the situation far better than I am. It breaks my heart daily. So thank you for all your responses to that discussion.

And remember, if you have an idea that you would like us to discuss on the podcast for parents, do let us know. Bye-bye. I'm Sarah Treleaven, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy.

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