(CNN) — As your child heads back to school, they’re probably thinking about who their friends will be this year.
Ninety percent of parents think their kids want to make more friends, according to the 2024 C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health. That’s good, because healthy friendships can make kids happier, improve their self-esteem and resilience, and protect against loneliness and depression.
In my decade of speaking to parents, students and educators about how to handle kids’ screen time, I’ve repeatedly heard that young people are struggling to keep up true friendships. That phenomenon could partly be because so many kids confuse the number of online followers they have with close relationships. What’s more, all the time kids are spending on screens is time they’re not learning how to interact with peers face-to-face.
Here’s the good news: “Children naturally make friends,” said Anna Seewald, a Princeton, New Jersey-based psychologist and host of the “Authentic Parenting” podcast.
What they need from parents is the opportunity to create friendships and help maintaining them, she said.
Extracurricular activities aren’t enough
Put young kids in the same place and most will naturally play and have fun together, Seewald said.
“No. 1 is providing spaces and opportunities,” she said. “Today’s children are overstructured, and they are in a lot of extracurricular activities.” But they need plenty of free, unstructured time in order to make friends, she added.
Seewald explained that if your child has four or more extracurricular activities you may need to increase the unstructured free playtime.
Sure, your child can make a friend at an extracurricular activity. But at gymnastics or soccer, “they are usually following instructions and there is very little or no time for socialization,” she said. Often, they get redirected or reprimanded if they try to chat. That’s why “kids usually need to meet outside of the soccer practice to deepen their friendship,” Seewald said.
If children don’t have places to develop friendships, they don’t have the opportunity to work on their social and emotional skills. That lack of development could leave them awkward and shy, she said.
On the other hand, if a teenager is struggling and isn’t involved in any activities, encourage them to explore their interests as a way of making those initial connections.
Then allow your teen to hang out in person with the people they meet at those activities. Young people told the researcher danah boyd they want to get together with their friends in person. The problem is their parents often won’t let them! Although it might be tempting to think kids are safer at home, they’re almost certainly better off getting together with friends face-to-face. (There are plenty of predators on social media.)
Help kids maintain friendships
The problem most kids have is not making friends — it’s keeping them, Seewald said.
Sometimes friend trouble starts young. “If something goes ‘wrong’ during the playdate, if two children fight over a toy, or there is a conflict, usually parents feel guilty, they interrupt the playdate, they don’t want to come back,” Seewald said. That’s not the right approach.
Instead, parents should help kids figure out how to share, solve problems and resolve other issues that come up.
“We need to coach them through difficult moments and teach them that relationships come with conflict,” Seewald said. With experience, kids learn that having disagreements is natural.
Many people see relationships as disposable and cut people off when things get difficult, Seewald said. Instead, we should teach kids how to repair the relationship, forgive the person and show compassion, she said.
As kids get older, parents can be a sounding board and offer advice on how to navigate the tricky situations that inevitably come up instead of ghosting people.
If your child won’t talk to you or is experiencing big challenges, a therapist can be helpful.
Talk about digital etiquette
Older kids often maintain relationships via text or apps, so it’s also important to teach them how to do so.
“We can teach them how to communicate respectfully through text, to not use harmful, derogatory language that can hurt someone’s feelings,” Seewald said.
Also discuss with kids when it’s appropriate to have a face-to-face conversation. Breaking up with a romantic partner via text isn’t OK, she said.
Of course, when kids type instead of talking, they don’t have a lot of context to figure out what people mean, so they usually have to make assumptions. It’s easy to misinterpret a short sentence a friend quickly fired off, especially since kids can’t see the other person’s facial expressions or hear their tone of voice.
That’s why when I talk to young people about how to protect and empower themselves online, I recommend that they pause when their feelings are hurt and try to talk to the friend in person to resolve things.
Another big topic to discuss is privacy, Seewald said. Teach kids not to share what friends send them without permission.
Maintain friendships yourself
One of the best ways to teach kids how to have healthy relationships is to model them, Seewald said.
She advises making your home a welcoming place. Invite people over and visit friends in their homes, too. That’s how kids pick up on skills such as small talk.
“We know adults also struggle with friendships, but if we want our children to have friends we need to show them how we socialize, how we entertain our friends, how we hang out,” Seewald said. “We don’t do much of that these days.”
We all need friends. Thankfully, making them isn’t as hard as we might think. The trick is creating the right opportunities and being willing to work through the challenges that arise.
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