Helping your child cope with end of a friendship
Breaking up is hard to do for anyone, but it’s particularly difficult when you’re a child.
For 4-year-old Lily Bottigliero, it was a 10-mile move from Chicago to the suburbs that caused her tears to flow endlessly. Those 10 miles meant new friends, and Lily wasn’t ready to give up friends she’d literally spent her entire life making.
“I let her know that life has so many interesting roads, twists and turns, and it’s important that we connect with people along the way,” said her mother, Blagica Bottigliero. “Sometimes we’ll see those people every day, but other times we have to leave, or they leave.”
While kids can be forced to change friend groups for various reasons throughout childhood — because of a move or the result of sudden swings of relationships at school — it can be a very difficult transition.
“Children tend to be less experienced in breaking up than adults,” said Irene Levine, psychologist and author of “Best Friends Forever.” “Emotional firsts can be especially painful, more so for a child who is shy and has difficulty making new friends.”
Yet a quarter to a half of children’s friendships don’t survive a full school year, so these breakups will come more and more frequently, said Eileen Kennedy-Moore, psychologist and author of the audio/video series “Raising Emotionally and Socially Healthy Kids.”
Friendships can fail for various reasons, with the emotional pain ranging in severity, Kennedy-Moore said.
“The most painful breakups are when one child still wants to be friends, but the other wants to move on to a different friend or a different friend group,” she said. “By definition, kids lack perspective, so they’re less able than adults to put the breakup in context and believe that they will get past a painful breakup with a friend and make new friends.”
Most of the time, their friends also define who they are in the social pecking order, so even whom they sit with at the lunch table can be fraught, Kennedy-Moore said.
That’s why it’s important to be able to help your child through these friendship changes.
Sometimes it’s possible to mend the friendship if it’s simply a disagreement or a temporary change in cliques. These conflicts often resolve themselves with time.
But it’s important to encourage your child to have multiple friends or groups of friends to help them weather the ups and downs of friendships and to give them more options when a particular friendship falls apart.
And it’s also important to help children deal with the sting of a particular loss in friendship, said Julie Binderman, co-director of Integrative Therapy of Greater Washington.
Binderman suggested naming the feelings that the child may be feeling to help them cope. For example, if a preschooler moves, you could say: “‘Sandy moved away, and from your tears I would imagine that you are feeling sad,’ ” Binderman said. Then, you could suggest something that could help, such as making a card to send to his old friends.
After their move, Bottigliero took Lily on trips back to the old neighborhood, together using maps to plan their outings.
“She loves it,” Bottigliero said.
But for older children, it’s not always as simple. For them, parents can help by being there, if needed.
“They can listen and give their kids a chance to pour out their hearts and, perhaps, even cry,” Levine said. “They can remind them that not all friendships, even very good ones, last forever.”
And then it’s time to move on.
For this, parents can arrange new play dates for the younger set or provide opportunities for children to meet other friends with similar interests through sports and via new afterschool classes, Levine said.
These usually help launch new friendships — until they change again. Danielle Braff is a freelancer.