If your child struggles to make friends, that hurts. It hurts you, who wants the world to appreciate what a great person your child is. And it hurts your child, who may give up trying to fit in and retreat into his shell. What causes a child to be rejected by other kids?

Children who are rejected send out different signals than other kids do. Rejected kids tend to be more aggressive or more shy than other kids, or less able to pick up play cues from others. Sometimes it’s hard to identify just what it is that sets rejected kids apart.

But rejection matters. It can become a way of life and a defining theme in a child’s school experience. Preschoolers who are rejected become elementary school students who are rejected and then become high school students who never fit in. Rejection has been linked with poor school performance, depression, and violent acting-out.

If you are the parent of a rejected child, what other kids do is usually beyond your control. Trying to stage manage your child’s social life can backfire. No one picks a friend because her mother wants it. Your child has to build her friendship skills so she can be an attractive friend all on her own. How can you help her fit in?

First, help your child celebrate herself. The child who is happy, confident and curious is the kid others want to be with. Develop your child’s interests for their own sake (not with an eye to increasing her popularity) and friends will find him interesting too.

Second, cultivate your child’s social skills. Help him know how to invite others to play, how to accommodate others’ ideas, and when to assert himself. Find a play group or team or club and use it as your child’s practice place. If you have trouble seeing what your child does that gets him rejected, ask his teacher for her ideas.

The friendless child may need help in these areas:

• How to strike up a conversation and keep the conversation going with other kids.
• How to listen to someone else. If your child talks on and on and never listens, that’s a problem.
• How to pick up on what other kids are interested in. Your child may be fascinated by fire trucks, but if other kids his age are interested in dinosaurs or NASCAR, then help him develop those interests too.
• How to engage in physical play appropriately. Help your shy child feel confident playing kickball or Twister. But notice if your child is physically intimidating instead and help her learn how to dial down her interactions.
• How to speak loudly enough to be heard… and, at the same time, how to speak without shouting or ordering other kids around.
• How to pick up on jokes and verbal silliness. Kids with poor social skills make not “get” the jokes. Help your child by practicing this sort of interaction.

Observe your child and see where he might need the most assistance. Then work on these skills with your child every day and make sure he has opportunities to practice. You can even role-play different situations. The shy child might find it easier to practice being a friend with younger kids, who aren’t so intimidating.

And finally, make sure your own ideas of popularity are reasonable. Remember that your child is worthy and valuable no matter how many friends she has.

© 2012, Patricia Nan Anderson.  All rights reserved.

Children as young as two-and-a-half engage in what’s known as “relational aggression.” They say things like, “You’re not my friend anymore,” and “If you do that, I won’t play with you.” Basically, as soon as kids are able to talk they are using words as weapons.

For a long time, relational aggression was thought to be something older children engage in. It was thought that children  – especially girls – form cliques and separate themselves into two groups, the “in” crowd and the outsiders, only in late elementary school and middle school. But this is not right at all. Research demonstrates that even in preschool, children use threats to withhold friendship as a way to influence other kids. By the time children become preteens they’re already very skilled at being mean.

The old saying, “Sticks and stones my break my bones but words will never hurt me,” is another aspect of this issue that is just plain wrong. As Oregon elementary school counselor Laura Barbour notes, “Kids forget about scuffles on the playground but they don’t forget about unkind words or being left out.”

Physical wounds heal. Emotional wounds do not.

We adults are more likely to see physical fights and we’re more worried about children going home with scrapes and bruises than we are about verbal nastiness and emotional hurts.  Unless we overhear what children say to each other, we may not know. Even if we do find out that children are rejecting other kids and getting others to reject them also, we tend to do very little. We tend to be annoyed and impatient but not really worried.

Maybe we should be worried. Studies by Jamie Ostrov, a leading researcher in this area, have demonstrated that relational aggression increases as children get older, so that verbal bullies become more unpleasant when their aggressive actions aren’t restrained. The effects of relational aggression on victims persists too. A child who is rejected by classmates in preschool and kindergarten tends to continue to be an outsider all through school. About 50% of children in grades 5 through high school say they’ve frequently been victimized by relational aggression. This is in contrast to the percentage of these students who say they’ve been physically bullied daily or weekly – only about 7%.

What should parents and teachers do? Here are some ideas to help curb the occurrence of relational aggression.

1. Pay attention to it and make your disapproval clear. Do not ignore mean comments you hear children making to each other, or mean assessments they make when talking with you about their friends. Do not tolerate mean talk.
2. Be inclusive and avoid supporting the class pecking order. If you are a parent, invite every child in your child’s class to her birthday party. If you cannot invite them all, invite only one or two. If you are a teacher, mix things up when selecting work groups and playground teams. Never let children do the choosing if you know they are likely to always pick the same children first.
3. Notice media messages. Research has shown that educational media intended to teach character development frequently backfires. Children pay more attention to the problem – to the depiction of bullying and verbal aggression – than to the solution that comes at the end. And, in fact, the time devoted to depicting problem behavior in children’s media is much longer than the time allotted to the happy ending. Find programs and media that simply demonstrate positive ways of getting along, instead of media that set up a before-after contrast.
4. If your child repeatedly is a victim of relational aggression, don’t ignore it. Your child needs more support and more help to overcome this than you might think. Bring this to the attention of your child’s teacher (or, if you’re the teacher, to the child’s parent) and make certain a plan is made to teach better ways of getting along. Most of all, don’t blame the victim by suggesting that her social status is her fault and that it is she who must change.
5. Be a good role model. Avoid talking about the relative worthy or popularity of different children, especially, but even of your own friends.

Relational aggression may become apparent at much earlier ages than we once thought. But this doesn’t mean it’s “natural.” Children have to be taught to be mean. Make certain instead they are taught to be nice.

© 2014, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Ask for Dr. Anderson’s new book, Parenting: A Field Guide, at your favorite bookstore.

Is your child fitting in to her school class? Does she have friends to play with at recess? Does she have friends who want to eat lunch with her? Most children do but some children don’t.

Friends are not just nice-to-have. They are essential to children’s success in school and in later life. Research has shown that children who are rejected or ignored in preschool continue to be rejected or ignored in first grade, third grade, and middle school. The pattern of no-friends doesn’t go away on its own. In addition, those children who have no friends at school are less happy at school, do less well in school, and develop patterns of aggression or withdrawal that become lifelong.

Every parent wants their child to have friends to play with. What can you do if your child has trouble making friends? Here are some ideas.

1. Make sure your child has friendship opportunities. To have friends, kids have to be around kids who are good candidates for friendship. So get your preschooler enrolled in a child-centered child care center or preschool and make certain that your school-age child has chances to play with kids outside of school. Remember that “play” is not the same as organized sports or lessons. Play is interacting with another child without any adult plan for what will happen. So set up play dates. Take time to get your child out into kid society.
2. Show your child how to play. Small children may not know how to sit down next to someone in the sandbox and engage that child in mutual play. Even older kids may feel too shy or uncertain and need to know how to strike up a conversation with another child on the playground or in the neighborhood. So show her how. Get into the sandbox yourself and help your child play with another kid. Introduce yourself and your child to a kid on the playground and help the two of them get involved in a shared activity.
3. Help your child be a responsive playmate. Some kids are better at this than others: they can pick up play cues and adapt to another child’s thinking almost effortlessly. Other children, especially those with ADHD or autism, may have difficulty understanding another child’s point-of-view. Studies show that children who are out of control, self-absorbed or overly-aggressive are rejected as playmates. If your child has trouble in social situations, he needs more opportunities to play, not fewer, and more guidance in how to do it. You may need to teach your child how to be a friend. Make this a priority.
4. Help your child say goodbye. When play is over, demonstrate how to end the play but saying, “Thanks for playing with us. We hope to play with you again sometime.” Easy to do and polite and it cements for your child the idea that, yes, she did play with somebody and it was fun. The shy and uncertain child may have felt uncomfortable during at least some of the play, so reminding her that this was fun leaves the good final impression.
5. Avoid over-managing friendship. Kids don’t become friends because adults say they should. They become friends because they have fun together. So trying to insist that another child be friends with your child or leaning too hard on a particular child to be your kid’s go-to companion is not likely to help your child in the long run. No one, your child included, should feel forced into friendship or forced to have play dates with someone she doesn’t like.

Finally, if you live in a remote area or there are no conducive children living nearby, you may be comforted by the fact that solitary children are not necessarily lonely. Many isolated kids use their imaginations to create a rich inner life or find affinity with pets. Some children with no friends are quite comfortable playing by themselves. The key thing is to notice if your child is really content or if he has simply resigned himself to a friendless fate. If your child is not unhappy, then don’t you be unhappy either.

Friends are good but popularity is not so important. It isn’t the number of friends that matters but the connection to even one person the same age or with the same interests. What’s important is your child’s happiness. Help your child be happy with her friends.

© 2014, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Look for free downloads on Dr. Anderson’s website at www.patricianananderson.com.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not going to suggest you start nasty rumors about your kid so his friends won’t like him so much. Being popular and having a lot of friends is a good thing.

But if your child isn’t one of the in crowd you might just thank your lucky stars. Being popular comes with risks.

In a recent study, researchers found that teens who were the most popular at age 13 were mired in problems 10 years later. The scientists followed 180 children from public schools in the Southeastern United States for a decade until age 22 or 23, along the way interviewing them, their parents, and their friends.  After 10 years, kids who were part of the popular gang in early adolescence had a 45 percent higher incidence of drug and alcohol abuse than less-popular teens, leading to missed work and DUI arrests among the popular kids. They were also more likely to have been arrested for a crime.

Lead researcher Joseph Allen reports that although in middle school and high school the most popular kids seemed to be on a social fast-track, doing more dating, going more places, and having more fun than other teens, at age 22 these same people’s friends described them as less mature than other 20-year-olds.

What does this mean for your child?

If she’s not part of the most popular group, don’t make it your mission to put her there. Popularity is a two-edged sword and doesn’t necessarily lead to a life of social success. Make raising your child to be an interesting, friendly, engaged person the goal and downplay popularity and status.

If your child is one of the popular ones, keep an eye on things. Remember that research studies necessarily deal in generalities and it’s doubtful that all the popular kids in this study became social outcasts after high school. Your popular child’s path may be different from the general findings of research. But certainly kids who maintain their popularity into their 20s have more going for them than just being cool. They are interesting, friendly, and engaged people.

People like them, not because they’re popular, but because they’re nice.

© 2014, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Ask for Dr. Anderson’s new book, Parenting: A Field Guide, at your favorite bookstore.

A mother told me recently that her second-grade daughter had been passed over when invitations were issued for several friends’ birthday parties.  She wondered what was going on and what she should do.

This is naturally concerning. One wonders if other kids or their parents are trying to send some sort of message. One wonders if other kids are engaging in passive-aggressive bullying.  One wonders if one’s child doesn’t really fit in with her peers. A parent quite rightly wonders who is at fault for this situation, other parents, other children, or her own child.

Any of these scenarios is possible, of course. It could be that other parents or other children are treating your family badly. It could be that your child rubs other people the wrong way. But it’s also possible that nothing at all is happening or at least nothing much.

The guest list for a party of seven-year-old children is understandably short. There is a limit to the number of second-graders a parent wants to have responsibility for, especially second-graders under the influence of sugary party foods and birthday excitement. The old rule-of-thumb to invite as many children as the birthday girl is old clearly works only in the preschool years. Once a child’s age exceeds five, the number of guests should depend only on her parents’ estimate of their ability to keep things under control.

So it may be that a child who is passed over for a birthday invitation just may not have made the short list. This might not be what her parents’ wanted or expected but it’s not an indication of something awful. It’s important to not make more of this than it truly is.

In addition, it’s important to notice whose feelings are hurt the most, your child’s or your own. Usually it’s parents who feel this slight most keenly. Parents of course want their children to be happy. But if not being invited doesn’t seem to bother the child, then there’s no need to fret to the point the child is bothered. Keep your indignation to yourself.

If your child is not invited to friend’s parties, take a careful look at things while remaining fair. There may be a problem if…

1. Invitations were issued in class, when uninvited children could see they were not included. Most schools have rules against this sort of thing. If this is happening at your child’s school, complain to the teacher and the principal.
2. Friends use party invitations as a way of controlling others, saying things like “If you don’t do as I say, I won’t invite you to my birthday,” or otherwise use the party as a way to establish an in-group. This is bullying and should not be tolerated. Again, if this is going on at school or on the school bus, tell the teachers and principal.
3. Your child is continually left out, not just of invitations, but in many aspects of kid social interactions. If no one will sit with your child at lunch, or play with your child at recess, or work with her on a project, there’s something amiss. Take a long, hard look at your child’s social skills and help her to find a compatible peer group. 

It’s possible that when your child is left off an invitation list, there’s something serious going on. It’s possible that nothing serious is going on at all. It’s often difficult to tell.

But it’s very hard to sort things out if we’re blinded by our own hurt feelings and anger.  As you figure out what’s going on be careful to stay objective.  That’s the best way to help your child.

© 2014, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Ask for Dr. Anderson’s new book, Parenting: A Field Guide, at your favorite bookstore.