026: What If My Child Has Trouble Making Friends?

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I was heartbroken the first time our oldest came home and told me through tears that he didn’t want to go to school because he didn’t have any friends. Our second oldest seems to make friends wherever he goes, but for some, making friends can be challenging and frustrating.

In this episode we talk about some of the basic skills you can practice with your children and some things you can do to exemplify for them what it looks like to make friends and to be a good friend.

Highlights, Takeaways, & Quick Wins

• Find out what your child’s definition of friendship is and that will help point you to the need they’re trying to fill.
• The example we set for our children is powerful, because they’re naturally inclined to look to us for how to act in the world.
• Practice basic things like making eye contact, speaking up, speaking clearly, saying hi, and saying the person’s name.
• Being your child’s friend doesn’t undermine your authority—it strengthens it.
• Create social situations where you can see how your kids interact with others.
• The quality of our children’s relationships is more important than the quantity.
• Continue to believe and hope that there is friendship and connection for your child, even if it’s not in this particular season.
• We want to encourage our children to be compassionate people.

Show Notes

• 04:46 Ben: Where there are some challenges that are specific to introverts when it comes to navigating relationships, sometimes, it’s not a personality specific problem. Regardless of your personality, how outgoing or shy you are, because friendship is such a complex thing, our children may find themselves in a situation where they’re having trouble making friends. We’re definitely experiencing that right now. Our oldest is often a little bit distressed about his experience with the kids at school and whether or not he’s making friends. In contrast to that, our six year old and second oldest is extremely personable, and making friends comes as naturally as breathing for him.
• 05:56 Because this was such a personal thing for us, and we had also heard from some other folks struggling through a similar thing, we wanted to cover this topic today and talk about some of the things we’re doing. There is a book that talks specifically about helping our children make friends.
• 06:32 The basic idea of this book, The Unwritten Rules of Friendship, is that friendships are really complex. Sometimes, we naturally pick up on the right cues, we learn the skills necessary to initiate those relationships, and sometimes that doesn’t come as naturally. It seems more elusive. Where there’s still the desire and the need for connection, the tools and the skills aren’t quite there yet.
• 07:09 Rachel: The book was by Natalie Madorsky Elman. I picked it up because our oldest was having a little bit of trouble. He has a different definition of what friends are in elementary school anyway, because he is an introvert and likes to go deeper with people than most elementary kids are willing to go. That will change as they get older and they learn more about what friendship is. I picked it up because we also live in a world where kids don’t know as much about how to engage with each other beyond something like screens. I felt like it was a valuable resource for us to have. These are things we learned as kids because we were out playing in the neighborhoods and meeting kids, but we live in a different world. It’s valuable for us to teach our kids some of these skills.
• 08:19 Ben: We say that often, and I think for the most part it’s true, given the fact that there’s so much more technology now and kids can entertain themselves without ever leaving their room or taking their eyes off a screen. I’ve seen that with Jadon. He has a phone that has some games on it and, if we let him, he would just sit and play on that thing for hours.

Defining Friendship

• 09:16 Friendship is very complex. It’s something that seems like it happens really naturally, which makes sense, because we need that connection. We need friends, companions, and community, and at the same time, there are so many different layers to how friendship works. There are a lot of different definitions that people have for what they would consider friends. I want to dive into that a little bit. Rachel said something about how our oldest defines friendship, and one of the things you can do if your child is complaining to you about having difficulty making friends is not to assume that your definition of what a friend is is their definition of what a friend is.

If you can find out what your child’s definition of friendship is, that will help point you to the need they’re trying to fill.

• 10:21 For example, it makes sense for us that Jadon would desire deeper relationships and that he would consider those people friends. When we’ve asked him, sometimes, it’s something as simple as, “I asked them if they wanted to be in my Power Buddies club, and they said no.” That’s not necessarily our running definition of a friend. Sometimes, you have friends who are your friend for a lot of different reasons, but they don’t agree with you on a specific point or they don’t want to be in a club with you because they don’t share that interest. It’s a complex thing. If you probe a little bit and find out how your child is defining friendship and where the people they’re spending time with are coming short based on their definition, you can learn a little bit more about their needs.
• 11:35 For Jadon, when he said, “They didn’t want to be in my Power Buddies club,” we can take that and learn, “He really wants people to identify with his thing.” That’s good, and that can be a mark of friendship, but sometimes for people to take that step and feel that level of connection with you that they’ll be a part of something that you care a lot about, you’ve got to take the first step. One of the things we can encourage our children to do is to take the first step, to introduce themselves, play the other child’s game, and be interested in the thing that they’re doing.
• 12:25 That’s something that we’ve coached Jadon on. We say, “You want them to be interested in what you’re doing and you want them to play your game, but are you willing to play their game? Are you willing to do the same for them?” I could tell, when we asked him that, the wheels in his head were turning a little bit.
• 12:49 Rachel: I think the next day was when he came home and he told us that he played soccer with everybody, which is weird, because he’s not really a sports guy.
• 13:00 Ben: Today, he took a soccer ball with him to school, because they lost the other one.
• 13:07 Rachel: He wanted to help out his friends.
• 13:11 Ben: You want to be careful not to set a precedent of, “You have to always do what other people want, so don’t worry about what you want.” If you’re a person who’s willing to take that first step and show genuine interest in what other people are about, that interest usually comes back to you. It’s an investment that you make. People like to feel like they’re known and other people are interested in the things they’re interested in. It makes them feel more secure. Out of that security, they’re willing to take the risk of being interested in your thing. It’s the Rule of Reciprocity. If you’re the one who gives first, there’s a social rule that now, because you’ve given me something, I feel the desire to reciprocate that gift.

Focus on the Basics

• 14:25 Sometimes, we overlook this because it comes naturally to us. For example, sometimes when we walk the boys to school and someone will wave and say hi to our oldest. At worst, he’ll not acknowledge them at all. He’ll keep looking at his book or whatever he’s doing. He’s so much in his head. There are some people, because of who they are, their personality, and the way they engage with people, they’re always looking outside of themselves for those connection points. That’s our six year old. He’s very much, “What’s going on in the world?”
• 15:14 Rachel: Even he has had to be coached in responding when people say hello. I don’t think kids know how to do that without being coached in it, most of the time.
• 15:26 Ben: That is, unless they’ve been exposed to that a lot and they’ve taken it on as a behavior. The practice part might feel a little bit awkward, because it feels like basic human stuff, but unless it’s something they’re exposed to a lot, they may not have that skill and understand the importance of doing that.
• 15:50 Rachel: I always respond to people when I’m walking them to school. I always respond to everyone who comes by. Still, when teachers would say hello, I would have to nudge them to say, “You know, when someone says hello, the polite thing to do is to say hello back.” I don’t know if they even notice that kind of thing without you specifically calling it out. I don’t think all kids notice those things.

The example we set for our children is powerful, because they’re naturally inclined to look to us for how to act in the world.

• 16:45 Ben: But that doesn’t mean that they always catch everything that we do. Certainly, the circumstances around that play a role. For Jadon, who is introverted, when he’s in an environment with more people and more stimulus, it totally makes sense that he would tend to focus inward to keep some of that extra stuff at bay. He wouldn’t be as aware of what’s going on, even to what Rachel is doing. Don’t just be out in public demonstrating these things, but set aside purposeful time where you can have their attention and they’re not having to shut out all of this other stimulus. They can really focus on what you’re doing. Practice things like making eye contact, speaking up, speaking clearly, saying hi, and saying the person’s name. It seems a little bit funny, because these seem like such basic things, but it’s amazing how that helps their interactions.
• 18:23 Those really basic things are a doorway into deeper conversations. Helping our children get those basics down, making them second nature for them so they do them automatically, will help them out a great deal when it comes to establishing those contact points.
• 18:45 Rachel: There was one time where you guys stood in the kitchen after dinner and you practiced handshakes with all of them. I thought that was really cool. Ben was teaching them how to shake a hand, and we take those kinds of things for granted when we’re parents. We know how to do them—everyone knows how to do them, but kids come into the world knowing absolutely nothing.
• 19:11 Ben: I can attest to the fact that not everybody has learned how to handshake properly. I get weak handshakes all the time.

Help Your Child Embrace Who They Are

• 20:21 I was thinking about the “people are like onions” metaphor from the movie Shrek. Sometimes—and I don’t know that our boys struggle with this someone is—it’s not the lack of making contact that’s difficult, but it’s that when they make contact, they have a tendency to overwhelm the other person with information about who they are, what they’re interested in, and what they like. They’re over-zealous. It’s great for our children to embrace who they are and to be enthusiastic about the things they like, to be able to express passion, and some people might argue, “You should just be yourself in all situations,” but:

As we grow, we learn to curate ourselves.

• 21:37 Rachel: That doesn’t mean that you tell the person you just met your whole childhood story.
• 21:43 Ben: Right. As adults, you think about it. Here on the show, I speak differently. I present myself differently than when Rachel and I are having a conversation over tea. When I’m with guy friends playing poker, I’m a different version of myself than when we’re at church. None of those versions of me are inauthentic, but they’re not the whole thing. It would be overwhelming, in each of those situations, for me to present my whole self. We learn to do that in really subtle ways, but sometimes our kids don’t have that skill. They don’t recognize the importance of curating.
• 22:44 The reason I like the “people are like onions” metaphor is because when you first meet somebody, you’re testing the waters. You don’t know whether or not this person will be interesting. The amount of energy and effort it takes to understand somebody deeply is too much of an investment against the risk of not having a relationship with that person. If I spend all this energy and effort getting to know you and it turns out that our values are very different, then I’ve just wasted all of that time and energy. People don’t consciously think in those terms, but that’s how we’re designed to interact with each other.
• 23:33 Maybe a flower is another good metaphor. You haven’t really opened up yet—you’re just a really simple version of yourself. As you introduce yourself and you get deeper into the conversation, you can start to peel back those layers. Maybe you tell your kid, “When you sit down with somebody you’ve met for the first time, think to yourself, ‘I’m an onion and it’s okay for me not to show them all of my layers at once.'”
• 24:16 Rachel: I don’t know if it’s because I was a journalist for so long, but I like to hear other people’s stories more than I like to share my own. Part of it is that I don’t often go very deep with many people. I guess it’s because of how introverted I am. For me, it takes a while to build that friendship. Sometimes, I feel like I’m not the greatest example for our kids. Ben is probably a better example, because he’s the guy everybody loves, the life of the party, but he also keeps in touch with friends and nurtures those relationships. It’s not my tendency to do things like that.
• 25:16 Ben: The fact that Rachel takes a longer time to establish those relationships and connections is not a negative thing. Friendship is very complex, like I said—everyone approaches it differently. When we’re curating ourselves, we don’t do that to suppress who we are. When we’re making friendships, the style with which we approach establishing relationships has to be true to who we are. Some people make fast friends. Some people have lots and lots of friends, and their connections are relatively shallow. Some people only have a few friends, and those connections are very deep. Some people take years to warm up and feel like they have that deep connection they’re looking for. Some people feel that in minutes. There’s no right formula.
• 26:20 We need to encourage our children, when they’re establishing relationships, to trust themselves and trust the pace at which they establish that connection. They shouldn’t feel like they have to rush it, but if it feels like they’re making a connection with this person, they shouldn’t feel like they have to be wary and hold that back, either.
• 26:47 Rachel: For our kids, that looks like embracing the way that they make friends.

Demonstrating Friendship

• 26:55 Ben: I say it for us, too. We’re talking about our kids, but a lot of this is for us. How do we demonstrate this as parents? There was something really practical about sitting down with your kids and talking about the basics. A way you can demonstrate this for your child that’s not as instructive but more experiential is being a friend to your child.
• 27:31 Rachel: You’re going to get some flack for that. If you’re a friend, you don’t have authority.
• 27:40 Ben: You can’t be a parent and a friend at the same time? I don’t care what they say. We have a lot of kids, so we’re not doing this as much as we would like to, but we set aside time every day to spend with each of our children. We get 15 minutes a week of concentrated, one-on-one time that we spend with them, and we call this “snuggle time.” It’s not us sitting on a couch snuggling together, necessarily. We have purposed to allow our children to say, “This is what I want to do with this time.” Part of being a friend is taking the first step and being interested in what they’re interested in, so one of the ways we demonstrate that is that we have this time set aside where we get to express interest in what they’re interested in. We are all about what they want to do for those 15 minutes.

The relationship you have with your child is the cornerstone of your authority.

• 29:15 Being your child’s friend doesn’t undermine your authority, it strengthens it. When they feel connected to you, your voice, your thoughts, your ideas, and your opinions, your instructions hold a whole lot more weight. It’s amazing the difference those 15 minutes a week make. Certainly, we find other times to connect with them in other ways, but this 15 minutes a week is all about them. It’s about what they want to do, and it’s about us being fully present with them and giving them our attention and focus.
• 29:45 Rachel: That’s hard to get in a household like ours, so it’s important.
• 29:51 Ben: Yes, it’s very important. 15 minutes a week doesn’t seem like much, but it really does make a huge difference. Part of being a friend, of course, is all of those other things we can do as parents, where we stick up for them, listen to them, greet them with a smile by name. Those are some things we can do to demonstrate what it looks like to be a friend.

Supporting Friendships When We’re Not There

• 30:21 Another thing we can do is, in environments where we’re not able to be around, like the school environment, we can talk to the adults in that environment who are caring for our children. We can let them know about what our children are trying to do, the things they’re trying to grow in when it comes to making friends and make them aware of that. We can give them some practical things we’re doing when we’re at home with our kids, because most of the time, the people who are caring for our kids also want meaningful relationships for our children.
• 31:02 Rachel: I just was in talks with our oldest’s teacher because he had an altercation over soccer. He’s very much a rule keeper, and if somebody fudges on the rules, he gets pretty upset about that. It wasn’t anything bad, but a few words were said, and the teacher noticed that our son had been becoming friends with this boy. She sent me a note and said, “If he’s still interested in being this kid’s friend, I would love to help them smooth this out.” I thought that was just so great. We’re not able to be at school to help him, and we’re just hearing second hand information, which is just one-sided. We’re trying to help him work through that here, but it’s really cool to know that there’s a teacher in his corner who’s looking out for these friendships.
• 32:08 Getting those adults who also have authority in their lives on the same team is a really valuable thing, especially when it comes to things like friendship. A lot of times, when we’re giving them instruction about how to communicate with people, it’s coming from Mom and Dad. When they learn the same thing in their counselor’s office or their teacher says the same thing, it has a little bit more weight. Communicating those kinds of things has been really helpful for me. I’m able to let their teachers know, “This is what we’re working on, and I would love it if you could put a few words in their ear about what it means to make friends.”
• 33:03 Ben: That’s not often a place we look for support when it comes to guiding our children through these things, but it stands to reason that where they spend most of their day is where they need a lot of support. Outside of that, we don’t often find ourselves in social situations like our children do at school, where we can be present and walk them through those things. One thing we can do is to create those situations. Sometimes, it will look like going to a birthday party, going to a church or another community activity, or setting up a play date with other parents.

Create social situations where you can see how your kids interact with others while you’re present to give guidance when it’s needed.

• 34:07 That can be really helpful. The flip side of that is, sometimes we need to recognize when we need to back off as parents. If this is something you really care about for your child, you can have a tendency to be helicopter parents, stepping in every five minutes to say, “You said this. You could have said this instead.” Sometimes, it’s good for us to give that guidance, but other times it’s good for us to back off and just observe. Save some of our observations for later. Why don’t you like playdates, Rachel?
• 34:54 Rachel: For me, it’s just meeting new people. I have to meet new parents, and it always feels awkward. Our son has this one friend, and he pulled me aside when I picked him up from school and pulled me straight to this kid’s mom, and said, “I want to set up a play date with this kid.” We introduced ourselves, and it was the most awkward thing ever. I promptly forgot her name and haven’t been able to ask again, and he’s had several play dates at their house, this kid has been to our house, and I still don’t know her name. She’s saved in my phone as “Adam’s Mom.”

Embracing Weirdness

• 36:03 Ben: There are a lot of different pieces. There’s the time factor, the circumstances, whether or not the people your child is around actually do match in the right way to become friends. Some people go through primary school, junior high, and high school, and they never quite feel connected to any person. It’s not until they become adults that they find people they feel they can really connect with. I forgot to make this point—each of us is very unique. Some people would even say that we’re weird. Rachel, you said that you were weird when you were growing up.
• 36:58 Rachel: I’m still weird. I embrace my weirdness.
• 37:04 Ben: That’s really good. I was weird when I was growing up. I was what many would call “the unpopular kid” for a long time, and if I’m being honest with myself, I shed some of my weirdness when I moved in high school. I decided to live with my dad. It was an opportunity for me to start over. I recognized what that weirdness was costing me, so I shed some of that. Recently, I’ve been thinking back to that and lamenting that I did that. I’m still regaining some of that. That weirdness is precious. It’s hard, especially in junior high and high school, but even in elementary school.
• 38:08 Whatever age your child is, it’s hard to see beyond that season, to see how the weirdness, uniqueness, or whatever they think is keeping them from establishing connections is actually more valuable. That was certainly the case for me. I found that the more I embrace the uniqueness of who I am, the more I find people who do accept me for who I am and accept my weirdness.

There’s nothing like being known for all of our weirdness and being accepted.

• 38:50 That’s a gift, ultimately, that we want our children to find in their friendships. We want them to embrace who they are and to find acceptance because of who they are, not because they were able to conceal some part or suppress some of their weirdness. Let them be themselves and find friendship.
• 39:16 Rachel: I feel like I’ve become more self-aware of my weirdness as I get older. I didn’t think I was weird at all when I was a kid, but now I’m super aware of it. I was telling Ben the other day about this friend we had from a previous church who walked by, and I was the weirdest person ever.
• 39:42 Ben: She said something to Rachel, and it was a full minute later before Rachel yelled a response. I would say most people are weird, but they’re afraid that weirdness is going to keep them from making connections, so they hide it and, in many cases, discourage it. They build these groups around interests, and they try to keep their weirdness out of that. That’s not interesting at all. The most interesting and beautiful things come out of groups of people who are very diverse, who allow their weirdness to come into these common interests and make it blossom into something meaningful and valuable.

Hope for Future Seasons

• 40:58 It’s kind of miraculous that we’re able to relate to one another with all of our differences. There’s no formula to it, no right set of circumstances, no “this set of personality traits matches perfectly with this set of personality traits.” As much as we try to quantify it, there’s mystery to friendship. If your child is in a season where that doesn’t seem to be happening even if you’re doing all these things we’re talking about, the best thing you can do is to continue to believe and hope that there is friendship and connection for your child, even if it’s not in this particular season.
• 41:57 Rachel: I dealt with this when our oldest was having trouble making friends. One of the worst things we can do is to feel panicked. “Is he ever going to have friends? Is he always going to be alone? Is he going to turn into one of these kids who’s made fun of because he doesn’t have any friends?” That thought process is not helpful at all.
• 42:22 Ben: That will lead us, as parents, as it does with many other things concerning our children, to doing things out of our own interests and not in the best interest of our children.
• 42:36 Rachel: We act out of fear, and it’s never good to act out of fear.
• 42:45 Ben: That is the hope and the belief that even if not in this season, they will find friendship. That was certainly true for me. I went for a long time without feeling like I had friends, and then suddenly, I found myself in a situation where there were people who knew me for who I was and understood and embraced me. It wasn’t something that happened when I wanted or expected it to, but it did happen. If we can have that confidence, that hope, and that belief, that can be a great gift for our children.
• 43:30 Rachel: I should insert here the condition my college roommates used to say Ben had. They said he had “MADD,” Musical ADD. Any time there was a guitar in the apartment, he would sit in a corner and play without talking to anybody. He wouldn’t even respond.
• 44:02 Ben: It’s true. I still have that a little bit. As I’ve gotten better at playing the guitar, I’m able to focus outwardly more.

Does Your Child Have Enough Friends?

• 44:13 Megan Jones asked a lot of great questions, and I want to bring in a few of them here. One of them was, “As an extrovert, I want to make all sorts of friends. I’m pretty sure at least one of my kids is an introvert. How do I know if my child has enough friends?” It’s not the quantity of friends that makes the difference. The need that friends meet is that need for community and connection, to know that we’re loved and understood by people who are willing to support us. It goes a lot deeper than that.

The quality of our children’s relationships is more important than the quantity, however few or many.

• 45:12 For a person who’s introverted, and really for any person, a single deep and meaningful friendship with one other person could be enough to fill that need. For others, they may prefer to have a lot of different friends with a lot of different interests, because they like to have all of those diverse connection points. The quality of those is different because it’s spread out over a number of people, but that’s enough for them. Would you add anything to that answer, Rachel?
• 46:01 Rachel: I don’t think the number really matters, just like Ben said. Sometimes, we can make it more important than it really is, especially if we’re an extrovert with an introverted kid. As a kid, I was still introverted, but I thought it was more about quantity than quality. That’s sort of the message kids are sent when they get into places like middle school and high school. Who’s most popular? Who has the most friends? It boils down to how strong those friendships are. I ended high school with 70 friends, but I don’t keep in touch with hardly any of those people. They weren’t deep friendships.
• 46:49 Ben: That comes back to the definition of what a friend is, too. That changes for us over time.

Difficult Friendships

• 46:58 Here’s another one from Megan. She asks, “How do I help my child navigate the ‘I’m not your friend anymore’ from another child, especially since my boys say this to each other daily? How do I encourage my son that they probably don’t mean it, but not set up false expectations?” I don’t know how different it is, but I feel like we hear something to that effect almost daily coming from one of our kids to the other. Among siblings, because they’re around each other so much, they’re constantly in each other’s space, and they’re sharing a lot of the same things, those words can hold less weight than when they hear it from someone who’s not a part of their family.
• 47:48 When a sibling says, “I’m not your friend anymore,” it’s easier to dismiss that. They know they’re just saying that because they’re upset. That’s not to say that isn’t sometimes taken personally, either. The best thing we can do, whether they hear it from a sibling or a friend at school, before we can get into the nuts and bolts of what happened, what led up to that, and how to solve that, we need to help our children work through the emotions they’re experiencing from that interaction. Once we’ve helped them work through their emotions, we can help them learn a little more.
• 48:39 Their emotional response to that is why they’re coming to us in the first place. Because they’re in that emotional space, they’re not able to think objectively or logically about the situation and give you the kind of information you need to help them work through that. I’m going to bring in one more question from Charla, “Kind of the flip side. Any suggestions for when they make friends with kids we can tell are likely to cause trouble? There’s a girl all of my kids saw frequently for a while, and I could tell she was often an instigator and had a problem telling the truth. Because she was friendly, my kids didn’t know how to have their guard up. I didn’t want to poison them against her, but I also wanted to caution them.”
• 49:29 I love this question. This is something I would love to get into with a full episode. On the one hand, we want to protect our children from relationships with people who could be bad influences. That’s a very natural thing, but we also don’t want to guard them so much that when they encounter that in the real world, they’re not equipped to handle those situations and recognize that on their own. One of the best things you can do is to allow those interactions as long as you don’t see it creating issues for your children. Certainly, they’re going to walk away from those interactions with experiences.

When we talk with our children about their experiences, we get to learn about what their perspective is.

• 50:35 I’m often surprised when I take the time to ask, instead of assuming the effect that relationship is having on my child. I say, “Hey, you seem a little bit upset after hanging out with so-and-so. Tell me a little bit about what happened.” To hear something really astute from my child about what they’re experiencing, what they’re feeling, and where they think it’s coming from, is very encouraging to me. It almost makes me want to allow them to continue being in that situation, as long as they’re able to recognize that. Sometimes, they come up a little bit short or they miss something, and because we’re having that conversation with our child, we get to fill in the missing pieces for them.
• 51:34 There’s another aspect of that. Our children are going to encounter people from all kinds of circumstances, and often the unsavory behavior of another child has its roots in something that child is not causing necessarily. They’re perpetuating a hurt, void, or some issue at home, or maybe an issue with another kid who’s not even in the picture. One of our values as a family is to be compassionate, and we want to be careful not to force our compassion and be compassionate to others through our kids, but we do want to encourage our children to be compassionate people. Part of that is being around people who don’t behave properly, who sometimes do things that seem toxic, and seeking to understand what’s really going on instead of judging that person based on their behavior.
• 52:43 Rachel: I get pretty fiery about this, because I’m one of those who believes that everyone is doing the best they can with what they have. The kids who are bullies, who don’t make good choices, they do those things for reasons that are so incredibly nuanced that we can’t possibly understand them by just looking at the situation. There are so many different layers to all of that. When our kid comes home and says, “This kid was mean to me on the playground,” my first thought is, “Maybe something happened at home.” Sometimes, people do mean things because they don’t know how to act any better, they haven’t had a better example, or something’s going on that causes them to want to lash out. Those are the reasons people do things like that.
• 53:41 Ben: There have been times that our own children have thrown fits over stuff and been unreasonably upset about something that seemed kind of small. When we’ve allowed those expressions to run their course, sometimes we find out that the truth behind what’s really going on is that something happened at school that made them feel upset.
• 54:07 Rachel: I always know when something happens. I can tell immediately from behavior.

You can’t always judge what’s going on with a child based on the behavior you see on the surface—there’s almost always something deeper going on.

• 54:23 Ben: As a parent, you do have to use discretion as to how much of that your child can handle based on their own emotional health and their own experience and intuition. Don’t make a knee-jerk reaction and remove then completely from that situation before you have a conversation with them and try to understand how much they see.
• 54:52 Rachel: It’s helpful to empower them with the truth, that sometimes enough is enough. We can’t continuously make allowances for people at the expense of ourselves. There is a line with being compassionate, trying to figure out what’s going on, and helping people learn how to behave better and make better choices. There’s also a line that we have to teach our children to have as well, where they’re respecting themselves enough to say, “This person isn’t a good friend to me.”
• 55:43 I would, again, strongly recommend the book The Unwritten Rules of Friendship. It’s full of games you can teach your kids for how to handle things in different situations and that kind of thing. It takes you through ten different types of children—the kid who wants to be the rule follower, for instance, which is something we’ve used with our oldest.
• 56:10 Ben: That’s one of my favorite things about that book. It goes through the shy kid, the kid who’s really outgoing and a little overpowering, and so on. It covers a lot of different personality types, and undoubtedly, you’ll find your child in one of those examples. It’s a great resource.