How to Help Your Child Make Friends When Other Kids Leave Them Out

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A parent recently wrote in with this question: "How can I help my kindergartner navigate cliques at church? We've never sent him to nursery during the service, but that means the other kids tend to leave him out of their games after church and even events during the week because they don't know him as well."

Well, this is a really important question. I think this is a situation that can really easily happen in churches that pull kids out for programming during corporate worship, yet some families choose to worship corporately as a family and keep their kids in for the corporate worship gathering.

Even if you're not in this situation, I also think this topic of helping our kids navigate friendships pertains to most parents. Parents want their kids to have healthy friendships, and we know that because we live in a fallen world, cliques happen. Sometimes kids are excluded. They're not treated well. So how do we help our kids develop healthy friendships when it's a little bit more challenging?

Children Seven and Younger: An Easier Stage

The person who wrote this question in is talking about a kindergartner. So for anyone who has a child in kindergarten, or a little bit older or a little bit younger (basically any child age seven or below), this is an easier stage in life to help develop friendships, simply because at this stage, children tend to be friends with everyone and be much less exclusive.

So even if there are cliques, they're probably just cliques of familiarity, not cliques of "these are the cool kids" or "these are the sports kids" or "these are the music kids" or "these are the kids who do X, Y, or Z." It just tends to be familiarity. And so as a parent of a child who is seven or younger, you can actually play an active role in helping your child develop friendships.

Practice Hospitality

I think there are a few ways to do this. Probably the best way is to start practicing hospitality in your home. Open up your home and invite others over. If you've never read Rosaria Butterfield's The Gospel Comes with a House Key, I highly recommend that you check that out.

If you start having families over to your home, you're developing a relationship with the parents, and it's an easy opportunity for your children to develop relationships with other children. You can even help your children develop relationships across the body of Christ. You can have families over, but you can also have couples without kids, couples who are empty nesters, or singles over. This will help your child learn how to develop relationships with a wide range of people and to actually be actively involved in the body of Christ.

Now, if you're uncomfortable at this stage having people over to your home, I would really encourage you to think and pray through that. But you can invite another family to a park. I think it's in The Gospel Comes with a House Key that Rosaria explains how sometimes it's intimidating for people to come inside of a new house. So you can even set up a picnic table in your front yard or backyard and invite people over for a barbecue that's outside, or invite them for a barbecue at the park.

At this age, when you're practicing hospitality, your kids are just naturally going to develop relationships with the people you are practicing hospitality with.

Set Up Play Dates

At this younger age, you can also set up play dates, whether it's a play date at the park or at the pool or inviting a child to come over to your house. Just set aside some intentional time for your child to get to know other children. At the same time, you can spend that intentional time getting to know the child's parents. But giving kids the space to play without you being there highly monitoring them can really provide a great opportunity for them to develop relationships.

Now, I'm not saying you just go drop your kids off at the park. I'm not encouraging any negligence. Let me make that very clear: I am not encouraging negligence. What I am encouraging is what has really been revealed in research recently, specifically highlighted in the book The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt: children need more unstructured, less highly monitored playtime to really grow and develop in healthy ways.

So again, if your child is seven or younger, great ways to start developing healthy relationships at church, in the neighborhood, and in other social settings are to start practicing hospitality within your home and to be intentional about setting up time for play dates.

Children Eight and Up: When Cliques Start to Form

For those of you who have children who are eight and up, helping your kids develop healthy friendships becomes more challenging, simply because around the age of eight, children become more socially aware and they become more exclusive.

This is something I noticed in my teaching experience. My first year of teaching, I taught fourth grade at a Christian school, and I loved teaching fourth grade. I love that nine- and ten-year-old age, and I would have loved to continue teaching fourth grade, but I only taught it for one year. One of the things I couldn't stand about teaching fourth grade is that the students came in with cliques that were already rock solid. I was not trying to break into those cliques, but I was trying to break up those cliques so that there were larger groups of friendships and certain students in my class weren't excluded. No matter what I did, it was just almost impossible.

My second year of teaching, I was moved down to third grade. One of the things I loved about third grade is that the kids come in as fresh eight-year-olds, and they're still friends with everybody. They pretty much get along. However, that year I watched how, as my students transitioned from eight to being almost nine or to being nine, they started to develop those cliques. They started to notice that some kids were a little bit socially awkward. They started to notice that some kids weren't as cool as others, or weren't as good at sports as others, or weren't as well liked as others. And I watched those cliques develop right before my eyes.

So in my second year, teaching third grade, I thought, "Okay, what can I do?" That's what I'm going to share here: what we can do in these older years to help break up these cliques. Again, not to break up the friendships, but to really help get our kids thinking more broadly and more inclusively in their friendships.

Give Kids a Shared Task

As we're thinking about kids ages eight and up, I again think that hospitality can be helpful here too, because you're inviting a family into your home. When you invite a family into your home, what I think can be very helpful in breaking through some of the awkwardness between your child and a child from that family is to actually assign them a task to do together.

Whether it's setting the table or getting a certain portion of food ready, or any kind of task they can do together, that's helpful in forging relationships, because common experiences help us forge stronger bonds. Just think about the people in your life who you've gone through certain experiences with or done certain things with, and how that drew you closer together in friendship.

The Monthly Mingler: Pairing Kids Who Aren't Naturally Friends

This is actually exactly what I would do in my third grade classroom. As I started to see those cliques form, I started what was called a monthly mingler. There were two odd times we had (I think it was maybe 10 minutes on a Monday and 15 minutes on a Thursday) that were just in between our specials and something else. I would assign pairs of students to be monthly minglers. Everyone in the class was a monthly mingler.

For those 10 or 15 minutes, I would partner two students who were not naturally friends, and then I would give them something to do. It was usually something fun. Maybe I'd give them a few sheets of paper and say, "Okay, together you have to create a paper airplane. In five minutes, we're going to go outside and see which paper airplane flies the farthest." Or I might give them one sheet of paper and say, "Okay, you're going to have five minutes to construct the tallest tower that you can with only this sheet of paper."

Giving them something to do together, and those common experiences, didn't always forge best friends out of kids who were not naturally drawn to one another, but it did give them some common experience.

In fact, the first year I did this, one of the moms emailed me and said, "I just have to tell you how much I love your monthly mingler program." She told me that normally her son would just wait in the car with her at car line. Her son was a very nice young man, but he was more quiet and shy, a little bit anxious. We might even describe him as a little bit nerdy. There was another boy in the class who was very aggressive and loud and athletic and popular, and the two of them were not friends at all. However, I partnered them together as monthly minglers.

This mom said, "I just want to let you know that my son saw this young man on the playground the other day while we were waiting in car line and said, 'Oh, I'm going to go play with him. See you later, Mom.'" She said, "My jaw dropped. I had no idea why in the world this was happening." So after school, she asked him why, and he said, "Oh, this boy's my monthly mingler." Because they had been given these activities to do together, it helped forge a friendship.

So when you open up your home to practice hospitality, if you can give your child and the child of the family coming over some kind of common activity to do, hopefully that will naturally lead them into playing a game together or doing some other kind of activity together. You want those common experiences.

Model and Discuss Healthy Friendships

Another thing we can do for children who are eight and up: I think it's really important that we as adults model what healthy friendships look like and then openly discuss with our kids what healthy friendships look like.

I remember my mom, in middle school, talking with me about examples from her own childhood: people who were really good friends, people who were not so good friends, and their qualities. I remember my mom telling me one time, "Elizabeth, if somebody talks to you about somebody else behind that person's back, they're not being a good friend. And you can pretty much be guaranteed that that person is talking about you behind your back when you're not there."

So we want to talk with our kids about what healthy friendships look like and also model this for our kids. If you've never read a book on friendship from a biblical perspective, a great book to read is Friend-ish by Kelly Needham. She goes through biblically what friendship is and why it's been given to us as a gift, and then highlights specific ways in which friendships turn idolatrous and sin enters into them. So again, if you've never read Friend-ish by Kelly Needham, I think that's a great place to start.

Teach the Goal of Friendship

Another conversation to have with our kids is that the goal of friendship is to love God through loving this other person. So we can explain this to our kids: the whole point of friendship is to love God through loving this other person.

Then you can help think through with your child creative ways to serve their friends and their friends' families. Maybe together you can make a meal for a friend's family. You can write an encouraging note or a thank-you note. Maybe you can even go over and help a friend's family with yard work. If you're at the store and you see something small that reminds you of someone you're an acquaintance or a friend with, you can buy something meaningful for them.

Gifts are very low down on my love languages, so I don't naturally think of buying gifts for other people. But I remember one friend of mine who is very good at the love language of gifts. She would come back from the store and say, "Hey, I bought you this macaroni and cheese. I thought of you." At first I was kind of like, "Wow, this is weird. Why are you thinking of me at the store and buying macaroni and cheese?" But after she did things like that for a while, I realized, "Oh, she's just letting me know that she's not with me, but she's thinking of me. She's recognizing this is something I would enjoy."

So think about ways you can help your child love other friends well.

A Word for Moms: Disentangle Your Insecurities From Your Child's

In this next part, I'm going to speak specifically to moms. I know most of our podcast listeners are moms, and I think this part in particular will relate to moms, just with the way we're naturally wired, both as women and on this side of Genesis 3, on this side of the fall.

I think it's really important for us as women, as we're thinking through helping our kids through friendships, that we make sure we're disentangling our own insecurities from those of our children. Sometimes we can see things our kids can't. Our kids might not even notice that someone is leaving them out. So we need to make sure: Okay, is this my insecurity? Or is this a genuine struggle for my child?

When you're around other moms at church, do you feel left out by those other moms? Are you worried that both you and your child are not really accepted at the church or the homeschool co-op or the swim lessons, wherever you are with your child? I think it's really important to disentangle our own insecurities as adults from what our child is experiencing. And then think through, "Okay, if a lot of this is my own insecurity, just in feeling left out or uninvited or like I don't measure up, what can I do?"

I really think the antidote here is focusing intentionally and praying through, "How can I love this other person?"

When Social Settings Are Hard

You listening to this podcast probably would not guess this (or maybe you would, I don't know), but I am very much an introvert. Right here in this podcast, I am presenting myself to you as I am. I'm not trying to pretend to be something I'm not. But here in this podcast, I'm presenting myself to you in my strength: I am a teacher, I am a speaker. So you're seeing me in my strength.

In social settings where I am not giving a talk or a lesson or a presentation, I greatly struggle. I have this deep desire to love God through loving others, and I want to make others feel loved, but I'm an introvert, and social situations exhaust me. They drain me. I am always thinking through, "Oh, what question can I ask this person? Oh, should I have just said this? What is this person thinking of me? Oh, I wish I was more like this person or that person." This is a constant battle for me when I am in social settings, and I think it will probably to some degree always be a battle for me until Jesus returns or he calls me home and I've been fully made new, fully redeemed.

But what I've learned to do is pray on my way to a social setting, whether it's going to corporate worship at church, going to a class at church, going to small group, going to a friend's house, or going to a barbecue. I pray on my way there, "God, help me to love you through loving others. And when I start to focus on myself and what people are thinking of me or how I wish I were different, please help me to focus on the other person instead."

Now, this is not my natural bent. It takes a lot of energy and effort, and I am very far from perfect in this. But I'm sharing all this to say that I can really relate to insecurities in social situations. Even though I'm not a mom, I know that a lot of times moms carry these insecurities into social situations.

So we encourage you to seek to disentangle your insecurities from what your child is struggling with. And then also seek to grow in asking the Lord to help you take your eyes off yourself in these social situations. Even if you feel left out or excluded, how can you take your eyes off yourself and that feeling of exclusion and instead focus on how you can love God through loving others in this situation?

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My prayer for you as we leave our time together is the same as always: that no matter the situation in which you and the children God has placed in your care find yourselves, you would trust that God is working all things together for your good by using all things to conform you more into the image of his Son.