Speaker 1Friendships are one of the most emotionally charged areas of parenting. Watching your child struggle socially is almost physically painful and it is one of the hardest things to know how to help with because the instinct is to step in and fix it is so strong and yet stepping in and fixing it is often exactly the wrong thing to do. Today I want to help you understand what your child's friendships are actually telling you, when to worry and when to wait and how to support them without taking over. I'm Dr. Mary Han and this is how not to screw up your kids. Friendships are huge. They're such a big part of I think parenting challenges and they're not just social, they're developmental. The quality, patterns and the nature of your child's friendships are really a window into where they are emotionally. Their capacity for empathy, their communication skills, their ability to manage conflict and their sense of their own identity and worth are all wrapped up in friendships. And most parents typically focus on whether their child has friends full stop. The more useful question is what do the friendships they have look like? One intense best friend can be a completely healthy choice or a sign of worry about belonging depending on the child. A large social group can look like social success or it can be a place where your child suppresses everything about themselves to stay included. Friendship norms also change enormously by age and what looks worrying through adult eyes is often completely on track developmentally. A three-year-old who, however, plays alongside other children rather than with them is not socially delayed. A seven-year-old with one best friend and no interest in wider friendships is entirely normal. A 13-year-old whose friendships feel intense, volatile and all-consuming is also developmentally where they should be, even though it feels like a crisis every week. Understanding what is age appropriate takes so much of the worry out of this. And once the worry drops, our ability to support our children in the way they actually need increases enormously. So let's start by that distinction between the fine lens and the wide lens. So the fine lens, remember, is looking at a problem in a specific situation and then looking for a solution. So whether that is my child has no friends, my child is always left out, my child has fallen out with their best friend and is my child has been excluded on purpose and I don't know what to do. So remember, these are all, these are problems, help me with a fix. If we take a wide lens view instead, friendships are a mirror of the skills your child is still building in emotional regulation, in empathy, in perspective taking, in conflict resolution, communication, and that secure sense of self-awareness. Friendship difficulties signal a skills gap, not a character flaw, and definitely not a fixed social destiny. And that's why I want to encourage us to go wider. Yes, there are problems that you come with that starts it, but actually if we shift away from the specific problem in that specific moment to the wider lens, what we then do is we equip them with the skills, not only to deal with the future problems in all future situation. You know, the child who keeps getting dropped may be struggling to read social cues, not because they don't care, but because that particular skill in them is still developing. The child who never leaves their best friend's side might not have the confidence to manage multiple relationships. The child who is always the peacemaker in their group may be suppressing their own needs in order to stay included, which tells you something important about how safe they feel to take up space within that group. In every case, understanding the wide lens tells you what we actually need to be working on. And it is rarely what it looks like on the surface with the immediate problem. So what are the skills that we're going to be building? And what are the skills that I'm then going to be addressing in my top tips, which are pretty comprehensive today. I've left no stone, no stone unturned. So the skills that we're building, so empathy and perspective taking, yeah, the ability to understand how another person might experience a situation, which will be different from them. And that is foundational to all healthy friendships. So maybe for your child, it is empathy and perspective taking. Maybe it isn't that, maybe it's conflict and repair skills, that ability to navigate a falling out and come back from it. And this is the skill most children are never explicitly and particularly if we end up refereeing the sibling arguments at home, because they don't get to practice that conflict and repair skills is one of the most reliable predictors of the quality of adult relationships. Maybe it's not conflict and repair skills. Maybe it's not empathy and perspective taking. Maybe the skill that you need to be building for your child is a secure sense of self. Friendship is one of the primary arenas in which children test who they are and their identity. And children with a secure sense of self are the ones who are going to be able to communicate with each other. So a secure sense of self can disagree with friends, they can lose a friendship, or be temporarily excluded without it catastrophically altering how they feel about who they are, or trying to reinvent themselves. Children without it can't. Or it could be that the skill that you need to be focused on and building and bridging the gap is one of communication, specifically the language. It's not all communication, but it's specifically the language of connection and repair, how to express what they need, how to listen when they're hurt, and how to say sorry in ways which mean something. So that's what we're going to be looking at. But before we go into those skills, it's really important that we talk specifically, before I enter those tips, about a note on neurodiverse children. So before we get into the tips, I want to spend some time specifically on neurodiverse children. So neurodiverse children, so those with ADHD and autism, or both, which is more common than previously recognized. Friendship is an area where the gap between what a neurodiverse child experiences and what a parent sees can be enormous. And it is an area where parents often feel the most helpless, because the usual advice simply does not apply in the same way. So why are neurodiverse children so helpless when the brain is wired differently? So for children with ADHD, let's start with children with ADHD first. Social interaction requires several things to happen at the same time. Reading facial expressions, tracking where a conversation is going, managing the impulse to interrupt, knowing when to speak and when to wait, and responding at the right time. These all depend heavily on what we call executive function, the stuff that happens in the prefrontal cortex. And it's the very thing that ADHD affects. So the result is not a child who does not want to connect. It's a child who's working extremely hard to do something which other children do without effort, and who often get it wrong in ways that they cannot understand or cannot control. And research consistently shows that between 50% and 60% of children experience significant peer relationship difficulties. They've experienced more peer rejection, fewer friendships, and lower friendship quality than neurotypical peers. These are not small numbers, and they do not reflect the child's social motivation, which is often entirely intact. They reflect the cost of navigating social situations which are neurologically demanding. Now for autistic children, the challenges are different, and they're not necessarily real. Difficulties with reading facial expressions, tone and body language, and with their own nonverbal communication. It means that the unwritten rules of social interaction, which neurotypical children absorb unconsciously, have to be consciously learned. Social situations can feel confusing, exhausting, and often deeply isolating precisely because the desire to connect is there, but the pathway to it is hard. Now, one thing that we must talk about is this notion of masking, because that's the hidden cost for children who appear to be managing. And it's one of the most important things that I want parents of neurodiverse children, particularly parents of girls, to understand. Masking or camouflaging is when a neurodiverse child consciously or unconsciously suppresses their natural behavior and imitates neurotypical social scripts and performs, basically, what it means to fit in. They watch carefully, they copy what they see, they say the right things and hold it all together while they're at school, and then they come home and fall apart. So research published this year, 2026, in the journal Support for Learning, describes this as rounded, bruising sort of pain. It's the exhaustion of performing neurotypically all day in every classroom, in every corridor, with every teacher and every peer and contemporary. And girls in particular are significantly more likely to mask than girls, which means they're significantly more likely to be missed, whether that's by teachers, by schools, sometimes even by us as parents, because they look like they are coping, when in fact they're not. If your child, particularly your daughter, appears to manage socially at school, but arrives home dysregulated, exhausted, or emotionally volatile every day, this may be what you are seeing. The social performance is real, and the cost of it is also real. So what actually helps? And here's some evidence-based guidance for parents. First, reframe what friendship success looks like for your neurodiverse child. The goal is, not a large social group or popularity. It's one or two genuine connections in which your child can be themselves. Research is clear that neurodiverse children often find friendship most natural with other neurodiverse peers. Peers who communicate more directly, share intense interests, and do not require the same level of social performance and social complexity. Now, finding these peers matters enormously. It might be a coding club, a drama group, a fandom community, a sport with clear rules and structure. The setting itself is less important than the fit. So that's number one. The second thing is unstructured social time is often the hardest. So when it comes to playdates, do them with a clear activity. Baking, a game with rules, building something, painting pottery. Neurodiverse children, a framework which removes the pressure of having to generate social interaction from nothing. Structure is not a crutch. It is an access ramp. And thirdly, parent coaching at home makes significant difference to outcomes. So research on the peers program, a widely used evidence-based social skills intervention for neurodiverse children, consistently shows that the children whose parents actively practice the skills at home and reflect on the real social situations together and reinforce new approaches in natural settings make substantially better gains than those who only receive clinic-based support. You don't need to run a program at home. You just need to stay curious, ask questions about your child's social world, debrief gently without lectures after they've had a social situation. And help them develop the language for what they've experienced, what felt okay, what felt confusing, and what they might try differently. Fourth, do not try, I say this with love, do not try to make your child neurotypical. The goal of social support for neurodiverse children is not to teach them to perform neurotypically more convincingly, is to help them understand their own social profile. Navigate situations, which feel hard, and find environments and people where they can genuinely be themselves. That's where the quality friendships come. A child who knows they need to warm up slowly, or who finds large groups draining, or who communicates better one-to-one, is not socially deficient, they're self-aware. And that self-awareness, held by a parent with warmth, is a profound protective factor. And finally, if you suspect your child is masking, make home the place where they can unmask completely. No performance required, no social expectations at the door, the decompression time after school is not wasted time, it is the recovery which makes tomorrow possible. Now, hopefully that is super helpful for those of you who are supporting your neurodiverse child if they're having particular social challenges, and that hopefully places that into some context. It doesn't mean that the five tips I'm going to share are not going to be helpful, but just be mindful of placing them within the context, what's going on for your child within their brain itself. So, these are five tips and I'm also going to give them, within each of these, I'm going to give you a bit of a hierarchy. Remember, we're looking at developing skills, whether it's communication, whether it's conflict, whether it's empathy, whether it's perspective. So, if I talk about it in the hierarchy, with each of these top tips, think about where is my child development mentally right now in that skill, and then work with the stage that they are at. This is not age appropriate, it is stage appropriate. So, number one, read the friendship, not just the presence or absence of it. This goes back to this idea of, it's not about does my child have friends, but much more what the quality is. So, stop asking, does my child have friends, and start asking internally in terms of the narrative that you have, what do the friendships they have look like? A child with two or three genuine reciprocal friendships in which they can be themselves is actually thriving socially, regardless of whether they are popular or not. A child surrounded by people, but always playing a role, always performing, always managing others at the expense of themselves, now that warrants attention. Now, for you, as a parent, I want you just to notice the energy after social time. Do they come restored or depleted? Excited or worried? Do they talk about their friends with warmth and ease or with tension? Energy after socialising is one of the most reliable ways that you're going to be able to tell whether a friendship is genuinely nourishing, particularly for a neurodiverse child, for whom the gap between social performance and genuine connection can be significant. So, these are the stages. I've deliberately, I'm not going to talk about age, but stage. So, at the earliest level, when we're talking about friendships, is it's parallel play. They play alongside rather than truly together. And if you're thinking, oh, this is only for a toddler, this can happen when children get older, is that actually they're not really playing with, your seven-year-old isn't playing with them, they're playing in parallel or they're stood on the periphery. Now, that is normal and healthy as a younger child, but if you've got a still happening, then we want to be looking at the skills there. Narrate what you see in positive terms if this is a young child, or even when your children are playing at home, you really enjoy being near your friends. Shared imaginative play develops from around four to five. So, that's the first level. The next level is best friend intensity can be really normal in primary school children. The move to this sort of reciprocal friendship with that exclusivity and the occasional drama is exactly where this age should be. Ask open questions after social time. What did you all play? Was there anyone who felt left out? Because what we're doing there is we're building a habit of reflection without communicating alarm. We're then starting to look at the next tier of friendships is we want to listen for whether they have at least one relationship in which they do not have to manage how they present themselves. One relationship is what matters most. Who do you feel you're most around is one of the most useful questions you can ask a teenager. So, that's number one is making sure that we read the friendship, not the presence or absence of it. Number two, know what is age appropriate. Do not pathologize normal behavior. So, pathologize is let's not get into disorders or labeling things which are typical developmental and stage- appropriate. Most of the friendship situations which cause parents the most distress are often entirely developmentally normal. Knowing this does not make them less painful for your child or for you to hear, but it fundamentally changes how we respond. And responding calmly to what is normal is going to be much more supportive than responding with alarm. So, with younger children, with parallel play, possessiveness over toys, limited sharing, brief interactions with no real reciprocity are all completely normal. So, these are really young two to four-year-olds. Empathy is just beginning to develop. Within that next age range of five to seven, this is when we might begin to see the first real reciprocal friendships. High intensity, high sensitivity to exclusion, frequent falling out, and making up within the same afternoon, often within the same few minutes. You're not my friend anymore is not a crisis at this age. It is practice. bond with warmth and a short memory. Age eight to 11, groups begin to form and hierarchies begin to develop. So we often see this in primary school. It becomes a whole other level when they go to secondary and senior school. Girls often experience intense social complexity. So in groups, exclusion, relational aggression, boys often have this conflict, but it's direct and then it's resolved. It's very different to girls. The child who is occasionally left out is learning to manage a feeling that is part of life. The child who is systematically and repeatedly excluded, now that is different and definitely worth addressing. And then as we move up to the sort of the secondary and senior school, as friendships become very much about identity. If you remember about your days back at school, you'd have these little cliques in which cliques you belong to a little bit about your identity. Fallings out feel, certainly when we're in that senior school period, they feel catastrophic because at this age, they genuinely threaten their sense of self. Social media amplifies everything. And what looks like drama to you is real and significant to them. And your job is not to minimize it, but to help them develop the perspective to survive it. So that's number two. Two, know what is age appropriate and don't pathologize normal behavior. Number three, support without taking over. And I know this one is so hard. The instinct when our child is struggling socially is to fix it. We've been there. We've seen it. We've done it. We bought the t-shirt. We know. But most of the time, the cost of fixing it for them is that they don't develop the skills that we've talked about, which help them navigate not only the situation in that particular period of their time, but also for future friendships over time themselves. So the parent principle is before we act, we want to ask. So ask before you act, would you like me to help you with this or do you want to handle it yourself? And that gives your child agency and signals that you trust them. If they ask for help, help in the least intrusive way possible. But there are some when to step in versus when to hold back. So step back when friendships are going through normal developmental friction. Your child is upset, but safe. The situation is one that they can navigate with your coaching. Step in when there is a persistent pattern of exclusion or cruelty. There's a power imbalance, bullying rather than peer conflict, or your child's wellbeing is genuinely at risk. But ask yourself that question. Is this a persistent pattern of exclusion or cruelty? Or is this just the same young person being unkind to your child periodically, but also being unkind to everybody else? And it's not persistent every day. Then that's a different, let's equip our child to be able to manage that situation. So that's when to step in versus when to hold back. And that's when to step in versus when to hold back. But coaching from the sideline is the one that I would advocate if we do not need to be stepping in. And I'd advocate that for all ages. We just use slightly different language. So what do you think she meant when she did that? For example, as a question, what do you want to do next? What do you think you could say? You're not solving it. You're building the thinking muscle that lets them solve the next one themselves. Number four, teach repair explicitly. Because the ability to come back from a falling out is one of the most important skills a child can develop. And almost no one teaches it. We tell children to say sorry. Yeah, think about it. We get our children to say sorry to their siblings all of the time or to us. But we don't teach them what a genuine apology involves. And there are three parts of a real apology. And this they name what they did. Not, I'm sorry you felt upset. What they actually did. Number two, name the impact. I can see that hurt you. Number three, what they will do differently. All three parts in that order. What they did, naming the impact, and what they will do differently. Now, with younger children, we want to keep it simple and immediate. Help them find the words and stay close while they say them. Repair is also a physical act at this stage. Being near and warm as well as what they say verbally when they're really young. As they get older, we want to model the three-part apology at home. When maybe we as a parent get something wrong. Children who see repair modeled know what it looks like and sounds like when they need it. With teenagers, we want to encourage repair in person rather than by text. Because they want to do text because that kind of manages that emotional dysregulation. And we want to make sure that they feel the same way. We want to make sure that they feel the same way. We want to tone, eye contact, and physical presence are what make repair land. It's not the same when they message it. And when they make a genuine repair, name it. That took courage. That is how you keep good friends, for example. And then finally, number five, make home the place where friendships are talked about. One question at dinner, at bedtime, in the car. Not, did anything bad happen today? But an open and curious one. And then finally, number five, make home the place where who did you sit with today? What did everyone get up to at break? Is there anything happening with your friends right now? Then listen without immediately problem solving. The dinner table, for me, I find is the most powerful social coaching grounds that we have. Because that is often when guards are down, it's a relaxed opportunity to just catch up. And the investment is in the year is, I think, when we invest in that mealtime conversations. And I know it's not possible to do it every single evening. But I think it's important to invest in that mealtime conversations but even if nothing else, we're doing it at weekends. But those low stakes conversations help before those big moments arrive, if it becomes a regular thing. And with young children, maybe with really young children, we talk about our own friendships. You know, I had lunch with my friend today. Normalize friendship as something that adults value and have and think about. It isn't just a school thing. Build vocabulary and normalize that full range of friendships. It's not just a school thing. It's a school thing. It's a school thing. And it's a school thing. Who else is there? Who have you not talked to yet? Who are you intrigued by? Who would you like to get to know more? Who do you think is really interesting or funny? So it just gets them to, you know, planting those seeds for that next day at school. And with teenagers, we don't want to make friendships a topic itself, like, you know, a tick list topic. We want to make it part of a conversation. The teenager who is used to talking about friendships at home is far more likely to come to you when something goes seriously wrong. So we want to just develop that notion that we have conversations about friendships, not an interrogation. They are just conversations. And I also think, as I've said multiple times before, children are much more likely to see, to do what they see than what we say. So if they see us nurturing our friendships or carving out time for them, if they see us behave in a way that isn't us when we are with friends, then they're going to pull us up on that. They're going to notice that too. And they're going to notice that too. And so speaking to that directly, I think is also helpful. But I think it's that changing the way that ultimately changing the way that we look at friendships rather than has my child got friendships to what do those friendships look like? And hopefully that will give you a really foundational level to work on. And for those of you also with neurodiverse children, how you can help and support them. Now on Monday, I'm going into sleep. How much your child actually needs at each age? What has your child done? What has happened when they're not getting it? And five things which genuinely help even when everything else has failed. If bedtime is a battle in your house, and let's face it, it can be a major battle for a lot of us. Sleep is a really big, big issue with children. Monday's episode for you. So I will see you then. That's everything for today. Be as kind to yourself as you're trying to be to your children. You don't have to get it right every time. And genuinely, the fact that you're here says a lot. For more episodes and all the resources to support you, head to drmaryhan.com. Take good care of yourself, and I'll see you on Monday.
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