When Your Child Feels Left Out
Being left out is a painful reality. Teaching our children how to navigate friendships is an important part of Elementary School.
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This question came up in my DM and comes up enough that I wanted to share some thoughts here.
Question: Do you have any suggestions on how to help little ones cope with not wanting to be played with and feeling left out? This is all new territory for our 6 year old daughter. We are doing our best with listening and sympathizing, but I want to make sure we are saying the best things to help her along as well. Thank you and appreciate you so much!
Being left out is a painful reality. Teaching our children how to navigate friendships is an important part of Elementary School.
First things first: Adults often assume that any child who leaves their child out of a game, or rejects them on the playground, is being “mean.” It’s also easy for us to apply all of our very adult and very complicated feelings about friendships to our children, even when this most certainly isn’t about our feelings. Rather than simply giving a solution to our child such as "play with someone else,” or to yell back at that “mean” kid on the playground, learning how to manage the day-to-day drama of early friendships is much more complicated.
When tricky friendship drama comes up, here are some tips to think about:
Start by checking in with your own feelings. Take a breath, hand on heart, and regulate yourself before responding. This will stop you from bagging on the other child or imposing your own feelings of rejection on your child’s experience.
Validate your child’s feelings. Make space to hold their hurt while being a safe place for them to express themselves. This may look like “Ugh, it sounds like you felt hurt when you were left out. You thought Stephanie was your friend and when she didn’t invite you, it makes sense that your feelings were hurt.” Then pause so your child can let it land. Avoid telling them what they SHOULD be feeling. It may make us feel better to say “Well Stephanie is a loser anyway and you are so much cooler.” Bite your tongue.
Don’t overreact. In order to keep your child confiding in you as they grow, you need to practice being a good listener. If you fly off the handle (i.e. “I’m calling his mother RIGHT NOW), or you make shocked or dismayed faces, your child is less likely to talk to you in the future. They need to know you can handle it when they tell you something and they need to know that you won’t hold it against their friends. Reflect back on what you heard. “It sounds like you felt sad when he wouldn’t let you play with him. That makes sense. I understand.”
Ask permission to participate. Try saying, “Do you want a suggestion or do you want to just vent?” before you leap in with a recommendation.
Tread lightly. Before you offer a suggestion, ask them if they have any ideas about how they want to handle this. Once they are open to your suggestions, offer a suggestion that empowers them - like a strategy for telling someone that their feelings have been hurt; a mantra to help them remember that it was only one bad day; or a plan for something else they can do at recess.
Avoid getting too involved. When you rescue your child, you signal to them that you don’t believe they are capable of helping themselves. AND now they have lost the opportunity to build those skills for the future.
Don’t make this about the other child. Calling another child “mean” or “bad” won’t help your child build empathy, and ignores the fact that your child may still want to play with them. It also doesn’t consider other perspectives and the reality that we can like someone AND not be able to include them. So many interpretations get rejected when we go right to assuming the other child is mean. Instead, help your child be curious about what is going on with that child, and why they would be acting this way. Help your child to understand that this type of behavior is more about the other child than them.
Talk about how friendships feel. Telling your child that friendships should feel good is an important way to help them set expectations around their relationships. You can also help kids understand that friendships don’t all feel the same. Some friends are fun to play with on the playground, but not the friends you share your feelings with. Some friends are good at making you laugh, some are good for long talks, some are good for shared interests. Not all those things lend themselves to being included and may be context dependent. And if your child is being treated in an unkind way, ask them to pay attention to how they feel when someone treats them that way compared to how they feel when someone who is a good friend treats them. Give them permission to notice that some people do not make them feel the way they want to feel, and that they do not need to be friends with people who constantly hurt their feelings.
Have patience. Friendship skills are learned through the daily ups and downs. It's hard to sit on the sidelines and watch your child struggle to figure things out. Be patient with yourself, your child and the general clumsy behavior of kids navigating social lives.
Ask for help. If you’re really concerned about any issues your child is reporting at school or with friends, especially after you’ve tried to work with your child directly, enlist the support of teachers, administrators or other parents.
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Warmly,
