Making & Keeping Friends
How friendship actually forms across childhood and adolescence, why some children struggle to make or hold onto friends, and how to help without engineering a social life your child never asked for.
Inside this course
Most parenting advice about friendship treats it as a skill deficit to be corrected — as if a child without a best friend simply needs better manners or more confidence. The truth is more specific and considerably more hopeful. Friendship is not a personality trait some children have and others lack; it is a set of ordinary mechanics — proximity, repetition, shared activity, and small reciprocal risks taken and met — that either line up for a child or do not, for reasons that usually have far more to do with temperament, timing and opportunity than with any deficiency in the child.
You'll finish with
- Distinguish being liked from having a friend, and understand why the two require different things
- Understand the actual mechanics by which a friendship forms: proximity, repetition, shared activity and reciprocal small risk
- Recognise that struggling to make or keep friends is usually about temperament, timing or mismatch, not deficiency
Course modules
4 modules, revealed inside the course
The full module structure, lessons and printable resources open once you purchase this course. Enrol or sign in to view the course outline.
Start this course
Enrol to access the complete course — every written lesson, the case scenarios and all the printable resources. A one-time purchase, yours to keep.
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