How to Help Children Make Friends on the Playground

As an adult, you want the kids in your life to have meaningful friendships. Playgrounds provide a space for friendships to form, but children still need the social skills to develop healthy relationships.

Though we can’t constantly control our kids’ interactions, we can prompt them and guide them with helpful tips for making friends on the playground.

As a Parent: Talk to Your Child About How to Make Friends

As a parent, you walk a fine line between hovering over your child and ignoring them on the playground. To help your child make friends, be ready to listen carefully to their concerns. Discuss how it may be difficult for other children to come up and introduce themselves. If you have a kid who feels ignored when initiating interaction, you can play with your child on the playground until others come up to play.

Should the other child still not want to approach your child, explain carefully to your little one that it wasn’t a personal snub. Some kids want to be alone. If your kid is very young, you may use toys to illustrate the idea that the other kid wasn’t ready to play with your child.

If your child has difficulty making friends on the playground, schedule regular play dates with other parents you know and their kids. You can meet at the park so the kids will interact frequently with the same group, encouraging them to play together and develop friendships.

If your child feels scared interacting on the playground, visit the playground earlier than other kids typically get there to give your child a chance to scope out the situation. This also allows them time to warm up to interact with other kids.

Whenever you talk to your child about making friends, be careful not to compare the kid to their siblings, cousins, neighbors or yourself. Temperament and personality differ significantly between kids, which makes comparisons unfair. Every child has a different need for their number of friends and how quickly they make them. They simply need your support and patience.

If your child continues to struggle, you may consider talking to their teacher about the issue. Since the educator interacts with your child several hours daily, they may have additional insight. Ask the teacher how you can help your child make friends on the playground while seeing if things can change in the classroom to make friendships easier for them. You’re not alone in helping your child make friends.

As a Teacher: Talking to Students About Making Friends

As a teacher, you can encourage kids to adopt more positive social skills to help them make friends during recess or other social events. Having critical social and emotional skills can help children step out into social situations to make friends while avoiding negative relationships that could result in bullying or being a victim. These skills include the following:

Self-awareness: Knowing about your feelings.
Self-management: Recognizing when to regulate emotional responses and impulses.
Social awareness: Identifying others’ perspectives and how to behave in specific groups.
Relationship skills: Learning cooperation and when to seek help in inappropriate social situations.
Responsible decision-making: Considering ethics, safety, and respect for others when making choices.

Among these skills, promoting relationship skills is vital to helping a child make friends on the playground.

Inside the classroom, you can enforce rules against bullying and promote positive interactions among kids. It is essential to reach out to students who appear left out of groups and teach inclusion among the students in the class. When they get on their own on the playground, the skills they learned from you will help them build their own friendships.

Another idea to use inside the classroom is grouping kids to work on projects. When it comes to teaching kids to make friends in class, cooperative work on a project can help. While you don’t want kids to create cliques by staying in the same teams all year, rotating group members can prevent this. Changing groups also helps kids learn to work with everyone in the classroom and extend that to the playground.

A unique idea you could introduce on the playground is a Buddy Bench. These benches allow students who don’t have a playmate to alert others of their willingness to join a group. Anyone who saw someone sitting on these friendship benches could go over and invite the child to play with them. This bench offers a way of teaching kids how to make friends with others they usually don’t play with.

Relationships are fundamental to our well-being from infancy. Babies learn from one-on-one interactions with their parents and form a bond with them immediately after birth. Throughout life, we rely on relationships for support, sharing experiences and growth.

Social interactions during playtime are vital for childhood development. Kids can more easily navigate a difficult school day or other challenges by enjoying social interactions during breaks. Social interactions during playtime help kids in the following areas:

Improving social skills like sharing, teamwork and empathy.
Learning communication skills.
Boosting problem-solving through conflict resolution.
Developing self-esteem.
Learning new skills from friendships or teaching new skills to friends.

5 Tips for Helping Kids Make Friends on the Playground

Friendships are formed through common bonds, but at the core of making and nurturing friendships, there are skills anyone can learn. Through these five tips, you can help kids make friendships while teaching them valuable skills:

1. Grow Communication Skills

Since kids’ language skills and emotional maturity are not fully developed yet, communication can be challenging. Kids may resort to unhealthy ways of expressing themselves, such as throwing tantrums to show their unhappiness.

Teaching them a few of these essential communication skills can help them express themselves in healthy ways that build friendships:

Model communication on the playground: Try to avoid shouting at kids unnecessarily. If you need to reprimand them, walk up to them and engage them by moving down to eye level when you speak to them. Offering praise and encouragement shows children how to be supportive, too.
Teach children non-verbal cues: Teaching kids how to recognize body language can make it easier for them to navigate friendships. For example, you can point out that a child is crossing their arms because they are unhappy and then encourage asking the child if they are OK.
Prompt children to share how they feel: Help kids realize that their opinions and feelings are valuable so that they feel comfortable sharing them. You can do this by asking kids how they are and being patient while they express themselves.

2. Encourage Sharing

Friendships are two-way streets. Kids need to learn to be empathetic as part of sharing. You can demonstrate this by recognizing and validating a child’s emotions and then showing them that other children feel the same. For example, you can say you know the swing set makes them happy and it makes the other children happy, so they can all take turns to enjoy it.

Encouraging group activities on the playground is an organic but effective way to get kids to share, collaborate and form friend circles.

3. Celebrate Differences

A great way to foster friendships is to encourage children to be inclusive by respectfully acknowledging and authentically celebrating that they are all different. You can recognize differences in various meaningful ways:

Don’t ignore differences: Kids are naturally observant and should not be punished for noticing that other children look or act differently from themselves. Rather, acknowledge the child’s observation and then explain what they see.
Round out the observation: If a child notices a difference, round out the observation in a positive way. An example would be saying something like, “Yes, your friend uses a wheelchair. It helps them get around so they can do the same things you do. That’s pretty cool, isn’t it?”
Point out the beauty and strength in diversity: Children easily recognize differences on their own. What adults can do is point out the beauty and strengths of those differences. This can encourage unity and friendships regardless of various backgrounds or abilities.

4. Be a Role Model

Kids model a lot of their behavior based on what they see from parents and educators. When parents and educators communicate well with each other, celebrate each other and include others, kids can easily follow suit.

5. Allow Friendships to Form Organically

Prompt interactions by encouraging children with similar likes, dislikes, strengths and personalities to play together. It is also healthy to watch how children can naturally gravitate to each other and explore their interactions with other kids. Feel free to provide guidance when needed, but you can also step back and let kids form their own relationships simply by talking to each other and playing together.

Provide a Playground Environment Where Kids Can Make Friends

As important as it is to teach kids skills to make friends, providing them with the right environment to thrive is key. Children who have exciting experiences together can build friendships during their shared playtimes. The right playground equipment can create this environment for cooperative play. Encouraging group play through interactive playgrounds is one step you can take as a community member toward helping to foster friendships among kids.

At Miracle® Recreation, we provide playgrounds that bring fun and joy back into the outdoors. Kids will want to be on the playground building friendships. Browse our selection of high-quality equipment or contact us for additional support and information.