Social Skills For Making Friends In Adolescence

As children move from their early years into adolescence, they grow and change in many ways. Their personalities continue to develop, and they may grow apart from elementary school friendships and seek to make new friends. Read on to learn about the social changes your own child might experience, the skills you can foster to help them create and maintain close friendships, and how online therapy can support mental health, effective communication, and healthy ways of resolving conflict.

What social skills help adolescents make and keep friends

As much as you might want to jump in and solve problems for your child when they’re struggling, occasionally slipping up and making mistakes is part of life—and a potentially valuable learning experience. Here are some positive social skills you can encourage that might help your child form and keep healthy, mutually fulfilling close friendships with other teens. 

• A positive outlook and kind attitude: It might seem like something that should go without saying, but being kind can help your child seem friendly and approachable. Model positive, considerate behavior when your child is young. Teach them to treat everyone they talk to with a standard level of kindness and a polite attitude so that making and keeping friends can be easier. 
• Learning how to be a friend: Teach your children what it takes to be a healthy and positive friend. While friendship can mean something different for everyone, it generally involves treating friends like someone whose thoughts, feelings, and overall well-being are important to you. Friends care about each other, compromise to maintain balance, and work through conflicts together with communication. 
• Ask questions and actively listen with an open mind: Friends can offer your adolescent the opportunity to expand their horizons and learn about what life is like for other people. You can encourage your teenager to practice active listening when talking to their friends. If they worry about awkward silences, advise them to ask questions that require more than a yes or no answer to keep the conversation going. 
• Developing healthy, practical coping and conflict-resolution skills: Adolescents who struggle with managing stress, conflict, or other challenges and circumstances can still be genuine, loyal friends, even if they have to work harder to connect with others. If you begin developing age-appropriate coping skills to manage stressors and healthy ways to work through conflicts while your child is young, they may be commonplace habits by the time they become teenagers. 
• Emotional intelligence, awareness, and literacy: Part of the adolescent experience is learning to identify one’s emotions. Once a teen can recognize how they feel, they can work to understand how those emotions affect their mood and behavior. By learning to express their thoughts and feelings effectively, your teenager can gain basic proficiency in emotional skills that can serve them throughout the rest of their lives and in all of their relationships. 
• Connect with kids who have similar interests: Transitional phases can make your child feel isolated and misunderstood. If they aren’t making friends easily, encourage them to get involved in youth groups or clubs where they are more likely to find friends with common interests. Participating in the same sports, hobbies, or activities can be one of the easiest ways to bring and keep two people together. 
• Understand, watch for, and use appropriate body language and tone: Remind your teenager that sometimes, it doesn’t matter what they say if the way they say it stops the other person from listening. Smiling and using friendly, open body language can contribute to a positive response, making it more likely that potential new friends will approach them. Studies also show that smiling releases neurochemicals associated with happiness. 

Teaching your teenager about healthy boundaries

One of the most essential emotional development tasks of adolescence is learning to set, maintain, and respect emotional boundaries. While you may have begun these lessons when your child was young—i.e., teaching them not to hit others or encouraging bodily autonomy— your teenager will likely experience many other practical examples of boundaries over the next several years as they learn and grow. You may suggest that your child sets some of the following healthy friendship boundaries during their adolescent years:

• Learn to respect a friend's wishes if they say they want to spend some time alone. Don't pester them to spend time together if they need space. 
• Confide in a parent or another adult they trust if they are worried about their friend's safety.
• Friends shouldn’t put you in a situation where they know you’ll be uncomfortable, especially if you aren’t aware of the circumstances ahead of time. 
• Understand that sometimes your friends will say no. Let them, and ensure they return the favor for you. 
• Be willing to compromise. If only one person in a friendship makes all the decisions or acts like the other’s ideas and feelings don’t matter, it may not be a healthy friendship. 
• Every friendship isn’t meant to last forever. If someone isn’t willing to grow with you, it’s okay to grow apart. 
• If someone tells you a secret in confidence, keep it a secret. Even if you and the other person are no longer friends, keep the secret anyways. 

Understanding adolescent rites of passage and friendship’s role in them

Young people experience numerous rites of passage as they age, imparting valuable knowledge to them as they transition from children into socially responsible adults. Your child's close friends will be present for many of these adolescent milestones. If they've formed and developed healthy friendships, those friends can support your child emotionally through the turbulent teenage years. Some rites of passage your children may face as they age include:

• Baptism or confirmation, actively making a choice about their personal beliefs
• Beginning menstruation
• Bar/bat mitzvah
• Earning a learner’s permit and license to drive
• Celebrating their 16th birthday
• First dates, kisses, sexual encounters, etc. 
• Celebrating their 18th birthday
• Graduating from high school
• Moving out on their own
• Going to college
• Getting their first job
• Celebrating the end of adolescence on their 21st birthday

Close friendships can bring many benefits to a person’s life. Friends can build self-esteem and confidence, support emotional stability, increase resilience to physical and mental stressors, and improve interpersonal skills while reducing stress levels and adverse emotions like anxiety or hostility. 

What makes someone a healthy friend?

While the meaning of friendship can be different for everyone, some common characteristics were identified as the markers of a positive friend through decades of psychological research. These include:

• Integrity: Healthy, positive friends can be trusted to be there when needed, offering concern, support, and understanding. Friends with integrity demonstrate qualities like honesty, dependability, and loyalty on a regular basis. 
• Caring: People you consider good friends should care about you, showing that they empathize with your troubles, celebrate your triumphs, listen without judgment, and offer support when you're struggling. 
• Congeniality: A major part of friendship is to enjoy spending time with your friends and having fun with them. Close friends typically allow you to relax, have fun, and laugh so you don't take life too seriously. While laughter isn't a requirement for friendship, it is a frequent beneficial side effect. 

Tips for helping your teen with their friendships

Adolescence can be a trying time but as their parent, caregiver, or another important adult in their life, you can be there to support them. Consider giving the following tips and tricks a try:

• Be a safe place to talk about their life without judgment. While they may say some things that upset or concern you, it may be more efficient to pick your battles and only react to the critical issues so you can maintain open communication. 
• If you can’t muster a genuine interest in the activities that your teenager loves, try to show at least a willingness to listen to them talk about it. 
• When your teenager talks to you about their problems, ask them if they want someone to listen or help them come up with solutions. 
• Prioritize spending time with your teenager. Even making a habit of taking them grocery shopping so you can talk or scheduling five minutes each day to check in can show your adolescent that you care about them and want to be part of their life—and your actions can verify this claim.  

Could you benefit from speaking with a professional?

Parenting can be a challenging and often confusing experience— but you don’t have to navigate it alone. If you’re worried about your child’s development and need encouragement or advice as you support them, consider connecting with a licensed mental health professional online through the BetterHelp platform. Although parenting can be time-consuming, online therapy may offer a more accessible way to get care. With the option to chat through phone calls, videoconferencing, or in-app messaging, you can get support in a way that meets your preferences and needs all from the comfort and convenience of your own home. 

If you think your child could benefit from speaking with a professional, online therapy for children ages 13 to 19 is available at TeenCounseling. Therapy can help your child learn healthy, effective ways to communicate, practical ways of resolving conflict, and how to balance their individuality with the overwhelming desire to fit in with other teens. 

The efficacy of online therapy for parents

How useful can online therapy be in helping parents and caregivers through their children’s turbulent teenage years? One study conducted by researchers at Lehigh University found that it can be very effective, with behavioral parent training resulting in high levels of engagement, acceptability, and parent treatment knowledge and fidelity. These outcomes were similar to the face-to-face intervention that used the same methods of training and treatment.