Friendships require compromise, adaptability, and tolerating disappointment.

Flexible people are often more likely to attract and maintain friendships.

Flexibility helps people recover when things do not go as planned.

Summer is here and there are some topics we revisit over and over again because they are basically ever-present, both for parents and their children. One such issue is friendship. It actually is an issue most of us deal with in our adult lives too—other people’s sensitivities and our own.

While summer is often a respite from many of the challenges that arise during the school year, it also creates opportunities for growth. Children typically have more unstructured interactions with siblings, friends, cousins, teammates, and peers. Those interactions create opportunities for parents to help children strengthen social skills in a more natural and organic way. For many of us, that is how learning happens most effectively—in the moment, rather than from a book or a lengthy lecture.

Previously, we looked at perspective taking and how friendship problems often arise when children make assumptions about another person’s thoughts, feelings, intentions, or motivations. Perspective taking encourages children to ask questions such as, “What might be going on for the other person?” or “What other explanation might there be for what happened?” It is fundamentally a skill of understanding. It helps children become more empathic, more considerate, and less likely to jump to conclusions. It can also reduce hurt feelings by reminding children that they do not always have enough information to know why something happened.

Flexibility addresses a different set of friendship challenges. Many social difficulties arise not because children misunderstand another person, but because things do not go the way they hoped. A friend wants to play something different. Plans change. They are not chosen first. They lose a game. They feel disappointed. In many of these situations, the issue is not understanding what happened. The issue is adapting to it.

Perspective taking........

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