As with so many of my blog posts, I was inspired to write about coping with your child’s social struggles after a particularly emotional session with a parent whose child was entering the middle school years. She tearfully described how gut-wrenching it felt watching her tween daughter struggle to be accepted for who she is by the girls in her grade. While there are some neurodiversity issues with this girl that can help explain her social immaturity and poor social skills, the more important issue at that moment was helping her mom be strong for her daughter during the social storms of middle school. This mom understands that her daughter behaves impulsively, can become overly eager and excited when around her same-aged peers, and often misses the subtle cues that develop between middle schoolers when they hang out with each other. What this mom didn’t need was more of my psychoeducation about why this is happening and how to provide social coaching to her tween. Instead, what she really needed was validation that she, too, had her own feelings of insecurity, anxiety, and sadness because of being a witness to her daughter’s social life.
Parents typically go into “fix it” mode when they see their child struggle with anything. The difference in helping your child with social struggles is that it isn’t as black and white as helping her with her math problems. A child can learn a set of social skills, but then she must adjust them according to every new social situation. Some children (as adults) are intuitively cued into social nuances. They understand when others are joking, and when they are not, and can roll with verbal punches. Others are fine in elementary school when socializing is about playing games together, a time when socializing relies less on conversation and more on play. But these same children may begin to really struggle as they enter middle and high school, where social skills shift from activities to conversations. Add to that the pressure to dress and look a certain way, and the socially immature middle schooler often feels lost. If this describes your child, you have probably felt the same way this mother in my office felt. She wanted to fix her child’s social problem but realized that it couldn’t happen immediately and that it was far more of a journey than a destination. Additionally, the emotional toll it takes on parents is something that we often overlook. When we can acknowledge how painful social struggles are for the parents, we can open the parents’ ability to cope more effectively with their child’s social life.
For this mom, she seemed to need the validation that watching and coaching her child through social problems is painful. “It can be very confusing to watch your daughter forget to brush her teeth, wash her face or comb her hair when she’s 12”, she explained to me from the couch in my office. “These behaviors are just a few examples of how she’s setting herself up for rejection” she explained, “and I cannot relate! I was hyperaware of my appearance at her age”. I hear this complaint often from parents. They want their child to experience the joys of friendship. Maybe they themselves had an easy time with friends and assumed their child would too, much like this mom, and then came to the realization that social struggles will define their child’s development. Or perhaps they struggled with friendships as children too and seeing their own child’s difficulties triggers feelings that they haven’t addressed in many years. In any case, understanding that it is normal to feel deeply sad and fearful for your child is important. By acknowledging your own fears and feelings you can separate out what are your feelings and what are your child’s. If we can’t validate our own feelings of fear, sadness, and anxiety about what our child is going through, we cannot be expected to help our child cope effectively with her feelings.
As we concluded our conversation, this mom realized that her fears about her daughter’s social skills prevented her from being a caring and listening ear. She realized that when her daughter complained about friendships, this mom would launch into conversations about what her daughter could do differently, how she might have misinterpreted something, or what she could do to “fix” the problem. What her daughter really needed was for her mom to be able to listen, validate, and tolerate the emotional discomfort that it brought to her as a parent. When she is better able to do this, she can see that not all social struggles are totally her daughter’s fault. She realized that middle schoolers are kind of a mess (my words, not hers)! And that this meant that although her daughter did in fact tend to have social struggles, she was also a very loving, kind, and compassionate girl who was sometimes rejected simply because she wasn’t the definition of “cool” that the other girls were. We talked about how her own fears and anxieties were inhibiting her from seeing her daughter in a complete way. Instead of viewing her daughter through the lens of her social deficits, she was better able to see her daughter’s strengths as well. In fact, this mom was able to see that some of the social situations which deeply upset and saddened her, did not, in fact, bother her daughter. She gave herself permission to feel her feelings without imposing them on her daughter. She was also able to acknowledge that she wouldn’t be able to fix her daughter’s social struggles but could serve as a coach and a support system instead. She would always be her daughter’s “biggest fan”, providing a safe landing for her daughter anytime she needed comfort.
Parenting your child’s social skills is a tricky thing. You must strike a careful balance between coaching and cheering. Your child needs to know that you believe that others would be lucky to have her as a friend, while also gently pointing out the blind spots she may have. When we can share our own feelings about this task with other parents, family, and friends, we can be buffered from falling into the pit of despair with our child. In the best scenario, we deal with what are our feelings so that we can stay out of the pit and extend a hand to pull out kiddos when they need us the most.
