It’s difficult to be a parent with a child who’s upset about not being included in a group. Follow these useful tips to help your child deal with cliques.
Cliques happen in all sorts of environments and at all ages. Even adults have to deal with cliques during events, workdays, or functions where other adults gather.
When it comes to a child, though, cliques can really get your child feeling sad. It’s not easy when your child comes home complaining about how they don’t fit in or aren’t welcome to hang out with a particular group of other children.
While this may break your parenting heart, it’s simply part of the growing process. Since your child will have to deal with cliques their entire life, you can use these tips to help your child cope with cliques and feel more confident no matter how many people try to shun them from hanging out in a specific clique.
How to Help Your Child Cope With Cliques
1. Respect the Feeling
Don’t shun your child for feeling upset or angry about not being included with children who are in a specific clique. Embrace and respect how your child feels. Learn to be a listening ear and shoulder to lean on whenever your child needs to vent about feeling left out of a particular group of children.
2. Encourage Friendships
Talk to your child about finding a different friend or clique that may work better for their personality type. Help your child understand that not everyone will like them, and that’s okay. The only thing that isn’t okay is if the clique is being rude and bullying your child instead of just leaving them be.
3. Work on Social Skills
It could be that your child is anxious or super shy about approaching different cliques; they have their heart set on this one clique in school who doesn’t want anything to do with them. Try to work on social skills at home with your child through role-play or take them in public more often to get some social skills experience.
4.Look Beyond the Cliques
Last but not least, try to teach your child to look beyond the clique. Perhaps this clique doesn’t have the same morals and values that your child was raised on. This happens quite often in childhood. It’s important that you uplift your child by telling them all of the amazing attributes they have as a person and that they will find a clique that works for their morals and values sometime in the future.
These are just some of the helpful ways to help you guide your child forward as a means to help them cope with cliques. It’s so hard to be a parent who has a child so upset about not being included with a particular group of peers, but you must teach them this lesson now to cope with cliques in the future when they reach adulthood.
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