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By India McCarty
Want your kids to start the school year off on the right foot? Experts recommend encouraging your kids to work on one thing: strong friendships.
“Flourishing friendships are foundational to our health and happiness,” Psychology Today reported. “They help buffer against stress, give us a greater sense of satisfaction with life, and enhance our overall well-being.”
The outlet added that the skill of making strong friendships is especially important for kids, as it can teach them how to work together, be a leader, share, cooperate, compromise and communicate.
Related: Teens Are Sharing Their Location With Friends. Is That a Good Thing?
They cited a recent study conducted at a school in Istanbul. Ninety-four third graders were “educated in the fundamentals of friendship” and, by the end of the study, were experiencing “enhanced psychological well-being as opposed to those assigned to the control group.”
Psychology Today added, “Additionally, friendship education helped the children develop their sense of trust, honesty, and cooperation, values that are central to healthy peer relationships.”
“Having a close friend is also tied to academic performance and lower anxiety,” Psychology Today continued. “It’s impossible to overestimate the power of friendships.”
These lessons can start early; PBS wrote that the friends your child makes at 3-years-old can impact their mental and social development.
“That is marked as a time of a lot of growth, where 3-year-old brains are developing really quickly, they’re creating a lot of neuron connections and doing developmental tasks,” Janine Domingues, a clinical psychologist at the Child Mind Institute, explained. “It’s also a time when kids start school, start being away from their parents. Because of those different things, it creates a lot of memories that can last.”
Close relationships can have an impact on physical health as well.
VeryWellMind wrote that “having a close circle of friends can decrease your risk of health problems like diabetes, heart attack, and stroke.”
“Having strong social ties can also decrease feelings of loneliness, which evidence shows can take a toll on your longevity. One study found that the risk of mortality increased by a whopping 91% among socially isolated people,” the site continued. “A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis found that social isolation increased the risk of mortality from all causes.”
It might sound obvious to say your child should make friends, but in this day and age of social media and AI chatbots, it’s more important than ever to foster strong in-person friendship-making skills in your children.
Read Next: Children Turn to AI for Friendship—We Should Be Concerned
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