Does your daughter have trouble communicating? Practical steps you can take.

Does your daughter struggle socially? Is difficulty communicating affecting her social life, family life, school performance, mood, and self-esteem? Today, more than ever, children and adolescents find it difficult to communicate. At the same time, we’re seeing more lonely teens and more depression.

Your daughter needs friendships

The need for friendship and attachment is hard-wired in all of us. We live in families, study with classmates, love as couples, and thrive when we have meaningful friendships.

Forming connection is a critical part of our daughters’ development, but many parents are just at a loss when their child struggles to connect and build relationships. Difficulties creating connections and communicating can damage feelings of self-esteem during critical years in childhood and adolescence. Children who feel excluded socially have higher rates of depression and are more likely to be involved in risky behaviors as they move through high school and beyond.

The link between vulnerability, communications, and forming friendships

Making friends, especially for girls, means being vulnerable with each other. Opening up, being vulnerable, is a key ingredient in building trust and closeness. Vulnerability is not weakness. Vulnerability is the energy that powers connection and a feeling of belonging. Vulnerability opens you up to somebody getting closer.

While our kids need friendship, and connection with family, they often build a hard shell around themselves that cuts them off from the connections that they desperately need. This shell hides the very vulnerability that enables teens and children to connect. By toughening up and shutting down, we block friendship, love, connection, and intimacy. By turning vulnerability into a weakness, we are starving our relationships of the oxygen they need to thrive.

What girls require to create successful family connections and friendships

While being afraid to show their feelings is often a key obstacle, young children, adolescents, and even adults rely on an array of fundamental skills to create and keep successful relationships. Your daughter may need help with:

• Managing their own negative emotions
• Empathy – understanding how other people feel and see the world
• Sympathy – helping friends in need
• Trust – feeling secure enough to trust other people
• Social skills – how to manage introductions and conversational skills
• Getting along – cooperation, negotiation, compromise, flexibility

Fortunately, many of these skills that your daughter needs to thrive can be learned at home and with the support of a therapist who understands how to help girls build friendships and connections. Not all kids know naturally how to make friends. With help, however, girls can learn how to fit in socially and build meaningful relationships with other girls.

At home, or in therapy, your daughter can learn how to use their senses and their brains to build friendships. Some children just “get it” intuitively. Other children may need a bit of help developing social skills.

Some practical skills that your daughter can learn

At home, you can model “active listening”. Make clear to your daughter that when she engages you in conversation she has your full attention. Make appropriate eye contact, orient your body in the direction of your daughter when she is speaking, let her speak without interruption, and respond with relevant conversation.

You can also help your daughter become better at socializing by practicing specific conversational skills. Girls even learn through role-play, practicing concrete skills such as asking about your friend’s favorite movie (and worst movie!) – and sharing your own.

Addressing social difficulties in therapy

Many adolescents are preoccupied with friendships and social standing. Lack of friendships or extreme difficulties dealing with girls of her own age, however, can be symptoms of other challenges that your daughter struggles with such as depression, anxiety, attention deficit disorder, or other mental health concerns.

If your daughter feels excluded, don’t waste time assuming that she will “grow of out it”. If you think that your child’s social struggles are symptoms of other challenges, or if you just want your daughter to get some direction that can help her form healthy relationships, reach out today. In therapy, we will assess the issues and work towards practical improvements.