What to Say When Your Child Says They Have No Friends

It is almost always at lights out. The day is finally over, you have made it, and then a small voice from under the covers tells you nobody played with them at recess. Again.

Part of what makes it hard to know what to say when your child says they have no friends is the timing. It is 8:40 in the evening, you are running on fumes, and the honest truth is that you cannot fix this one by morning.

The two things you will want to say

The first is minimizing. “Of course you have friends. What about Ella?” You mean it kindly. What your child hears is that they reported something true and got corrected.

The second is fixing. Solutions, a plan, a talk about how to join a game at recess. Parenting.org’s advice for parents in exactly this spot is to sit down with your child and discuss what friendship means and what makes a good friend, to ask how they choose their friends, and to ask what their interests are and who else shares them. Those are good questions. They are not 8:40pm questions.

At lights out you have one job, and it is to stay in it with them for four minutes without flinching.

Ask a smaller question

“Did you have a good day” gets you nothing. Neither does “why do you think that is.”

Try one of these instead, and then stop talking:

• “Who did you sit next to at lunch?”
• “Was there a part of today that was okay?”

Specific questions get specific answers, and specific answers tell you whether this is a hard week or a hard year. A child who says nobody likes them and then mentions the twelve minutes they spent drawing with a boy named Sam is having a different problem than a child who has nothing at all to report.

Either way, do not solve it tonight. Say the true thing: “That sounds lonely. I’m really glad you told me.”

Do not promise them a friend

This is where faith gets misused with the best intentions. It is tempting to say that if we pray about it, God will send them a friend.

Do not make that promise. You cannot keep it, and if the year stays lonely, your child will quietly file all of prayer under things that did not work.

What you can say is that God knows, that he is not far off, and that you are going to talk to him about it out loud right now with them listening.

Pray it by name

Pray the actual thing, not a softened version of it. Children can tell.

Use their words and say their name. “God, nobody played with Nora at recess today, and it hurt. You know her. Please give her a friend, and please help her be one. Amen.”

Then pray for one other child by name. Not a lesson about it, just do it. Pray for the kid who ignored them, or for someone else in the class who might also be sitting alone. Something shifts in a lonely child when they get to be, for ten seconds, the one doing the praying instead of the one being prayed for.

The friendship story worth telling this week

When David meets Jonathan, David is nobody in particular. He is the youngest of Jesse’s sons, the one who was out tending the sheep when the prophet came looking (1 Samuel 16:11), and now he is standing in a king’s tent where he does not belong.

“After David had finished speaking with Saul, the souls of Jonathan and David were knit together, and Jonathan loved him as himself.” (1 Samuel 18:1)

Then Jonathan hands over his robe, his tunic, his sword, his bow, and his belt. (1 Samuel 18:4) The king’s son gives the shepherd boy his own clothes, which is a very concrete picture for a seven year old who is not sure anyone would pick them.

The part to say out loud: David was not looking for Jonathan. Jonathan was already there, and that morning neither of them knew it. That is not a promise that a Jonathan is coming next Tuesday. It is a true story about a friendship nobody saw arriving, and a lonely child can hold onto that overnight.

Tonight

Ask the smaller question. Let there be a silence after it. Then pray out loud, in their words, and add one other child’s name before you say amen.

Then go. Do not follow it with a talk about how to make friends. That conversation belongs to a Saturday morning, not to a dark bedroom at 8:40.

David and Jonathan Best Friends is one of the 82 stories in Bedtime Bible Stories, written four separate times with three discussion questions each, for the nights when you would rather the story did the talking.