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Tips for teaching your child how to build healthy relationships

Key skills can be taught from a young age to help our kiddos learn how to make friends, how to keep appropriate boundaries and how to be a good friend. Establishing these skills early will help your child be more successful in school and work settings.
• When meeting new people for the first time, empower your child to have the confidence to introduce themselves and to listen and try to remember the other person’s name. Talk about appropriate questions they can ask someone new, such as questions about the other person’s interests, movies they like to watch or books they enjoy reading. This is also a good time to practice conversation at home to help build that confidence, along with practicing not interrupting, listening to responses and asking related follow-up questions.
• Teaching appropriate boundaries will also help kiddos maintain healthy relationships. When practicing at home, don’t be afraid to talk about what this looks like. For starters, talk to your child about what types of information are OK to share with someone they first meet versus someone they’ve known a long time. Personal or private information should only be shared with someone your kiddo has known for a while, whereas when meeting someone for the first time, topics should be more superficial and general in nature. Physical boundaries are important to discuss as well. When meeting someone for the first time, a hand shake is sufficient. We need to teach our kiddos to respect others’ personal space. These conversations also help our kiddos learn what to expect from others and to determine what they’re comfortable with.
• Finally, we need to talk to our kiddos about how to be a good friend and how to maintain these relationships. This may vary based on the age of your child, but some skills can be established early on and can be used regardless of age. For example, teaching your child to listen to others and to show concern for what others are saying will encourage empathy and understanding. Also, teaching your child to compromise and to be open to meeting someone half way — whether it’s on the playground, in the classroom or during extracurricular activities — will help keep friendships strong. Healthy relationships are about give and take, about sharing attention and being open to others' opinions and ideas. We can show this to our kiddos by the example we set in our daily interactions with others.
Teaching our kiddos how to develop good, healthy relationships will help them be more successful in life and can set them up for success in the future. 

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