This article has been developed to help parents and carers support their primary school child at home while they participate in the Keeping Friends module as part of the Peer Support program.
Your child is learning how to build and maintain positive friendships. Friendships are an important part of the school experience, contributing to children’s sense of belonging, confidence, and social and emotional wellbeing. They also help children participate more positively at school and develop skills to navigate everyday social situations.
Each week, small groups of students, led by Year 6 Peer leaders, get together to talk about friendship. The Peer Leaders have been trained in their roles and have a guide to follow for the sessions. They’re supervised by a teacher. It’s a wonderful opportunity for Year 6 students to step into leadership roles and support their younger peers.
Keeping Friends is one of Peer Support’s modules, and gives children the chance to explore qualities and behaviours that help build positive relationships. Children will learn about and practise different social skills, like how to join a group, how to recognise, manage and respond to their emotions when things don’t go their way, and how to show real interest in someone else instead of just waiting for your turn to talk. Developing and maintaining friendships is a lifelong skill that many of us are still trying to master as adults. Here’s how you can help your child.
1. Talk about positive friendships
Ask your child who they enjoy spending time with and why. Talk about your friendships too. What makes a good friend? How do you become friends with someone you like? How do you learn to trust a friend? When has a friend let you down? How do you know when a relationship isn’t working well? Also talk about what kind of friend you would both like to be.
By sharing your own experiences and insights, these conversations can help your child understand that friendships are important, but not always perfect. It’s normal to have conflict sometimes, and that can be a chance to learn how to repair relationships.
2. Provide your child with social opportunities
Research shows that when parents help create opportunities for social interaction, children develop social skills more quickly.
This doesn’t mean over-structuring friendships, but offering simple chances to connect with different peers outside usual friendship groups. These experiences help children build confidence and practise social skills in every day settings.
Participating in Peer Support’s Keeping Friends module encourages children to build positive connections with a range of peers, helping them practise different social skills and feel connected across their school community.
3. Model what good friendship looks like
Your child learns a lot about relationships by watching how the adults around them interact with others. Everyday moments, like listening respectfully, showing kindness, supporting friends through challenges and working through disagreements calmly, can help children understand what positive relationships look like.
These everyday behaviours reinforce the messages children are learning through Keeping Friends, especially around inclusion, communication and respect.
4. Coach, don’t rescue
When your child comes home upset because something happened with a friend at school, it’s natural to want to step in and solve the problem straight away. But moments like these can also be opportunities to help children build important social and emotional skills.
Start by listening calmly and helping your child talk through what happened. You might say, “That sounds really tough. What do you think was going on?” or “What could you try next time?”
This approach supports children to problem-solve and build confidence in managing friendships. Following up later and sharing your own experiences can also help them feel supported.
Research shows that when adults coach children through social challenges, rather than immediately rescuing or dismissing their feelings, children are more likely to develop stronger emotional regulation skills and healthier, more positive friendships over time.
5. Reframe rejection as information, not catastrophe
Children will sometimes experience moments of feeling left out like not being invited to something, noticing groups change, or feeling unsure about where they fit. While these experiences are a normal part of growing up, they can feel significant for children in the moment.
What matters is the story a child builds around these experiences. For example, “I don’t belong” can feel very different from “that didn’t work out today, I can try something different next time.”
The Keeping Friends module supports children to navigate these situations by building confidence in moving between groups, trying again, and maintaining positive connections with others.
At home, you can support this learning by acknowledging your child’s feelings and helping them reflect on different perspectives. Sharing simple, age-appropriate examples from your own experiences can also help normalise that friendships naturally have ups and downs.
