What does it mean to be a good friend? A parents guide to helping your child develop into a good friend.
- Ava S
- Dec 11, 2025
- 2 min read
Ava S
University of Oxford - BA in modern history
Making friends - and keeping them - is an important life skills! Here are some simple ways to help teach your children about being a meaningful and good friend. After all, the only way to have a friend is to understand how to be a good friend!
As a parent, it is crucial that you model healthy relationships to your child. Family is our first role model of relationships and character, and parents who encourage their child to communicate fairly and openly, have patience, resilience, listening skills, will bring up children who are better friends as a result.
Help your child to develop politeness will help them to build positive relationships with the other children around them. Importantly, it is crucial to healthy relationships that a child learns when to agree and disagree with ideas around them. Learning how to say ‘no’ and equally, how to accept ‘no’ as an answer from another person will aid them in their self development. Learning how to apologise is also crucial in this measure, leading them to become a good team player.
Having an open mind to differences is also crucial to developing friendships. Teaching your child that it is okay to have a friend who is different to you is crucial in this respect, a person shouldn’t have to be limited to having friends of a certain kind. Being an inclusive person, as a result, will allow you to build and maintain friendships with a variety of people.
Encouraging your child to be confident is a great way to teach your child to be a good friend, as first they must learn to be good to themselves. When a child has a strong sense of self, they will not feel as if they need to please others to make themselves fit in or feel better about themselves. A child with a healthy sense of self-esteem will make healthier friendships and be able to maintain these in the long term - an essential component of adult happiness.
Teaching your child that it is okay to offer friends emotional support is also imperative. Friends should be loyal and trust one another to support one another through good and bad times. Teaching your child the value of loyalty and being supportive will help them be the best friend they can possibly be. Supporting your friends when they achieve - even if you are not, yourself, in the same position - is important and will show your dedication to them.
I hope this blog post was useful to you as a parent and that your children go on to develop healthy, loving friendships.
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