How Children Make Friends - By Dr. Alistair Bryce-Clegg
The Science, The Practice, and The Bit We Often Get Wrong, by Me!
Hey PLAY People,
September is always a month of beginnings. New learning spaces, new routines, new adults and perhaps most importantly, new children to meet. For some, friendship will come easily. For others, it will take time, patience and the right kind of support.
Connection is about far more than just having fun with another child. When children make and maintain friendships, they’re also learning to manage emotions, negotiate, solve problems, and show empathy. These are life skills rehearsed every day in play.
In this article, I look at how children really learn to connect, what’s happening in their brains, how early relationships shape behaviour, and why the way we talk about friendship matters.
How Children Make Friends
Childhood friendships can be something really special, those moments of shared connection can stay with us for a lifetime. But for lots of children, forming friendships isn’t always easy.
Connection is a vital part of development. When children build and maintain friendships, they’re not just enjoying the company of another human, they’re also learning how to manage emotions, negotiate, take turns, solve problems, and develop empathy. These skills are essential, and they are experienced, rehearsed and consolidated right in the middle of the play that fills our early years spaces.
If we want to support children get it right, we need to understand the bits of the brain that help children connect with others, recognise how early relationships shape social behaviour, and possibly rethink some of the language we use around friendship (like ‘we’re all friends here’… more on that later). But most of all, we need to meet children where they are, developmentally, emotionally, and socially.
The Science of Making Friends
From birth, children are tuned into other people. There’s a well-known experiment where six-month-old babies, watched a simple puppet show. In it, one character tried to climb a hill and was either helped up by another puppet or pushed down by a different one.
Afterwards, when given a choice most babies reached for the helper. That tells us that even before they can talk, babies seem to identify and prefer kindness.
They are already paying attention to how others behave and showing an early sense of social preference. And before they’re even confidently walking, some are already showing preferences for certain peers. These early preferences aren’t random, they’re often based on similar interests, energy levels, or play styles.
But it’s not until the later stages of associative and cooperative play that we see the kind of friendship most adults would recognise. In the early years, children typically move through Parten’s stages of play – from solitary to onlooker to parallel to associative to cooperative.
Associative play happens when children play alongside each other and start to interact a bit more, they might talk about what they’re doing or share materials, but they’re still each doing their own thing. Think two children in sand, both digging their own holes but chatting as they go, occasionally handing each other a spade.
Cooperative play is the next step. This is where children begin to play together, not just next to each other. They share a goal, they might build a den, act out a story, or create a game with rules. There’s more back and forth, more negotiation, and more opportunities for those lovely (and sometimes tricky) friendship moments to happen.
It is in these later stages (usually around three or four and up), that you get shared goals, role play, negotiation, and what we might call proper ‘friend stuff.’
A three-year-old might say that someone who plays with them is a friend. By six or seven, a friend becomes someone who understands how they feel, tells them secrets, saves them a place on the carpet or sticks up for them in a disagreement.
This shift is mirrored by changes in the brain. Friendship relies on a whole collection of different parts of the brain working together. the ones that help with self-regulation, emotional awareness, decision-making, and the reward system.
So while one child might calmly wait their turn, another might still be in the thick of managing their impulse control when things don’t go their way.
These stages of development are often accompanied by big emotions, which can sometimes be misinterpreted as ‘bad behaviour’, when in fact they are quite typical and to be expected.
Why Attachment Matters
We can’t talk about friendships without talking about relationships. And that means thinking about attachment.
Children who’ve experienced secure attachments with consistent, responsive adults tend to approach new relationships with confidence. They’ve learned that people are mostly kind, feelings are okay, and problems can be solved together.
That doesn’t mean everything goes smoothly. But they’ve got a blueprint that says relationships can be safe, and that gives them an extra level of confidence when it comes to navigating friendships.
For children who haven’t had that same consistency, things can be trickier. Some might come across as overly controlling, needy, withdrawn, or even aggressive in social situations. This is because they haven’t yet developed a map for safe connection, and that’s where we come in.
Every warm, reliable interaction with a practitioner is a chance to strengthen a child’s relational and emotional safety net.
‘We’re All Friends Here!’
It’s a phrase many of us have used with the best of intentions. But… it’s not true, and deep down, children know it.
They know when someone’s mean to them. They know when they don’t feel safe. They know when another child always pushes to the front, or takes the toy they wanted, or says something hurtful.
Telling children they are friends with someone who treats them unkindly doesn’t teach respect (or friendship) it encourages them to ignore their feelings and shows them that adults don’t recognise them either. It suggests that friendship is not a choice.
That doesn’t mean we allow children to be unkind or exclusive. Quite the opposite. As adults, we make clear boundaries around respectful behaviour. But we also give them permission to say, ‘I don’t want to play with at the moment’ as long as it’s done kindly and with respect.
Teaching children about boundaries is just as important as teaching them how to connect.
What We Can Do
1. Create emotionally safe spaces.
Children need to feel emotionally and socially safe before they can engage in meaningful play. That means settings where empathy is modelled, mistakes are met with understanding, and kindness is the norm.
2. Coach social skills in real time.
Rather than correcting from a distance try and be in the play and in the ‘moment’ alongside the children, then you can model and scaffold responses and appropriate language.
3. Tune into the quiet signals.
Not all social struggles are loud. The child who plays alone every day. The one who always follows but never leads. The one who is ‘included’ on the edges of the play, but never fully involved. Specifically observing social interactions can help us spot what’s going on in children’s play.
4. Gently scaffold new connections.
We can create opportunities for children to connect, not by forcing friendships, but by setting up the kind of play that brings children together. Small group projects, loose parts, imaginative setups with shared roles, collaborative games are all great places to start.
5. Support social problem-solving.
Friendships come with bumps. We can help children notice what went wrong, name the feelings involved, and think about what they might try next time. Not every conflict needs an adult to step in, but when we do, we should treat it as a learning moment. Rather than just say ‘make friends’, discuss what went wrong, how everyone feels and how we can move forward.
6. Teach how to make things right.
’Sorry’ is just the start, and for lots of children it is just a meaningless workd.
As adults we can show children how to make amends, to rebuild the tower they knocked over, or find a new way to share by modelling the lnguage and intent - especially if the child is not yet at that point in their emotional development.
7. Honour their choices.
Children don’t have to be friends with everyone. They don’t have to like everyone. But they do need to treat everyone with kindness and respect. That’s the difference. We need to promote authentic connections, not artificial ones (imagine if you were made to be best friends with everyone you had ever worked with!).
Friendship in early childhood is deeply human. It’s shaped by brain development, early relationships, and everyday experience. Our job isn’t to force it. Our role is to guide, coach, and play alongside children as they figure out what it means to be a friend, and to find their own way there.
