The Friendship Tree – how can you support girls in building healthy friendships?

If you think back to your friendships as a young girl, what do you remember? Closeness? Shared interests? Sometimes confusion? I think there’s an assumption that childhood friendships are easier than adult friendships. After all, children spend their school days learning and growing up alongside their friends. 

It’s true that as adults we have many competing priorities, so perhaps we feel that friendships are crowded out by busy schedules. We might not have the time and freedom to maintain those connections like we could when we were young. But something valuable that comes with experience is perspective. We know that friendships change, and that’s okay. We know we can survive the pain.

For young girls, friendship struggles can feel all-consuming. In friendship girls learn about belonging, loyalty, trust, conflict, exclusion, repair and love. Research shows that our friendships at this age are foundational; having close, quality friendships when girls are young leads to higher self-worth and lower rates of depression and anxiety as they enter adulthood. At a young age, we don’t yet know ourselves deeply, and we are still discovering what we want from friendships and how to be a good friend to others.

So, how can we support girls in building healthy friendships? We may feel an urge to guide them, to impart our wisdom, to put their struggles into perspective. This is a natural impulse, but we should also recognise that we can’t fix their friendships for them – and they don’t want that! It’s important that girls learn the lessons that friendships can teach them by finding their own way through the confusions and conflicts that arise. Those early experiences are how they come to know what they value in a friend. Remember that you don’t have to fix, only listen. 

What we can do is take their friendships seriously. We can treat the feelings and opinions of our girls with gravity, even at this young age (especially at this young age!). When we allow girls to feel the hard feelings and to find the answers themselves, we show them that they can trust in their own intuition. 

If you’re unsure how to approach the topic of friendships with your girl but you want to take her voice seriously, our Friendship Tree Activity is a great way to explore healthy friendships with her. With the school year just beginning, we want to support girls as friendship groups shift and reconfigure. The Friendship Tree is a visual way for girls to explore what’s important to them in their friendships; this will be different for each girl, so let them know there’s no right and wrong answers. It enables girls to talk about the hard bits as well as highlighting the things they value most in a friend. It’s also an opportunity to do something creative together with your girl or group of girls. The Friendship Tree Activity is free to download.