My high school child is bright.
My child says she has no friends. I can't figure out why.
How do I help as a dad?
such a good question.
I'm glad, I love it when dads ask questions.
That means you're aware and attuned to your child's needs.
Um, more often than not, we find
that in situations like this, um, our children have a struggle
or they struggle knowing how to best communicate how to, how to read people.
So one of the things that I would suggest is I, again,
I don't know, uh, your community as a whole,
but is your child involved in some, any of the following?
And he plays at school, any school athletics, any school-based activity, any clubs if they're engaged in
that, because you can be, uh, intellectually smart
but isolated away from others.
But finding a study group, finding others who have, uh,
other students who enjoy whatever your, I mean, if your child's bright, that means that they're probably in
courses that are pretty challenging.
So I would encourage that to be a starting point.
Invite, uh, their friends over
or those, those peers over for say, a time to study together
or time to, uh, review things together.
Because what you find in that situation is that's
where friendships are made when you're studying something
together and pushing each other intellectually,
having intellectual conversations.
And so I, I, I, I guess I would start by finding peers
with commonality, whether they're in plays,
whether it's sports, whether whatever activities is,
or intellectual, like, um, what do they call that?
Uh, a key club or a, um, a chess club
or again, whatever club it is at school,
if they can get involved in that, that's generally
where friendships start to develop
because you start to, Hey, we're going on the choir tour
and we're gonna be going to this place.
And, and that's really where friendships start
to develop is they start interacting with them.
One of the things that I should mention here
that's really interesting is the more we interact
with people solving a problem,
the more likely we have things in common,
the better off these friendships are.
So again, a really big thing
that you can do here is find an, an experience
where they're trying to solve a problem.
And that that can be just a very effective thing to do is,
is get an environment where they're learning
to solve something with their peers.