About Peer Relationships
What Parents Usually Notice First
Peer relationships are central to adolescent development and when they go wrong, the impact on a teenager’s mental health, self-esteem, and daily wellbeing can be profound. Social exclusion, bullying, loneliness, intense peer pressure, and the social complexity amplified by social media are among the most painful experiences teenagers face.
Dr. Sally Hackman, PhD, MFT, helps teenagers in Santa Monica and Los Angeles navigate peer relationships with greater social confidence, emotional intelligence, and resilience addressing both the immediate difficulties and the deeper patterns that may be contributing to them.
When It Is Worth Getting Help
Most children go through difficult social stretches. A few weeks of friendship trouble after a class change is ordinary, and usually resolves.
It is worth speaking to someone when the pattern lasts beyond a term, when your child is avoiding school or activities because of it, when their mood or sleep has changed, or when they have started to describe themselves in terms of it as the one nobody likes, or the one who is always left out.
That last one matters most. A temporary social difficulty becomes a
lasting problem when a child begins to treat it as a fact about who they are.
How Therapy Helps
The work depends on what is actually going wrong, which is why the first sessions are mostly about finding that out.
With younger children, much of this happens through play watchin g how a child handles turn taking, disagreement, and losing, and working on it there rather than through discussion. With older children and teenagers, the work is more direct: understanding what happened in a specific situation, what the other person was likely thinking, and what could be done differently.
Where the difficulty is exclusion or bullying rather than skills, the focus shifts to protecting confidence, deciding what to do practically, and making sure the child does not come away believing it was their fault.
Dr. Hackman also meets with parents separately, since what happens at home between sessions matters as much as the sessions themselves.
What Parents Can Do at Home
A few things help more than most parents expect.
Arrange one-to-one time with another child rather than group settings. Friendships are built far more easily between two children than among six, and a child who struggles in a group may be perfectly comfortable one on one.
Resist the urge to solve it in conversation. “Just go and talk to them” is advice that assumes the hard part is willingness. Usually it is not.
And be careful with reassurance that contradicts what your child can see. Telling a child everybody likes them when they know otherwise teaches them that this is not a subject they can raise with you.
Key Points
Building Social Confidence in Teens.
Empowering Resilience
Help your teen understand their own social patterns, develop genuine confidence, and build the skills to form and maintain meaningful friendships.
Healing Space
A private, confidential space where teenagers can speak honestly about their social experiences including things they would never tell a parent or teacher.
Transformative Support
Dr. Hackman works at the intersection of individual therapy and social skill development addressing both the emotional roots of social difficulty and the practical skills that support healthy peer relationships.
OUR COMMITMENT TO YOU
Why Some Children Struggle With Peers
Social skills are learned, not automatic, and children learn them at very different speeds. A child who struggles with peers is usually finding one specific part of it difficult rather than all of it.
Reading Social Cues
Some children miss the small signals other children read easily when a joke has gone too far, when someone wants to end a conversation, when a group is open to a newcomer and when it is not. They are not being careless; the information simply does not register.
Entering a Group
Joining a game already in progress is one of the hardest social tasks of childhood. Children who cannot do it often hover at the edge, or interrupt too abruptly, and are turned away either way.
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Years of Teen Therapy Experience
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FAQ
Common Questions
Shyness describes a temperament a child who warms up slowly but does form friendships once they do. A concern is different: the child wants friends and cannot manage it, or avoids peers because it feels frightening rather than simply slow. If your child is happy with two close friends and no interest in a wider group, that is usually temperament rather than a problem.
Therapy helps with the effect confidence, self-blame, and deciding
what to do but it is not a substitute for addressing the situation itself. Dr. Hackman will usually work with you on both: supporting your child directly while helping you decide what to raise with the
school.
They show up at every age, but the shape changes. In younger children it is often sharing, turn-taking and entering play. From around age nine or ten, social groups become more fixed and exclusion more deliberate. In adolescence it usually involves identity and belonging rather than skills.
It is a fair worry, and how it is introduced matters. Dr. Hackman frames the work as learning something rather than fixing something. Most children are relieved to find an adult who takes the difficulty seriously instead of telling them it does not matter.
Yes, though it is a different focus. If your child's difficulty is driven by fear panic before social situations, physical symptoms, avoidance that is social anxiety, and there is more detail on the
social anxiety page.