To think that children aren't as good at playing together anymore?

How did she make friends?

A stranger is just a friend you haven't met!

That was 5 bloody years ago!

My ds now 12 has always made a friend where ever we go, he just seems to be one of those kids that makes friends very easily. Helps that he's quite confident and not shy. He's a very friendly and approachable boy so other kids just seem to like him, he's always been very popular at school.
My older child has always been a bit more reserved and not made friends quite so easily.

Agree - and how old are we talking about? DS is 8, covid disrupted nursery but his school life was completely unaffected. Younger kids won’t have been affected at all as either not born or too young to really play together. Older kids presumably learned to socialise before Covid hit. We can’t blame Covid for everything, it was more than five years ago at this point.

I think that even though it was ages ago, covid and high profile child abductions have had an effect on parenting. During lockdown, many children naturally had more time with their parents than they would have done otherwise. My DC are generally quite happy with their own company and the lockdowns just encouraged them even more to look inwards.

And having children is seen to be a lifestyle change nowadays - we are considered to be negligent parents if we don’t want to play with and engage with our children. My life would be so much easier if I could send the DC out all day.

Same - schools seem to have particular parks that the kids go to (annoyingly DS’s school all seem to go to the tiny boring park right next to the school rather than the much bigger and more exciting park ten minutes walk away).

All the kids play together for a good hour after school and the adults can have a chat or read a book. All years and across “normal” friendship groups. It’s rather lovely. I see similar things with other schools in other parks too (you can tell by the uniforms).

DS seems to make friends with kids in other parks (even in other countries) - I’ve always assumed it’s because he’s an only and so has nobody else to play with if he doesn’t join in (I do play a bit but am not as much fun as another child now he’s a bit older).

I'm not seeing this where I am, both my kids have made many friends playing at random parks. At public events I see kids gathering in a crowd and running around together (though I also saw one kid stamp on another one's belly so hard it made him cry, don't think he'd learnt yet how to play with others). I just had a holiday where there was my two children (7 and 14) and my two little cousins (11 and 14), it did take a while for the older cousin to warm up but the 11 year old and my two played together so much (kicking a ball about, playing volleyball, playing card games), whenever my 7 year old was bored the 11 year old was happy to play with him (he was also really good at talking to adults, I was very impressed)

Absolutely this.

@DownsideUpside yes it does feel like that I agree!!

@BusWankers You're so right about it not being as easy as it was back in the day for kids to meet up organically, for all sorts of reasons.

We can’t win. Go to the park and play with your kid, you’re making them unsociable. Go to the park and ignore your kid, you’re a bad parent who should be engaging with their child and not doing the online shop on your phone.

@Optimustime I do agree with you actually, you’re totally right that certainly for my generation the news stories about Madeleine McCann and also Holly and Jessica definitely took up space in my head and made me much more cautious as a mother and more “helicopter parent” than I think I’d have been otherwise. Easy to say those are old news now and haven’t shaped the current generation of young kids but I do think those events helped shape general social and parental attitudes for a long while, then the new generation came along with seemingly even more worries about child safety. Plus there are plenty of people my age with school age kids still!

On holiday recently I noticed that the kids who were most gregarious tended to have string Northern accents- Liverpool, Lancs, Yorkshire, Manchester, Newcastle. Could be a cultural thing.

Wow. My children made new "friends" every time we went to the playground. Everyone is a stranger until you get to know them.

They aren't as good at anything anymore. They seem to have regressed in all areas they need to develop.

Oh fgs, are you still riding this thing out? Covid ended years ago and life has moved on. Not everyone was so severely affected. My dc was 4yo and we did not have contact with anyone for a whole years. Just us 3, in another country. He doesn’t even remember it.
When we got here and realised that life was going on as normal for a long while, I dont understand what people moan about when they have no idea about how much more brutal it was in other countries

Well back then there was always a parent around so kids could roam and come back. Even back then we always did play dates though. Now people are working, these things have to be arranged. My 3yo has play dates - how do you suggest we do that if it’s not arranged?

Don't agree with this either. So many years ago.

Of course you are going to watch your child as they play, you are the adult.

As the adult you are also going to help your child to be independent, support them in their socialisation and build their skills in risk assessing times when they do play alone as age/developmentally appropriate.

Children are so plugged in to screens they are losing all of the above.

NAH, COVID was years ago, an especially long time in a young child’s life.

If it has affected them, time to support them to learn to play with others.

I’m not sure. I was born in the 1970s so grew up very much in the past…I went on lots of holidays to campsites and stuff. Never once did I make a friend on holiday and the thought horrified me. My parents didn’t hang around either, I was saying to my husband the other day that I don’t have a single memory of my Mum taking me to the park. My brother and I played together on holiday even though (a) he is nearly 5 years younger than me and (b) he always was bloody annoying and we never played together at home! At home I had one best friend from age 7 that I spent all my time with (we are still friends now age 51) and I hated playing in groups.

Weirdly, as an adult I am very very sociable, love meeting new people and will strike up a chat with anyone. Something switched in me when I went to University. But as I child, absolutely not.

So maybe your dd is just a different personality type to you?

I haven't really noticed this to be true, the park near us all the kids play together, my kids are always making new friends and finding kids to play with wherever we go. But then both of mine are oddly social and talkative (they do not get that from me!)

I think 6 and 3 is still quite young. Maybe the 6 year old will be on the cusp of approaching other children to play with, but I’m not sure a 3 year old would be. I remember making friends with kids on holiday but I was a fair bit older - maybe more like 9/10/11? My 5 year old has < 1 hour of TV a day and we don’t own a tablet, but despite this he would not approach another child he didn’t know in the park, so I think it’s too simplistic to blame it on screens. He’d run around for hours with a school pal, but a stranger? I’d be very surprised.

I don’t expect adults to come up to me when I’m out in public, I’m not sure why my daughter should have expected the same of children when she was younger.

She absolutely hated random kids coming up to her to talk. She was more than capable of playing with other kids, she just didn’t want to do it with strangers.

Thankfully not true for us. Lots of free play outdoors after school & in the park near us. It’s possible your kids are a bit young still. My daughter only really got her confidence to go off on her own and make friends at 5/6.

I don't have this issue with my kids at all. The older one is very confident and will just join in with a gang at the playground or ask other kids to play and the younger one is still into parallel play or trails along after the older one. The last holiday we were on, DC1 made a gang of friends and insisted on sitting next to one boy at dinner which was awkward as his parents clearly wanted family time and we had to drag DC1 away under pain of no ice cream 😂.

I don't know how much it has to do with area or upbringing but we live in an area with lots of playgrounds and parks and where families tend to live in very small houses or flats with no gardens. Very few families have space for their own play equipment or for kids to kick a ball around in the garden. So there is very much a culture of kids stopping by the playground after school and at weekends and we see many of the same faces regularly.