One Year and One Week into school and STILL DS has NO friends.... WTF can I do?

[Alambil]

He's crying himself to sleep this week.

It's breaking my heart.

I haven't the ability to do playdates; my mum will when she's back from her holiday (and so has time) but that's a month away

That's AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAges in a child's life.

What can I do? I feel so, so helpless. I refuse to let him go through life with no friends.

DS is shy, he doesn't like rough boys, he doesn't like and can't play football.

He wants to play imaginative games; Power Rangers (although he does this to "fit in" and would prefer to be a horse or somesuch) and still can't find anyone to join in

School have a buddy-stop where you go if you've got no-one to play with but I'm not convinced it actually works well.

Help. Please.

He's just started at Beavers but no kids go from his class (am amazed at that) - anyway, he doesn't mix well with them either due to his problems with noise levels and rough play.

Argh.

What about getting those cards that boys collect - whatever is 'in' at the moment - pokemon, yu-ge-thingie or whatever they are. Swops get you attention! And it's something to connect him to the others, something to talk about.

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swaps is a good idea hecate... those gogo things are the in thing here..

Find out which kids have 2 ft working parents - we'd love for people to arrange things for the weekends as obv we can't do anything social in the week for DS, but its hard to get anyone who does have time in the week to do anything.

I now have a very informal meeting up at swimming on a Sunday afternoon thing with the parents of a girl in DS's nursery class and he loves that (obv younger than your DS)

iCod, I have no friends - this is history repeating itself... I aim to change that though

When I start uni he'll barely see me, let alone with friends!

I'll see what the teacher says tomorrow and I'm also going to "modernise" DS - he's never seen the likes of Transformers or Spiderman et al so I'll start letting him watch certain films after I've vetted them (he's got one wild imagination) so he can converse with the other kids about them and join in properly.

LewisFan - this is just like my ds. I did what you are planning. And it was fairly successful. I also got him to join the football club at school, just to learn the terminology at least (DH not the football type). But I also accepted that DS is not ever going to be the most popular boy in school. And helped him to accept that if he wanted to play with other children then he had to compromise on the games he wanted to play. Your "would prefer to be a horse" comment absolutely rang a bell"
It was a tough lesson for a small child to learn, but he is much, much happier now he has.

Had meeting this afternoon with teacher; also rang the PSHE teacher yesterday so she's in on it too.

We've decided that the teacher is going to do playground games at PE time as the class needs help interacting better and that in turn will help DS.

The PSHE teacher is going to take him aside and do a "circle of friends" thing. This is basically they choose about half a dozen kids to be DS's circle of friends; some DS wants to be mates with and some that are, let's say - more skilled at "making friends" so DS can learn through osmosis about how to make and be a friend.

Then at home I'm going to beef him up a bit, going to get him to play board games and other things to get his imagination going a bit more, teach him how to play things and get his confidence up

Hopefully with all that, DS will start to settle in to making friends and having the confidence to say "play with me" rather than waiting for an invite.

She was REALLY lovely about it and is on the case as of Monday and has said any time I have a problem, her door's open.

I really, really like this teacher; last year, I was told "oh well" and then given a barrage about how bad he was performing in school!!

I empathise LewisFan - my dd has just started yr 2 and for all of reception and yr 1 didn't really fit in with the other girls in her class. I agonised over it loads and tried all sorts of things but basically the problem was that the other girls are very girly and dd isn't, and can't be botherd with Barbies, Disney princess etc.

The answer has come unexpectedly as her school has just merged with another one and (hooray!) sh has made one really good friend with the new children and is talking enthusiastically about a few others.

I know this doesn't help you but I just wanted to say "I've been there". The other answer I have come up with for dd is to help her to make friends outside of school at things like Beavers and dance class. If you're only around on the weekends, if you are at all religious, churches can be a good place to start. Many are extremely family friendly and have good, very positive and affirming Sunday schools. Ready made group of friends.