How Should You Parent a Lonely Kid?

New York subscribers got exclusive early access to this story in our Brooding newsletter. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

More than any other emotion, loneliness feels like it’s your own fault, like you’re being punished for the crime of being yourself. This makes it especially dreadful to bear witness to a lonely kid. A kid feeling ashamed of something that’s out of their control? Intolerable. Anything to make it go away.

But sometimes, loneliness really does come from within; some people have more attunement toward it and feel it more acutely. It’s part of who they are. External conditions might change, but the feeling won’t. It is, after all, an evolutionary adaptation, a result of our species relying on our social groups for survival. It’s what compels a lot of people to make art. It’s why many writers write. Loneliness can be generative.

That’s not how we tend to think of it. Over the past few decades, loneliness has taken on a sinister pall, and it can seem like a load-bearing concept holding up every injustice of postindustrial life. Starting with the Columbine massacre in 1999, loneliness has been widely used to explain violence in young men. (“Guns don’t kill people, lonely people kill people.”) Partly because school shootings have become a defining anxiety for American parents, the prospect of raising a lone-wolf shooter is a surreal yet not totally implausible specter for many parents of boys prone to loneliness. In 2023, when then–surgeon general Vivek Murthy announced a “loneliness epidemic,” a lot of hard-to-answer questions — why do men struggle to make friends in adulthood more than women? When young people suffer, is it the phones? — coalesced around loneliness as an explanation.

Meanwhile, loneliness has fallen into the trap of gender discourse, as Jessica Winter noted recently. What if loneliness affects everyone, and what we think of as “male loneliness” is actually more like entitlement to a certain kind of social status? What urgent conversations might have come out of a government-declared “entitlement epidemic”?

So humans are somewhat prone to loneliness, and yet we fear it, because it’s used to explain what’s wrong with our culture, and we fear that by failing to raise children who can cope with it, we would be perpetuating everything that’s wrong with our world. How are we metabolizing this contradiction in our homes? How are we parenting our lonely kids?

I surveyed parents with kids who struggle with loneliness about how they’re trying to help and what parts, as a parent, are hardest. For many of those I heard from, a life event like a move to a new town or a best friend moving away caused a sudden onset of loneliness that they hoped would fade in time. But other parents identified their kids as feeling chronically left out or apart from the group and worried that, as one parent wrote, “loneliness begets loneliness.”

“I worry his loneliness will drive him to make friends with the kinds of kids I find mean and obnoxious because the nice kids won’t accept him,” a parent of a 6-year-old boy told me.

“I worry that he will sustain this level of loneliness for a while, and it could snowball into depression, anxiety, low self-esteem … I just want him to have fun and enjoy his childhood to the extent he can,” wrote a parent of a 13-year-old.

The hovering conundrum is that you can’t, as a parent, singlehandedly place your body between your child and loneliness. You also can’t force connection between kids; it’s something only they can really feel. Your power might instead lie in your ability to change up the environment and stimuli. The majority of parents I heard from had adopted a similar approach to helping their kids cope with loneliness: They spend more time together, trying to expose their kids to as many new and interesting environments as they can — sports, activities, places, feelings.

“Longer talks and cuddles at bedtime,” wrote a parent of a 14-year-old. “We also got her involved in lots of sports. So she’s on all the teams — lots of fun people surround her day-to-day — but no one she wants to hang with.”

“I would ideally give my kids more space and freedom to figure out plans on their own,” one parent wrote, “but I find myself trying to get my 13-year-old to try more extracurriculars, encourage him to make plans with friends, and find things for us to do more than I would otherwise (for example, my 11-year-old has friends who love to hang IRL so I don’t feel the need to “help” with her at all). I don’t reach out to my 13-year-old’s friends’ parents to try to rig up friend hangs for him because of his age, like I used to when he was little, but have been tempted! I let him play more video games than I perhaps would have, because oftentimes he will be playing with friends online over FaceTime/Discord, so I’ll consider it ‘social,’ even though it still looks kind of lonely to me.”

“I think I spend more time with them than I thought I would, and I try to make them feel the family unit is a full source of connection and maybe more profound of a relationship than with the outside world,” another parent wrote.

This sort of redirection should not be mistaken for trying to distract a child from feeling lonely. Redirection invites our kids to consider other scenes they might feel at home in, while distraction just tries to make them forget they have a self at all. This is why I don’t believe our devices cause loneliness, exactly — I think the problem is they’re designed to distract us from it, which makes us less accustomed to it, less able to tolerate it, and therefore more dependent on the distraction of the device.

Experience has shown many parents that the quality of your attention is as important as the amount of it you give. Nervous energy is a connection inhibitor for kids just as it is for adults.

“I’ve had to learn not to show her my anxiety about her loneliness,” a parent of a 14-year-old wrote. “It just makes it worse for her, to feel like a problem. So I’m calm and listen and try not to give too much advice when it’s not asked for, but then I can’t sleep for a week, or until she seems happy again.”

Loneliness is not one thing: It’s an entire region of life, requiring a certain set of skills to move through. Learning to talk about what it feels like and to keep talking about it in a low-stakes way can be an inoculant against worsening isolation. “I think loneliness is common, and we shouldn’t be so frightened of it,” wrote one parent.

Loneliness’s neighbor, solitude, is where we learn to be comfortable with ourselves in the world. There are pleasures accessible only to a solitary person who can give their full attention to their surroundings without the distraction of a companion’s mood. Kids don’t need to believe this is true (try telling a lonely kid that solitude is a gift), but it remains true that adults who are good at being alone are better off than those who aren’t.

Sometimes I think the “loneliness epidemic” is the hallucination of a society that is losing its ability to express, and thereby experience, nuanced feelings. (If you can’t describe something, can you really experience it?) Our attention economy juices our senses continuously, while the consumer economy invites us to continuously optimize, to seek better and better versions of ourselves. A “loneliness epidemic” suggests a cure of compulsory good vibes.

Last year, while doing research for the book I was writing, I joined a series of networking groups through Meetup.com in the hopes of meeting strangers that I could interview. I’d go to a new city and attend a mixer for “new-in-town young professionals” at a gentrification-themed beer garden. These groups are good jumping-off points for people to break into smaller groups where real life can happen, and I was grateful they existed, mostly because they were helpful for my book but also because I had to assume people really did meet friends through them — it seemed statistically inevitable. But these meetups were also somewhat grim. Everyone would spend several hours trying very hard to be upbeat and fun — some people getting drunk right away, out of either enthusiasm or nerves — and I imagined each person I met collapsing with relief upon getting home to their sparsely furnished starter condos at the end of the night, alone at last.