Friendship Feelings – Exploring Healthy and Unhealthy Friendships
A reflective resource to help children recognise how friendships should make them feel and how they should help their friends feel.
Support children in exploring the emotional impact of friendships so they can build healthy, positive, and respectful connections.
Friendships play a huge role in a child’s emotional world. They shape self-esteem, confidence, communication skills, and a sense of belonging. But friendships can also be confusing, especially when children find themselves in situations that feel unkind, uncomfortable, or unclear. Helping children recognise the difference between healthy and unhealthy friendships is essential for their wellbeing, emotional safety, and long-term relationship skills.
The Friendship Feelings resource was created to give children the emotional vocabulary and reflective space they need to understand how friendships impact them. Rather than focusing on labels such as good or bad friends, this resource centres on how interactions and behaviours make children feel. Healthy friendships feel supportive, safe, and uplifting. Unhealthy or tricky friendships can make children feel hurt, left out, worried, or unsure.
This gentle worksheet invites children to tune into their feelings, empowering them to recognise signs of supportive relationships and identify situations that may require adult guidance, boundary-setting, or social coaching.
About This Resource
Friendship Feelings is a two-page printable reflection tool that helps children explore emotions connected to friendships. Each page focuses on a different aspect of the friendship experience.
● Page One explores healthy friendship feelings - Children reflect on how healthy friendships make them feel. They may write about feeling happy, included, supported, respected, loved, and safe.
● Page Two explores unhealthy or unkind friendship feelings - Children reflect honestly on how certain interactions make them feel. This can include feeling left out, confused, hurt, worried, jealous, or unimportant.
This structure allows children to identify patterns in how others treat them, recognise their own emotional responses, and build healthier relationship expectations. It also gives teachers, counsellors, and families insight into the child’s social world, helping them support relationship challenges more effectively.
The worksheet is suitable for children aged five and up. It is perfect for classroom work, pastoral sessions, counselling, emotional regulation programmes, and family conversations about friendships.
Features
• Two clear, child-friendly printable worksheets.
• Focus on emotional awareness rather than labels.
• Encourages reflection on healthy and unhealthy friendship behaviours.
• Helps children name and understand their own emotional experiences.
• Supports children in recognising boundary-crossing or unkind behaviours.
• Suitable for therapeutic, pastoral, and educational settings.
• Works well for individual reflection, small groups, or whole-class lessons.
• Designed to be simple yet thoughtful to suit multiple ages.
• Supports safeguarding conversations by giving insight into social experiences
Benefits
1. Helps children understand healthy relationships
Children learn what kindness, respect, and support feel like. This forms the foundation for lifelong positive relationships.
2. Builds emotional vocabulary
Children gain language for naming their feelings accurately, empowering them to communicate more clearly when something feels wrong.
3. Supports social problem-solving
By identifying what makes them uncomfortable or unhappy, children can learn strategies for navigating tricky friendships, setting boundaries, or seeking help.
4. Encourages self-reflection and self-awareness
Children reflect on their own experiences and gain insight into what they value in a friend.
5. Opens up important conversations with adults
The worksheet gives adults meaningful insight into the child’s social world, helping them provide guidance, reassurance, or intervention where needed.
6. Prevents long-term unhealthy patterns
Recognising early signs of unhealthy friendship dynamics helps children avoid repeated negative experiences or peer pressure patterns.
How To Use
1. Introduce the resource slowly
Explain that friendships can bring lots of different feelings, and this worksheet helps us understand those feelings better.
2. Begin with the first sheet: Healthy Friendship Feelings
Invite the child to write or draw the feelings they associate with kind and supportive friendships. Offer examples such as happy, comfortable, included, respected, calm, or excited.
3. Move on to the second sheet: Unhealthy Friendship Feelings
Explain that exploring difficult feelings helps keep them safe and confident. Encourage honesty without judgement.
4. Explore patterns with the child
Ask reflective questions such as:
“What do you notice?”
“Do certain feelings come up more often?”
“Which friendships feel healthy to you?”
5. Offer support and guidance
Use the worksheet as a foundation for conversations about boundaries, peer interactions, emotional safety, or conflict resolution.
6. Revisit over time
Friendships evolve. Repeat this exercise regularly to help children process changing relationships.
This resource supports core social-emotional learning skills, including:
● Self-awareness
Children learn to tune into their feelings and understand their own emotional reactions.
● Social awareness
They consider how others' actions influence their internal world.
● Boundary-building
Recognising unhealthy feelings helps children identify when a friendship does not feel safe or supportive.
● Relationship skills
The worksheet supports communication, empathy, conflict resolution, and relationship-building.
● Emotional regulation
Understanding emotional triggers helps children manage difficult feelings more effectively.
This resource is developmentally sensitive and rooted in psychological insight. Children often struggle to articulate relational discomfort; this tool gives them symbols, words, and prompts to help them express themselves safely.
By focusing on feelings rather than labels, children learn that a friendship can be tricky without calling a friend "bad." This empowers them to navigate friendships with confidence and emotional intelligence.
Friendship Feelings is a gentle, reflective tool for helping children understand the emotional impact of their friendships. By exploring how healthy and unhealthy friendships make them feel, children develop awareness, boundaries, and relational clarity. Adults gain valuable insight into the child’s social world, allowing for supportive interventions, guidance, and relationship education.
This resource promotes self-awareness, communication, and emotional safety, making it a strong addition to any social-emotional learning toolkit.
Help children explore their friendships with confidence using our Friendship Feelings reflection worksheets. Download now to support emotional literacy, healthy relationships, and meaningful conversations about kindness, boundaries, and social wellbeing.
