$36.99 AUD (NEW RELEASE) + Bonus Webinar
This book is written for parents and professionals, but it’s also designed to be shared with your tweens and teens. Inside, you’ll find the answers to help kids:
- recognise quality friendships
- respond to drama and bullying with greater confidence
- navigate friendship changes and transitions
- understand how trust, boundaries and repair shape friendships
- know their own worth.
If you’re raising a tween or teen, you’ll already know that navigating friendships can be one of the hardest parts of growing up. Your adolescent might be dealing with fallouts, shifting loyalties, group chat exclusions or the mission of making new friends, all during a period of their lives when they are trying to find themselves.
The world itself has changed too. The friendship challenges kids are coming home with feel more challenging, and because of technology, never feel like they leave them. “Go play…” certainly is not enough of an instructional manual anymore. They need a stronger skill set to get them through.
This book gives parents and professionals supporting tweens and teens (8 – 17):
✔️ The “Friendship Smart” framework, drawn from wide-reaching research and three decades of my work with adolescents
✔️ Accompanying Friendship Smart shapes — a powerful, practical tool to open conversations and empower decision making to respond to drama, conflict and bullying with confidence
✔️ Skills to navigate friendship changes and transitions
✔️ A toolkit of options to handle drama, conflict and bullying
✔️ A deeper understanding of how trust, boundaries and repair maintain healthy relationships
✔️ A broader conversation of how technology, loneliness, and modern pressures are shaping friendships
Friendship Smart is filled with:
✔️ diagrams that help explain complex principles
✔️ field-tested “Michelle Mitchell tools”
✔️ ready-to-use scripts your kids will find helpful
✔️ “Dear Adolescents” letters that invite them into the conversation
STOP GUESSING HOW FRIENDSHIP WORKS
Friendships aren’t failing because kids don’t care. They are struggling because too many have never been given the right tools. This is where Friendship Smart can genuinely help.
The Friendship Smart framework is built on three essential elements – safety, chemistry and effort. Every friendship is a unique combination of these elements, and can ‘shift’ depending on the investment each person makes. Below is a glimpse of a few of the twelve Friendship Smart Shapes you’ll discover inside this book.
I am advocating for a future where every young person, regardless of gender, neurotype or social status, has the relationship skills
to build connections that truly sustain them.
Michelle Mitchell
ENDORSED BY THE BEST
This book needs to be in every home - even though Michelle has aimed this for 8+ - friendship dramas start early. Thank you, Michelle, for your passion, for your wisdom and for creating this book to help all our kids, navigate our unpredictable digital world in a way that allows them to benefit from the true gifts of safe human connectedness.
I can't put it more plainly than this, MICHELLE KNOWS KIDS in all their tangles and tribulations! As parents of teens, we have this dual challenge - to be their calm harbour, and yet not make light of how strongly they feel. This book is the most in-depth look at friendship that I have come across and will give you the confidence that you need to walk that line!
In a world where genuine connection feels increasingly hard to find, we need this book more than ever. Michelle has created an invaluable resource, writing with rare warmth and clinical insight to give young people the tools to build friendships that carry them through adolescence and form the foundation for a lifetime of connection.
This is the book every parent needs. Friends matter!!! Michelle provides clear strategies and real-life tips for navigating relationships online and in person. The book is based on research and decades of experience, providing the tools to support children with the social skills needed to thrive in today’s world and to grow into socially competent young people.
Michelle’s book lays on the line the importance of understanding the wide spectrum of adolescent friendships, the good, the bad and everything in between. It is a much needed resource with content that is clear, and easily actionable with advice also directed to teens. A highly recommended addition to your parenting library.
Anxiety can stand in the way of the very relationships that help young people thrive, and when loneliness creeps in, it takes a real toll on their mental health. Healthy, fulfilling friendships are a balm for anxious kids and teens, and this book is the guide we have all been waiting for. Every parent and educator needs to read this one.
This book is a masterful expression of the foundational principles that guide adolescent friendships. It stands as an authoritative guide for navigating the reality of interpersonal relational dynamics when parenting tweens and teens. Michelle has grounded her work in in decades of experience and it has been an honour to be part of the journey.
Friendship Smart is INCREDIBLE!!! I would highly recommend this book for neurodivergent families and those working with teens. It's got so much practical gold in there. Call it the “Friendship Bible”.
WHY I WROTE FRIENDSHIP SMART
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
Once you receive your copy of Friendship Smart, you will also have access to the Resource Hub. This a place where you will find
✔️ Supplementary Resources
✔️ Smart Shareables quotes
✔️ Podcast Episodes
✔️ Additional Friendship Blogs