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Continuing my current theme of how parents can help children through the school years, I move on to a topic that can loom horribly large for children at certain stages of their education – relationships.

Youth culture dwells on relationships with an all consuming passion and young people as a result see perfect relationships with their peers as being the principal purpose of their life.

For most parents, hearing your child weeping into their pillow saying no one likes them, is infinitely worse than hearing they have failed at GCSE.

But somewhere along the road to growing up, children need help to understand that no one will ever love them as unconditionally as their parents and that you have to work with and get along with people who won’t even particularly like you and who you won’t particularly like.

School is where this starts.

Relationships are complicated – as are group dynamics. Particularly in teenage years the landscape can change very quickly.

One line of approach can be to do nothing – encourage the child to focus on school activities that are more reliable and more likely to produce straightforward satisfaction such as their school work, music or sport.

But ‘nobody likes me’ can turn into ‘everyone is being horrible to me’ and depending on the degree of distress, parents will feel they need to act.