It is never easy to navigate friendship breakups, especially when it involves your kids

Thankfully, the same child Number One had decried as ‘not my friend’ was the first child he bearhugged at the childminder’s the next day. He was also the first child he named as coming to his birthday party next September (we like to plan well in advance).

‘Crisis averted’, I inwardly celebrated as I sped away (and by sped, I mean 30km an hour, because you never know when you might need to swerve suddenly to avoid a mouse or an American tourist). However, even in my momentary glee, I knew this social harmony was temporary. Because when it comes to our children, social fallouts will happen, friendships will end, and all of that as yet untravelled terrain will have to be navigated.

It is one of the parts of parenting I most dread, mostly because I haven’t quite learned how to navigate the heartbreak of losing friends, even as a fully formed grown-up. The real test of parenting is helping our children heal from something we might not be fully healed from ourselves. After all, parenting is the ultimate case of spoofing and hoping you might come off as convincing.

It is never easy when friendships end. Even as an adult, my worst heartbreak was never rooted in romantic love, but in the ending of a friendship.

I was so heartbroken about this friendship’s conclusion that even now my coping mechanism is to bury the memories deep and keep scrolling, should anything related to the person pop up on my Instagram feed. In other words, my usual and perhaps quintessentially Irish approach to anything is basically to make like an ostrich and bury the head right in the sand. It is a coping mechanism that has always served me well (says the woman who became a stand-up to talk through her problems for free).

I know there will be a time when both Number One and Number Two come crying home from school, telling me, through tears, that somebody no longer wants to play with them, that there was a birthday party they weren’t invited to, that there was a trip to the cinema that didn’t include them. When that time comes, my job will be to make them feel better, to offer them comfort, but there is little you can say to take away the sting, especially when you can hardly march up to the offending child’s parents and demand a showdown, as much as you might wish to.

Also, I’m sure, eventually, my children will wish to spend less time with their friends and more time with new ones, because that evolution happens as children’s interests change and their personalities gravitate towards some more than others.

Harking back to my previous teaching experience, I recall a parent asking for advice on how a child might end a friendship with another child. Rather than offering them anything meaningful, my heart instantly went out to the child being excluded. As , of course, that child was once me. Besides being into poetry, I also enjoyed drawing political caricatures at lunchtime, oblivious to how my portraits of Albert Reynolds were pushing my fellow third-grade classmates away.

I have developed a newfound sympathy for the former adult friend who broke up with me a few years ago, because, in her defence, there is no easy way to do it. We preach being kind, and, of course, we all aim to be just that, but it is hard to end things kindly when sometimes being kind to yourself inevitably means being seemingly unkind to others.

All we can hope is that our children find their people, their tribe, but, more than that, that they find themselves and know that even if nobody in the playground wants to play with them, that is ultimately their loss, because they are wonderful. Maybe instilling that confidence is the only real thing we can do as parents, as changing friends will be inevitable.

Especially if that friend rocks up with a caricature of the Taoiseach.