The Lost Art of Friendship

For kids to bond, they need time together doing an engaging activity.  For toddlers and pre-school children, we arranged  times for friends to meet with our children, either by joining “play groups” where parents and their children meet weekly at parks or other child-friendly locations, or by inviting children over to our house for “play dates.” As our children entered school, there were many more opportunities to meet with friends in addition to play dates, including parties, organized sports, and clubs.  The key was to make sure that our children were spending time with their friends in engaging and positive activities. 

After we’d planned a meeting for our kid’s friends, we’d start planning engaging activities for them.  Engaging activities are activities that interest and engage the children, while allowing them an opportunity to interact with each other.  To set up the best environment to attract friends, we wanted to create play times with our child unique from their friend’s other play experiences.  While we didn’t need to have all of the latest and greatest toys and resources, we did try to purchase one or two unique and age appropriate activities that kids might not have at their own home. For instance, we were the house that had swings and a slide, or the toy with all the fascinating parts and little people, or the house with the finger paints and other art supplies.  When we didn’t have the resources to purchase unique toys, we provided novelty by hosting creative activities.   We took the kids to the park to teach them outdoor games, hosted dress-up parties (nail polish is a big draw) and allowed the entire family room to be turned into a giant blanket fort.  For a while, we were the only household that allowed rubber band gun fights, and we couldn’t keep the boys away.  They key is to provide an engaging activity that will consistently draw your kid’s friends to them.

Not all engaging activities are pure “fun” or “play.”   Our kids formed stronger bonds over activities with a purpose than they did with entertainment activities.  Some of our kid’s strongest bonds of friendship have been formed while helping us with chores and projects around our house, or with community service like landscaping our high school, building houses for the homeless, or serving at our local church.  It’s not unusual for our children to tell their friends that they have to spend 2 hours on a Saturday landscaping before they can play, and have the friend offer to come over early to dig in the yard or haul wheelbarrows.  Other parents are amazed that their children are eager to join us in “work,” but we find that children get deep gratification from activities that have a purpose, or that teach them a new skill.  When we take a group of teenagers to Mexico each year to build houses for the homeless, we work them all day like adults, but then they tell us things like, “this is the hardest I’ve ever worked, and the most tired I’ve ever been, but it’s also the most fun I’ve ever had.  I’d rather do this than take a vacation at an amusement park.”  In that week, those teenagers form permanent and inexplicable bonds with our children that go much deeper than the normal disruptive forces of teenage life.

For friendships to grow, friends need to know they are physically and emotionally safe, and that they are valued and cherished.  Physical safety means that toddlers and pre-school children don’t bite, grade school children don’t hit, and teenagers, especially girls, never feel physically threatened in our home. Children feel emotionally safe in our house because toddlers don’t scream, school children don’t call each other names, middle school children aren’t cruel to each other, and teenagers aren’t duplicitous.  Since we value physical and emotional safety for both our children and their friends, we intentionally trained each of these negative behaviors out of our children, through modeling, instruction, and discipline.  We’ve even caught them being champions of physical and emotional safety (“You shouldn’t call her that mean name.”).

Because we value people, we trained our children to value and cherish their friends and acquaintances.  We’ve all met the socially inept child that struggles to make friends, but what was it about that child that kept them from forming friendships?  It’s often that they don’t value other children with their time, respect, conversations, and resources.  We’ve noticed that children who love others are generous: they listen to their friends instead of dominating the conversation and always talking about themselves.  They share their toys and games, and concede their opinions and desires to their friends; they don’t insist on doing their favorite activity every time they play.  This is not to say that generous children are pushovers or doormats, because our children have very strong opinions and personal presence; but we’ve trained them to consider their friend’s preferences and desires when choosing their activities.  When we’d invited an artistic child over to play, our kids didn’t expect an athletic experience, so they’d offer up a couple of their favorite artistic activities, like drawing or making crafts.  With their more athletic friends, they’d suggest riding scooters or playing ball.

Friendly children often have strong personalities, which attract other children, but they are also polite and kind to the children who gather around them.  As we train our children to be loving and kind, which is a difficult and ongoing endeavor, we can’t just instruct them at home alone in a vacuum.  When they play with friends, we monitor their activities, correcting and directing them to be safe, kind, and generous.  Especially when they were very young, it was tempting to drop them into a group of children and run to another room so we could take a break with other parents. Instead, we found that if we wanted to train our children to be good friends, we had to be actively involved with them while they played.  If they were being selfish with toys, or reacting to conflict physically, or being mean and rude, we had to be there to correct them or even discipline them, taking an active role in their social development.  

The Art of Natural Consequences

When adults are foolish, they receive the natural consequences of their actions.  For instance, when they act dangerously, they are physically injured.  When they are rude, mean, or hurtful to others, they lose relationships.  When adults act stupidly, they suffer financially.  Because life has these natural consequences, we do our best to make the “punishment fit the crime,” making the discipline as close to the natural consequence of breaking the rule as possible. When a child wouldn’t share their toys, we took away a favorite toy.  When they threw a fit (which is a demand for attention), we gave them a time-out away from other people.  When older children broke something through disobedience, (“don’t slam that glass door, or it will break!”), we had them participate in the repair work, either financially or as a helper.

When our teenage daughter violated our “only use nail polish remover on the bathroom counter” policy, she learned how to refinish Becky’s brand new kitchen table the hard way (did you know that nail polish remover dissolves Styrofoam cups in a really cool way, but doesn’t stop when it hits varnish?).  We weren’t always able to make a good fit, but were always searching for creative discipline to match the infractions.  Surprisingly, when we asked the kids for their suggestions, they often came up with very creative disciplines, especially when it was for their siblings!

Each child is different, valuing different objects or freedoms.  For our introverted pre-teen, we found that just the threat of removing his bedroom door was enough to correct a serious behavior problem.  For our extroverted teenager, one day’s restriction from the cell phone was much harder than a week’s restriction from any other activities or objects.  Some children’s personalities will only require a stern look and the threat of discipline, while others will require draconian measures before they will change a bad behavior.  Make sure to study your child to see how they’re built, so you’re administering a discipline that is personalized and appropriately restricting to cause a change in behavior.

At first, we were concerned that removing a favorite toy or object would bond the kids tighter to that object, and make it a problem in the future.  However, our experience was just the opposite.  When they received the security blanket or plush toy back at the end of the discipline, they bonded to it for a short time, but then abandoned it in the long term.  They learned that no object is truly secure, and began to find their security in other, more appropriate places.  In our materialistic society, we’re surprised to find that none of our teenagers are tightly bonded to any of their possessions.  They may value what an object represents, like the communication from a cell phone, the enjoyment of a video game console, or the freedom of a vehicle, but they don’t mourn the loss of any of these objects if they are broken.

The Art of Group Dating

The first part of our plan was to encourage our children to have positive interactions with the opposite gender, as early possible.  In pre-school, they were happy to engage in play activities without regard to gender.  By grade school, they seemed to have a natural draw to spend time within their own gender, but we still encouraged them to form cross-gender groups and partnerships for school projects, and to interact with family friends of the opposite gender in social situations.

Once our kids hit the pre-teen years of middle school, we began encouraging them to participate socially in what our friends called “group dates.”  We wanted them to learn how to interact with other kids of the opposite gender, and begin to assess which personality traits they valued in people of the opposite gender, without the intimacy of one-on-one dating situations.  Group dating allowed our kids to have the kind of social interaction that allows exploration in an emotionally safe environment.  It gave them opportunities to become familiar with a new boy or girl by interacting with their group of friends, outside of the pressure and awkwardness of a formal date.  Here are some guidelines to help your kids with successful group dating:

All events should be adult supervised.  For pre-teens, this means parental supervision.  For teens, it can also include other adults at supervised events like school socials and dances, church youth gatherings, and birthday parties.  Your supervision shouldn’t be suffocating, but you’ll want to keep an eye on what’s going on.

Parental planning and facilitation. In the pre-teen and young teen years, parents should be involved in the planning, to help orchestrate a successful social event. You may also need to host in your home or drive all the kids to an event.

It’s best to start with large groups.  Even if the boys and girls stay grouped by gender for most of the social activity, they will at least begin to get comfortable having each other around.  As your kids get more comfortable breaking the ice and interacting, you can reduce the size of the groups.

Odd numbers are best.  You want to avoid pairing off, so an odd number of kids are best, but not required.  For special events, like formal school dances, this may not be possible, but the goal is to avoid the pain of adolescent infatuation.  Double-dating is OK for teens, as long as the goal isn’t to begin a “steady” relationship.

Have them bring a friend.  When inviting friends of the opposite gender to a social event, the most common question is, “who else is going to be there?”  No awkward pre-teen wants to be the only boy or girl at an event.  We recommend all invitations to mixed social events always either extend an invitation to bring a same-gender friend, or clarification that a close friend is also being invited.  Don’t be surprised if everyone needs a separate phone or text message conversation with all of their friends to make a group decision before accepting the invitation.

The Art of 12 to 14 Year Olds

We take keen interest when we observe other parents transitioning their children into the early teen years.  We’ve found the age of about 12 years old through about 14 to be a pivotal time in parenting, and see many families struggling during this transition.  In the same way that toddlers challenge barriers during the “terrible twos,” young teens will have an awakening to their surroundings, and initiate intense challenges to their existing barriers.  They will begin to ask for more privacy and unsupervised time both inside and outside the home.  They’ll want to make their own choices about social activities, clothing, and peer groups.  They’ll want to coordinate and plan the logistics for their activities by themselves (leaving their parents to fill any gaps at the last minute!), and will push against curfew and bedtime restrictions.  They’ll want to have more control over how money is spent on them and their friends, and more influence over shared resources like the family room television and car rides to activities. Boys who worshipped their mother will suddenly reject her and demand time and attention from their fathers.  Conservative girls will suddenly desire makeup and revealing clothing.  This “social growth spurt” seems to catch confident, successful parents of grade-school children off-guard, and because they haven’t anticipated the change, or planned a strategy for dealing with this change, it throws them for a loop.

At this critical time in childrearing, we often see parents take one of two unhealthy approaches.  They either decide that they’ve done enough parenting, and essentially let their teens run wild, or are afraid to let go of the grade school years, and exercise tight control over their children.  Either out of parenting exhaustion, or overconfidence in the foundations they’ve laid, some parents of young teens will collapse under the onslaught of demands for new freedoms and privileges, and give their young teens or pre-teens far more unsupervised freedom than they’re equipped to handle.  When these teenagers start making really poor decisions and getting into trouble, the parents are forced to back up and assert more authority and control.  This reversal creates a crisis where parents have to add unpopular new rules and limits, and the teenagers rebel against the changes and loss of their previous freedoms.  Their rebellion requires more draconian restrictions, and the relationship between the parents and teenagers spirals downward.

Alternatively, some parents will resist teenage growth by staunchly limiting their teens to the rules and freedoms established in grade school.  The parents will continue to exert unwavering control over clothing choices, social activities, friendships, and family resources.  They treat their teenagers like young children instead of adults-in-training, and the teens will often rebel against their parents, sometimes as late as young adulthood.  We’ve seen a number of “good” kids go off to college or a career unprepared to establish self-discipline in their lives, and make disastrous, life-changing errors in judgment.

We didn’t see either of these approaches as healthy, and instead choose a planned, guided approach to training our teenagers how to handle the responsibilities that come with pre-adult freedoms.  Each time one of our teens pushed against an established boundary, we reviewed with them the skills and experience adults used to manage that freedom, and built a plan to help our teen grow into successfully managing that new freedom.  Sometimes, they would be ready to take on a new freedom or expanded boundaries right away, and we would release them with a plan for managing their progress.  Most times, we would review what would need to change or improve before our teenager could take the next step.

For example, our pre-teens began asking to join friends at local parks without supervision.  Because they had demonstrated their ability to resist peer pressure, and to make good decisions with groups, we gave them some new rules around park visits (know who the friends are and get parental approval in advance, travel to and from the park with friends, establish a time they’re expecting to return, plan to be home before dark, and carry a cell phone), and expanded their freedom around park visits.  Because they were still children, they occasionally violated the new rules, or made some bad decisions, and we either discussed the ramifications of their actions, or disciplined them by temporarily restricting their park visits, as appropriate.