As our kids start the new school year, we parents hope they will be academically successful, make the team, land a role in the play. But I suspect many parents’ deepest desire is for our kids to find good friends and to fit in without compromising their values.
Making friends may seem easy for kids who are outgoing, athletic, or gifted with humor, perhaps harder for those who are shy, physically different from their peers, or, depending on the school culture, intellectual or artistic. Most kids fall somewhere in the middle; they won’t be the epicenter of all things cool, nor will they be the butt of bullying. Most will ride a pendulum of popularity, eventually finding equilibrium among peers.
Since we parents can’t exactly set up play dates anymore, what can we do to help our kids make healthy friendships and ease the pain when bonds are
betrayed?
Don’t get too hooked into teen angst
It’s okay to identify and empathize with our children’s fears and hopes about their friendships, suggests clinical psychologist Wendy Mogel, but it’s not realistic to believe you should protect them entirely “from feeling sad, angry, afraid, frustrated, or disappointed.”
On the contrary, Mogel advises in The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, children must experience what’s called the “wave pattern” of emotions: “If parents rush in to rescue them from distress, children don’t get an opportunity to learn that they can suffer and recover on their own.” So, if your child is temporarily on the outs with friends, your best bet might be to avoid hooking into his angst rather than analyzing it in detail.
Tips: Help brainstorm strategies, but let your child handle her own feelings. If your child is getting the brush-off from school pals this week, remind her she has other friends: neighbors, summer campmates, members of the church youth group, etc. She could call Grandma for a movie date or offer to baby-sit a neighbor’s kids or walk their dog. In fact, she can stew in her room for a while, write in her journal, pen a poem, or paint a picture.
“To have a friend, be a friend,” I tell my kids. It’s challenging for introverts like me to say hi first and make small talk. But it just might lead to big talk, or true sharing and connection.
Parents need peer support, too
Local family life champion Bill Doherty suggests getting to know your kids’ friends and telling your children what you like about their friends. “Being positive,” he writes in Take Back Your Kids,”allows you to deliver cautions at times without your child feeling you’re always negative about all his or her friends.”
While you’re at it, he says, get to know your kids’ friends’ parents, too. Gathering as adults or families periodically creates opportunities to compare notes about curfews, driving rules, and teenage tastes du jour, and ideally, to build support for your parenting values.
Tip: Model how to be a friend. Do you backbite the neighbors over the dinner table? Do you roll your eyes when so-and-so phones? Conversely, do you call someone who’s had a baby or surgery and offer to bring dinner or lend an ear? Invite the new family at school to join you for a meal? Kids notice and learn these habits from you.
Tap the strength of community
Nurture roots in your community to help your kids grow strong. In The Shelter of Each Other, family therapist Mary Pipher counters anecdotes about children and families roughed up by our toxic culture with healthy examples of families who decide to turn off the TV, insist on family time, teach children they are part of a larger, multigenerational world (not the center of the universe), and offer them meaningful work to keep them grounded. “Communities,” she writes, “are real places with particular landscapes, sounds, and smells. Particular people live there and everyone knows their names. You may not always like each other, but you understand each other. Communities are about accountability, about what I owe you and what you owe me and about what we can and should do for each other.”
Tip: Peers are important to kids, but so are parents and other adults. Don’t forget to invite your teen to do something with you, go to a movie or for ice cream, walk the dog or take a bike ride.
Resources
-The Shelter of Each Other by Mary Pipher, Ph.D. (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996)
– The Blessing of a Skinned Knee by Wendy Mogel, Ph.D. (Scribner, 2001)
– Take Back Your Kids by William J. Doherty, Ph.D. (Sorin Books 2000)
