Friendship Lessons for All Ages & Stages by: Scholastic Parent Staff
Learn what to expect when it comes to your child's interpersonal relationships with peers, and the best ways to help those friendships flourish.
As parents, our hearts melt when we witness affection between children, because we know it's fundamental to all good human relationships. But like adult love, childhood friendship is not a bed of roses. There are many stages in the development of friendship and many conflicts that loom in the future. All children will experience meanness, betrayal, and teasing. And all children will show bad judgment at times, and will hurt others.
Experiencing all the aspects of friendship — the good and the bad — is a natural part of your child's social learning and growing process, as painful as it may seem at times. Take heart: he will learn how to make and keep friends, as well as how to be a good friend, with your guidance and support. However, you do not have to teach him about friendship. Children naturally recognize that good friendship is reciprocal, affectionate, and reliable. They teach the rules of reciprocity, mutuality, and equity to one another through interactions in play. Your child doesn't need you to manage his social life, but he does need you to provide a steady, supportive environment for his social experimentation.
The Stages of Friendship
Your baby is capable of choosing a friend as soon as she can get off your lap and crawl around. While babies' early friendships are generally restricted to relatives or children of their parents' close friends, research has shown that in group child care, children as young as 12 months do make independent friendship choices (demonstrated by the time they spend sitting next to their playmates).
From ages 1 to 3, physical attraction and mutual liking is the basis of friendship, but toddlers are not capable of sustaining coordinated play. They sit close by one another playing individually — something known as parallel play. To support your child's growing friendships at this age, simply provide opportunities to be with other children, and help resolve occasional conflicts.
Between the ages of 4 and 7, mutual, reciprocal play is the glue of friendship. Children become increasingly able to generate complex fantasy games, taking on roles, giving one another directions, and sharing leadership.
By around age 7, conversation becomes central to friendship. The discussions tend to be about what you have to do to get along in school, to be "cool," to gain social acceptance, and to avoid getting in trouble. Keeping secrets from adults also begins at this stage. While these are not deeply revealing or meaningful to adults (they're usually about who has a "boyfriend" or did something embarrassing at school), they feel intensely exposing to a child.
In middle school, that intimate, self-disclosing relationship that we know as "adult" friendship actually begins. Twelve year olds begin to share real confidences with their friends: their fears, their fantasies, the dysfunction in their parents' marriage. Middle schoolers really begin to open their hearts to each other, which is one reason why friendships can feel like a matter of life-and-death. At this acutely self-conscious age, when one's new identity as a person separate from the family is just beginning to form, betrayal by a friend can feel overwhelming.
The Power of the Group
Young children quickly realize that, by forming a duo or a small group, they can have a strong impact on others. They want to choose their type of play and their playmates. If their play is consistently attractive to others, they may soon recognize that they are popular, so they will declare that they have formed a "club."
Kindergarteners' "clubs" might last for a day or two, but group membership is fluid. By 3rd and 4th grade, however, group membership is much more fixed and the issue of who's "in" and who's "out" is carefully enforced by the social leaders — the "popular kids." By late elementary school, there is a social ladder in every classroom, with the very popular children (15 percent) on top, the accepted group (45 percent) next, followed by the average group (20 percent) and the unclassifiable group (20 percent).
Support Your Child's Friendships
There is a certain amount of normal social pain in childhood. It is part of learning about the complexity of social relationships. You may feel a bit helpless and bewildered when your child's social life becomes more intricate and shifts — when old friends are dropped or when new ones (some of them not to your liking) are added. But remember that you gave your child her first lessons about reciprocity in the first 3 years of life, and you still have an important role as her most trusted adult. If you focus on listening to your child and being open-minded about her friendship experiences, she will continue to turn to you in times of joy and trouble.
Here are some strategies you can use to help your child learn to be a good friend and deal with difficult social situations when they arise.
When Children Are at Risk
While it's upsetting to hear that your child is being excluded, if she falls into her class's accepted group there's no reason to worry. The children in this group — 80 percent of all children — almost certainly have at least one friend, which protects them from experiencing long, lonely days in school.
It is the bottom 20 percent of the children on the social ladder (the unclassifiable group) that psychologists worry about. These children may have no friends at all. They fall into three categories: neglected children (5 percent); controversial children (5 percent); and rejected children (10 percent). Neglected children tend to be very shy, very close to their families, and good students. They don't attract much attention from their peers. Controversial children may have some traits that their peers like, but they also have annoying habits — being a poor sport or having poor hygiene, for example. Rejected children are either overly aggressive from the start and react to being rejected with more aggression, or they become depressed and withdrawn.
Teachers, administrators, and parents have an obligation to help these children. Controversial children need to be coached to give up their annoying habits; rejected, angry children may need counseling. Parents have to help their children find friendships in other venues: youth groups, sports teams, community service projects, or with cousins and neighbors.
School administrators can make a huge difference in the lives of at-risk children, so be sure to talk to them about help they can offer. For example, they might be able to arrange friendship groups that help isolated children connect with a friend. Just six to eight meetings of such a group can have a significant positive impact. Administrators should also implement anti-bullying policies and train teachers to create a socially safe environment in the classroom.
It only takes one real friend to alleviate the worst aspects of loneliness.
Perfectionism holding you back? 3 ways to shift the habit by ideas.ted.com
“Perfectionism is a symptom of something,” Thomas Greenspon PhD, an expert on the topic and a recovering perfectionist himself, told me. “It’s not the disease.”
At its core, perfectionism is about anxiety — you’re afraid of failing or afraid that making a mistake means that there’s something wrong with you. “Perfectionism is more than pushing yourself to do your best to achieve a goal; it’s a reflection of an inner self mired in anxiety,” he adds.
According to Greenspon, the most highly successful people are actually less likely to be perfectionistic, because perfectionism can leave you overwhelmed by doubt and indecision and make it difficult to bring any task to a conclusion.
So what’s driving your perfectionism? Is it about proving your worth to others? Is it about avoiding feelings of shame or judgment? While you may think you’re trying to impress a boss who seems judgmental, oftentimes we’re proving ourselves to our parents — who may or may not still be present in our lives — or to an internalized critic we’ve learned to hear above all others.
Like a lot of anxiety, perfectionism can become a comfortable habit. If we’ve been leaning into it since childhood, maintaining the self-talk that powers our perfectionism feels like a superstition or an indispensable ritual. As entrepreneur and startup cofounder Sehreen Noor Ali says, “Our self-talk becomes like an old friend that maybe should’ve been ditched a while ago.”
Your perfectionism, your old friend, won’t go away overnight. Nor will exercises alone assuage it. So my goal here is to help get you on the road to recovery by suggesting new ways of thinking. Here are three to try:
1. Find the motivation
Like breaking any unhealthy habit, it helps to feel really motivated before you start to tackle your perfectionism. I find this question really helpful: What are you missing out on because you’re scared to be less than perfect?
For example, my fear of being shamed for public speaking held me back from applying for a TED talk. For years I’d made fun of TED to anyone who’d listen. I even wrote an article about how overrated TED talks are. But in truth, I desperately wanted to give one, because I knew they lend credibility to speakers and authors and help you get to the next level in a speaking career.
Voilà, there was my motivation. I also realized that if I was going to be a perfectionist, I’d never reach that level, so I applied to seven various TED and TEDx talks. I got rejected from all of them. It hurt but frankly, I wasn’t ashamed. It felt like a badge of honor; it became a punch line for me.
And then one day I got an email from the TED team asking me to do a talk. Turns out they had seen my submissions and enjoyed them, even though they passed on them at the time. If I hadn’t found the motivation to “ditch that old friend,” as Noor Ali put it, I would’ve missed my chance to land a coveted TED spot, which opened a lot of doors for me.
So what are you missing out on because you’re afraid to be less than perfect? Identify and name that experience, and you’ve found your motivation.
2. Isolate your inner critic
You wouldn’t be a perfectionist without the thoughts that keep you there. Many perfectionists have common barbs we like to fling at ourselves.
Here are some examples of the perfectionistic self-talk I’ve heard in heavy rotation:
What voice speaks those lines in your head? Is it a specific person? Is it you? Can you take a moment to notice the next time you automatically chime in with a justification for your actions? How do you feel when your inner critic takes over? What emotions precede it? What could help calm your anxiety in the moment?
Here’s one way to calm your negative self-talk, and you’ll love it because it involves a little self-criticism. I say this with love, but being stuck in our heads — ruminating and focusing on our flaws all the time — is very self-centered.
For this method, I have my former therapist Wilma to thank. One day when I was anxious and frazzled about bombing something, Wilma said, “Why do you have to be so special at everything? Whoever told you that?”
I looked at her and said, “I’ve always been special, since I was three years old.”
To which Wilma replied, “Well, who says?”
Who says, indeed? Where did I get the belief that I must be special and outstanding at everything?
Anxiety expert Alice Boyes notes that this narcissism is self-protective. “You end up believing, ‘The only way I’ve succeeded in life or the only way I’m being accepted and loved … is by being excellent, by overdoing everything,’” she explains.
But that’s another thought trap of perfectionism. The truth is that “not being the best at everything isn’t a threat to you. It isn’t a threat to you getting what you want out of life.”
Sometimes when I’m stressing about a looming failure on my horizon, I’ll just tell myself, “Why can’t you do bad work or have a bad day like everyone else?”
Reminding myself that I’m no more special than anyone else is not self-denigrating, and it isn’t a way to let myself off the hook. It’s an act of self-compassion and a way to gently but effectively expose and address the underlying narcissistic tendencies that power perfectionism.
3. Learn to set “enough” goals
Dare yourself to set “enough” goals and practice using only appropriate effort — rather than going all out and putting in extra effort. Appropriate effort is about doing something well but removing undue emotional investment in the outcome; it’s the opposite of our culture’s expectation to always go above and beyond and always do our very best.
Buddhism teacher Sally Kempton writes that appropriate effort is any effort that doesn’t involve struggle. For Kempton, the secret of acting with appropriate effort is to ask herself, “If this were the last act of my life, how would I want to do it?”
How can you bring appropriate effort into your life? Why not practice being a C+ student? I know that probably made some of you gasp, but just hear me out. Not every project demands your best work. What if you gave only 79 percent? What if your next report doesn’t have prose that rises to the level of greatness? The key is to acknowledge the outcome. Will what you do be good enough for your boss? Will what you achieve be good enough for you? The answer to both is, almost surely.
Think about some happy accidents. Was there ever a time when a meeting was canceled or a deadline was extended, and you magically struck upon an idea or a solution that you’d been striving for? When the mind is free, creativity tends to happen. Remember that the next time you’re inclined to overwork and imagine brain space literally opening up as you decide to stop for the night.
To try this, practice on something outside of work. You could use exercise as a stand-in for setting limits on work time. Science shows we need only a certain amount of cardio and strength training every week to achieve our goals. So if you normally exercise for an hour a day, cut it to forty minutes. See what happens. Is the process less stressful? Do you dread the gym less? Here’s a heads-up: if you’ve been conditioned to achieve, as most of us have, this will make you feel like a failure for a short while. But only for a short while.
You may just find that what you gain — more calm, easeful workdays, more unimpeded time and headspace — is worth what you’ll lose in so much anxious striving. And is that such a loss anyway? Of course not. Know that it’s OK to do some things less well in order to have the complete and healthy life you want.
Reprinted with permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted from the new book The Anxious Achiever: Turn Your Biggest Fears into Your Leadership Superpower by Morra Aarons-Mele. Copyright © 2023 Morra Aarons-Mele. All rights reserved.
About the author
Morra Aarons-Mele is the host of The Anxious Achiever, a top-10 management podcast that helps people rethink the relationship between mental health and leadership. Morra founded Women Online and The Mission List, a digital-consulting firm and influencer marketing company dedicated to social change in 2010, and sold the businesses in 2021. She helped Hillary Clinton log on for her first internet chat and has launched digital campaigns for President Barack Obama, Malala Yousafzai, the United Nations, the CDC and many other figures and organizations. To learn more, visit www.theanxiousachiever.com
