Worried Mother

Dear Mrs. Radcliffe,

We have recently moved to a new city and my daughter has just entered high school here. She has had no difficulty fitting in, and in fact, has already started to bring friends home. Unfortunately, I am not impressed with the girls I am meeting. I know that there are many fine families in the area – one of the reasons we chose this neighborhood; I’m sure the girls my daughter is befriending are not the best choices. I don’t know how to get her to select a better group for herself. I haven’t said anything yet to my daughter – I wanted your advice on how I should approach the subject.

Awaiting Your Advice,
Worried Mom

Dear Worried Mom,

You are correct to be concerned. Friends have enormous influence on children. Some researchers in the past few years have suggested that peer group influences actually affect youngsters even more than genetics or the childhood home! I don’t personally agree that friends outweigh everything, but I will concede that they do have an impact.

Parents instinctively appreciate the potential influence of friends and often try to steer their children toward “good” social choices. Moving into a particular geographical area (including a particular country, city and suburb!) is one way of helping this process along. Choosing a particular school system and particular school within that system are other ways of trying to control the peer influences on our children. Sometimes, parents will even attempt to select a particular class within the particular school. However, try as we might, our kids remain individuals with their free will intact. Children ultimately choose their own friends from within the circle we have drawn around them.

When children are toddlers and parents arrange “play dates,” parents can and do select the small circle of potential friends for their youngsters. However, even then, the little ones choose again within that circle, liking some and disliking others. Parents cannot narrow the circle to such a small size once the children enter school. All the way from kindergarten to high school, children choose their own friends from that larger pool.

Adults, of course, also choose their own friends. If your mother suggested that you should get some “better” friends, I’m not so sure how pleased or how compliant you would be. We are attracted to whoever we are attracted to and we are uninterested in those who do not, for whatever reason, appeal to us. No one can instruct us to like people we don’t like (although we’ll be nice to everyone hopefully!). All people of every age, choose friends based on a “feel.” It’s not a rational, intellectual decision. Your adolescent daughter doesn’t sit down with pen and paper to determine the pros and cons of each person she encounters. Rather, she naturally feels comfortable with some people more than with others and selects those people to interact with on a more frequent and closer basis. It is the subconscious mind that chooses friends. Friendship is a good feeling, not a good decision.

But what if the subconscious feeling mind leads a child to make bad friendship choices? Can a parent intervene and re-direct the child? Most parents who have tried to comment negatively on their child’s friends encounter strong resistance. Children and teenagers usually feel defensive when their friendship choices are challenged and they often react vehemently. Being critical of a friend is like being critical of the child herself. In challenging the friendship, you are challenging the child’s essence – the core of who she is, for it is that core that drives her friendship choices. Some children react to their parents’ criticism by forging even stronger bonds with their “bad” friends.

Nonetheless, if you are worried for your daughter’s development or well-being, you won’t want to stand silently and passively aside. You can help your daughter – but not with negativity. Do not criticize her friends. Never say anything bad about them. However, you can help build up your daughter’s self-concept (which will change who she selects as friends eventually) by giving her lots of positive feedback for everyday small behaviors (such as comments on her humor, her good taste in clothing, her clever ideas, her helpfulness and so on), and also just being with her in a relaxed, loving way (chatting, joking, discussing interesting topics) and in general, building a positive relationship, relatively free of criticism and complaint. Your admiration and obvious enjoyment of her can help her see herself in a positive light and it is that self-concept (her “feel” of herself) that determines her selection of friends over the long run. Invest in your daughter’s future selection of friends by showing her where she is “right” rather than where she is “wrong.” We all go from strength to strength.