Friendships can be hard to navigate at any age. But does anyone else remember being a teen or preteen trying to navigate them? There’s added pressure and hormones and immaturity – It’s just not fun.
And teen and preteen friendships become a whole new level of hard when you’re not navigating them firsthand. A.K.A., when you’re a parent, guardian, or general, loved one of a teen or preteen.
Sometimes, it can seem like your child has plenty of friends, always coming home from school with stories and new names or constantly texting people on their phone, but when it comes to invitations to parties or hangouts, they never received any. Then, when your child becomes distressed about not being invited somewhere, you’re baffled, too, because you have only seen a limited part of one side of the friendship, which looked promising!
So how in the world are we able to help with that?
Obviously, we can’t force people to be friends with our kids, and we have to give our children the space to navigate personal friendships for themselves. But what we can do is help equip them with the right mentality and a strong sense of self to be confident when it comes to friendships. And that all comes down to one thing: investing.
In today's culture, there is a deepening disconnect between people. While we are spending more and more time on social media (our teens and preteens especially), our social relationships are becoming shallower. The desire for instantaneous gratitude, such as maintaining streaks and growing followers, which presents a false sense of connection, outweighs the desire for the more delayed gratification of cultivating deep friendships. In short, friendships take work, and most of us are too lazy to put the time into them.
There’s a chance your child is not taking the time to invest in true friendships. They may be friendly with a lot of different people but not commit to a specific friendship or group. This is totally fine (in fact, it shows a great sense of maturity), but may make them not a ‘core group’ member and therefore not be invited to everything.
What our children need is 1-2 close friends to invest in and then a friendly attitude with everyone else. With this smaller group (or pair), our children can feel supported and be invited to things that count, but let them know this will take work. They need to show up, commit, and put in the work to gain the friendship they want.
If they already have 1-2 close friends, great! Remind them that friendship is not a numbers game. The quality of friends we have is always more important than the quantity.
If your child hasn’t found a great friend yet, don’t worry. It’s natural for friendships to drift and reconfigure, especially when we’re around 12 to 15. There are new schools, new interests, and new understanding of self – in fact, if our friendships aren’t changing in some way, we may not be growing. Let your child know there will be plenty of opportunities to make close friends in the coming years but the most important thing is to be ready to nurture and cultivate them when they do.
Now, while this mentality is the best thing you can foster in your children, there are a few other things you can do to help spark relationships for them to invest in:
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Take Action
Get your children to initiate their own hangouts to deepen connections with the people they are already friendly with. Not only does this give them a chance to connect further and see if they want to invest in a friendship with this person, but can spark reciprocal invitations that might have otherwise missed out on.
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Embrace Authenticity
Encourage your children to keep doing what they love to find the right friends, not do something just because others they want to be friends with are doing it.
Sometimes, school isn’t the place to find a great friend, so ensure they keep up with extracurricular interests, hobbies, or clubs to find people they already have something in common with.
Tip: This makes it an easy segue to initiate a hangout like above. Encourage your child to invite someone to work on their shared interest together.
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Step in Yourself
One of the best things you can do for your child is be one of the people who love them and want to spend time with them. Fill that space until a great friend comes along, and then continue on after, because family friendships are not a given and need to be cultivated too!
Further, you could reignite preexisting support systems. For example, arrange catch-ups with old family friends or cousins to remind your child that they have so many people who love them already. This is also great for investing in your own relationships that may have slipped through the cracks recently.
Remember to always have an open discourse with your child and ask them what they need before trying to help. You may find they actually prefer floating around friendship groups and not having a set couple of friends, or you may learn of new ways to help support them in this period. Because no matter how hard it may seem for you both, it is just a period of time, and before you know it, there may be too many friendships your child is trying to invest in at once.
For more support, click here for more teen adviceandpreteen advice.
Hoping meaningful friendships bloom for all in 2025!
