Friends broaden our children's horizons, share their joys and secrets, and accompany them on their journeys into ever wider worlds. But friends can also gossip and betray, tease and exclude. Children can cause untold suffering, not only for their peers but for parents as well. In this wise and insightful book, psychologist Michael Thompson, Ph.D., and children's book author Catherine O'Neill Grace, illuminate the crucial and often hidden role that friendship plays in the lives of children from birth through adolescence.

Drawing on fascinating new research as well as their own extensive experience in schools, Thompson and Grace demonstrate that children's friendships begin early-in infancy-and run exceptionally deep in intensity and loyalty. As children grow, their friendships become more complex and layered but also more emotionally fraught, marked by both extraordinary intimacy and bewildering cruelty. As parents, we watch, and often live through vicariously, the tumult that our children experience as they encounter the "cool" crowd, shifting alliances, bullies, and disloyal best friends.

Best Friends, Worst Enemies brings to life the drama of childhood relationships, guiding parents to a deeper understanding of the motives and meanings of social behavior. Here you will find penetrating discussions of the difference between friendship and popularity, how boys and girls deal in unique ways with intimacy and commitment, whether all kids need a best friend, why cliques form and what you can do about them.

Filled with anecdotes that ring amazingly true to life, Best Friends, Worst Enemies probes the magic and the heartbreak that all children experience with their friends. Parents, teachers, counselors-indeed anyone who cares about children-will find this an eye-opening and wonderfully affirming book.

Some years ago, when my children were twelve and eight years old, our family returned from a two-week vacation-a good and fun trip. We had barely made it through the kitchen door before my son, Will, headed for the phone to call his friend Mitchell and my daughter, Joanna, disappeared into my wife's home office to grab the other phone line so that she could call her friend Miranda. I remember that Theresa and I looked at each other and one of us said, "Well, the family vacation is over." Our children were desperate to be in touch with their friends.

This is a book about the importance of children's social lives, the inevitable tendency of kids to torment and reject their peers, and the redemptive power of friendship. Every teacher and every parent watches children's relationships played out in front of them every day. We see the isolated child standing off to the side; we hear our own children gossip viciously in the car; we see how much our children miss their friends. We are able to call up memories, both joyful and excruciatingly painful, from our own childhood relationships. But our memories are not always a good guide to what we should be doing for our own children. Indeed, our social scars from middle school often lead us to worry when we shouldn't, hesitate when we should intervene, and fixate on our children's painful reports when they are, in fact, growing, coping, and adapting in the best possible way.

Very few grown-ups fully understand what is actually going on when children hurt one another's feelings, when they tease and betray each other. Are kids just "mean"? Why is it so hard to stop children from excluding one another? Why is it so hard for some children to make friends? What makes other kids so popular? Why is it that some children thrive with a friend or two and don't seem to care about popularity, while for others it is a matter of life and death?

I hope that by the time you finish this book, you will have the answers to these and many other perplexing questions. Developmental and clinical psychologists have researched the social lives of children in depth. There is an important body of scientific literature on the subject that has never, to my knowledge, been made available to the public in a comprehensive, reader-friendly form. I have been baffled that there have been no good popular books written about the complexities of children's friendships, social groups, and social cruelty. In addition, I think that the media's focus on the bully and bullying has oversimplified the issue and confused the public. The classic bully scenario is only a tiny part of what goes on among children. Similarly, the media's attention to "cool" kids does not illuminate what goes on with most children.

Best Friends, Worst Enemies is my attempt to take you inside the complex social worlds of children that researchers such as Willard Hartup, John Coie, and Kenneth Dodge have studied. On this journey, my clinical knowledge and my classroom observations-as well as my experiences as a parent-will guide you into the lives of children. The map I will employ to prevent us from getting lost in these complicated interactions has been drawn from the work of distinguished social scientists. We will travel the superhighways of popularity and the back roads of intimate friendship. We will begin at my daughter's birthday party, seeing the tensions among twelve-year-old girls from the point of view of a parent. We will then go out into day care centers and schools and observe children leaving their mothers, playing with their toddler buddies, trying to find friends, and loving one another with great loyalty. We will talk to members of cliques in middle school and end up in high schools, where classmates haze one another cruelly-and forge lifelong, intimate friendships. I trust that Best Friends, Worst Enemies will illuminate the sometimes invisible forces that drive children's groups.

Best Friends, Worst Enemies also aims to provide teachers and parents with practical strategies for dealing with difficult social conflicts among kids. The last two chapters of the book will offer educators and parents concrete suggestions for creating more harmonious school environments and for supporting children's friendships at home and in the neighborhood. If you are a teacher, you should be able to read this book and know if you have an unusually cruel or dangerous situation in your classroom or if a rejected child needs a serious intervention. If you are a parent, you should be able to finish this book and know the answer to the question that most parents ask every day: "Is my child okay?" This book should tell you whether your child is doing okay socially or whether he or she is at risk and needs additional support.

Before we embark on this journey, there are a couple of introductions I need to make. First, I need to explain the point of view of this book. It is written through my eyes and experience as a child psychologist, school consultant, and parent. I couldn't keep the parent part of myself out of this book; I'll tell you why below. Second, I need to explain why this book doesn't emerge primarily from my work with children in therapy, as did my earlier books on the psychology of boys.

Third, I need to introduce the "we" behind the "I" voice that is used throughout the book, because Best Friends, Worst Enemies is the result of a collaborative effort of three people. We have chosen to write in the "I" voice, through the lens of my training and experience, because it is clearer for the reader. But my two collaborators, Catherine O'Neill Grace and Lawrence J. Cohen, have been instrumental at every stage in the creation of this book. All three of us possess extensive but very different experience with students in classrooms and with our own children. Finally, I want to introduce you to some of the children who will appear and reappear through Best Friends, Worst Enemies because they have been our best teachers.

Child Psychologist, Consultant, and Parent

This book is written, as I said, from the point of view of my three identities-child psychologist, school consultant, and parent. I was trained to be a child psychologist, to do play therapy with small children and talk therapy with older kids and adults. I also was trained to conduct family meetings with children and parents together-and that's what I have done very happily for more than two decades. Over the past ten years, however, I have moved steadily out of the quiet and relative safety of my office into the rough-and-tumble world of psychological consultation in schools. The halls and classrooms of school buildings have provided an opportunity to see children at work-struggling to develop skills, meeting adult demands, avoiding some schoolwork, loving their friends, hating their enemies, and ultimately trying to feel good about themselves.

There are many wonderful moments in a school day, but schools are not sweet places. Any given school day can be ferociously painful for a child, as intense an emotional experience as anything one hears described in a therapist's office. Over the years, my work in schools evolved and I began to conduct workshops for teachers to help them understand the psychological forces swirling around them, which they cannot often stop to ponder during the fast-paced school year. I became a teacher of teachers. And then, as schools began to take more responsibility for educating parents, I was increasingly asked to address issues that concern them as well. Since 1990 I have run workshops for parents and teachers on twenty-two topics, including childhood depression, eating disorders, parent-teacher communication, and the emotional lives of boys. I am perhaps best known for my work on the psychology of boys, contained in two books: Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, which I coauthored with Dan Kindlon, Ph.D., and Speaking of Boys: Answers to the Most Asked Questions About Raising Sons. But I have also had an abiding interest in friendship, popularity, and social cruelty in children's lives and have conducted parent-teacher workshops on these issues for years. In fact, issues about children's friendships are closest to my heart. Parents have shown me that these are the issues in children's lives that they least understand. No speech that I give draws a bigger audience. No topic produces such agonized questions from both parents and teachers. No problem baffles veteran teachers in the way that a poisonous class dynamic does. And no teacher suffers more visibly than one who must witness the daily humiliation of a rejected child and not know how to stop it.

It would have been impossible for me to write this book just from the point of view of a psychologist or just from the point of view of a parent. Those two experiences have absolutely complemented one another. As a psychologist, I have seen rejected children in therapy and have worked with school administrators to try to help them. As a parent, I have watched my children make friends, lose friends, say dumb things, and miss social cues that were obvious to me. I have also seen my own kids discover solutions to social problems that never would have occurred to me.

Social Cruelty Is Out in the Open

Best Friends, Worst Enemies describes the ongoing drama of psychological pain and creativity in childhood. Some of the stories in this book are tragic; a couple of them end with the death of a child. Despite these tragedies, this book is not about mental illness nor, for the most part, is it about children who need to be in therapy. Arguably, more children should receive psychotherapy for social problems. Rejected children do suffer terribly. Certainly, helping excluded children is a major part of what guidance counselors do in elementary schools. However, the loneliness that children feel is not typically a complaint that brings children into a psychologist's private office.

Why not? Because there is a certain amount of social cruelty that we all live through without needing help. A woman was telling me that her daughter suffered some stinging experiences in school that she cannot forget. "She's thirty," said the mother, "and she still talks about them." The daughter was hurt. Those stings shaped her life, and yet she did not necessarily need treatment for what happened to her. The ongoing paradox is that some children experience intense pain and grow from it, while other kids are crushed by their peers.

For me the interesting thing about children's social lives is that the psychotherapy office doesn't offer the best vantage point from which to view the action. Unlike the hidden traumas of childhood, such as incest or physical abuse, when peers are tormenting a child the torture most often takes place out in the open, where almost everyone can see. The social phenomena that I describe in Best Friends, Worst Enemies are right under everyone's nose. Let us say, for example, that a girl has been devastated by the teasing she experiences at a middle school dance. The comments made by boys were hideously painful for her, and everyone witnessed her humiliation. Her classmates overheard the remark "ugly dog," and though the adult chaperones couldn't hear the comments, they understood the nature of the drama. What happens the day after the dance? The victim of that teasing will want to forget the incident as quickly as possible. She is highly unlikely to seek counseling for what happened to her. She might never make it to a counselor's office, though she cries herself to sleep for three nights and carries an enduring sense of shame for the rest of her seventh grade year.

This one example illustrates how my profession does not give me a special window on the social realms in which children live. To write this book I had to rely on a wide variety of my professional and life experiences, not on my work with children in therapy.

The Best Friends, Worst Enemies Team

I knew that I could not write this book alone. First, I wanted the help of a woman, because my experience and the research suggest that the texture of girls' friendships is different from that of boys' friendships. In this area my gender was a limiting factor-and the fact that I am the father of a daughter could broaden my experience only to a certain extent. I turned to Catherine O'Neill Grace for help. Catherine had been my editor at Independent School magazine for many years.

Catherine grew up in a Foreign Service family, so she and her parents and older brother bounced around the world a good deal as she was growing up. This meant befriending and then saying good-bye to a series of friends during her elementary school years. "The advantage of a childhood like that is that you learn to meet new situations with confidence and interest," Catherine says. "But underneath there's a lot of anxiety. You walk into a new school wondering, Do I know the social rules? Are my clothes okay? Will they think I'm cool?' I used to study the social customs of my peers like an anthropologist deep in the Amazon."

Throughout this book, even though it is written in the "I" voice, you will benefit from Catherine's personal experiences, her intuition about children, and her years as a middle school and high school English teacher. Though she isn't teaching teenagers at present, she lives among them on the campus of Chapel Hill-Chauncy Hall, a day and boarding school in Waltham, Massachusetts, where her husband, Don, is head of school.

My other coauthor, Lawrence J. Cohen, is a psychologist and the author of a magical book about the play between children and their parents entitled Playful Parenting. Larry is a gifted therapist and writer in his own right and has helped enormously with the research for this book.

Of the three of us, Larry is the shyest. When he was in high school in New Orleans, he was accepted, but he always felt like an outsider. "Watching movies and reading novels, you get the idea that they are all written by outsiders getting revenge on the popular kids. But you don't have to be rejected to feel like an outsider," says Larry. "I was accepted, but like most people I had experiences that made me feel like an outsider. I was also shy. It was drama club that allowed me to be more visible. The breakthrough for my shyness was Arsenic and Old Lace, when I played Dr. Einstein, and later when I appeared in an Elaine May play called Adaptation. The nonjudgmental camaraderie of the drama kids was important to me."

For the record, and because I have revealed something about Catherine and Larry's social struggles, I must confess that I was often physically timid and frightened in middle school. When it came to team sports, it was difficult for me to be in the popular group. I have vivid memories of the seventh grade athletes, some of them my friends, who seemed to me to have a lock on cool, because they played baseball well. I hated the sports hierarchy and envied the physical ease of other guys. In contrast to them, I was a constant-and almost certainly annoying-talker. I was al-ways trying to please, always trying to entertain, always feeling that I was just outside the inner circle.

Children Were Our Best Teachers

Over the course of two years Larry, Catherine, and I interviewed more than eighty children, teenagers, parents, and teachers. We gathered material not only from these formal interviews but also from my school consultation work, Larry's clinical work and his work on committees at his daughter's elementary school, and Catherine's experiences as a class-room teacher and member of a boarding-school community. I ran work-shops on the subject of classroom cruelty with hundred of teachers and conducted assemblies with several thousand middle school students, inviting questions, discussion, and stories from participants at each event.

We relied on our families as well. Larry's daughter, Emma, age ten, and my two children, Will, ten, and Joanna, sixteen, conducted an unplanned course in the vicissitudes of friendship for us. Each day they lived out social pleasures and group tensions, and we watched intently. I hope we weren't too intrusive; we certainly learned a lot from them. At times Joanna would appear briefly at our meetings held in my house and would answer questions from us. All three of our kids have read portions of this manuscript and have given us permission to use their stories. We have disguised the names of some of their friends and identified others who have also given us permission to use their real first names.

Catherine's goddaughter, Alex, who is nineteen, and her niece, Maeve, twenty, were a unique source of perspective. They were enormously helpful in providing us with stories about their own friendships growing up. Beyond that, they had the psychological maturity to share observations about their history with their parents and how that played out in their social development. Catherine also had a rich source of anecdotes from the students at Chapel Hill Chauncy Hall and from her essay-writing class at the Middlesex School. We have used these students' stories and writings. I was privileged to read the essays on friendship written for Mr. Zamore's senior writing class at Belmont Hill School, where I am the consulting psychologist.

Without the first-person testimony of many children, Best Friends, Worst Enemies would be as dry as the proverbial dust. If we have done our job, it will be the stories of children that make this book a memorable journey for the reader. We hope you will see children discovering their capacity for love, suffering from arbitrary and painful rejection by their peers, and developing their social creativity. The richness of children's friendship is the source of inspiration for this book. The pain of rejected children gives Best Friends, Worst Enemies its sense of mission. We hope the reader will leave us with new insights about the misery and the magic of childhood social relationships.

Excerpted from Best Friends, Worst Enemies by Michael Thompson, Ph.D., and Catherine O'Neill Grace with Lawrence Cohen, Ph.D. Copyright © 2001 by Michael Thompson, Ph.D., and Catherine O'Neill Grace, with Lawrence Cohen, Ph.D.. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Tags: Child Development, Child Psychology, Parenting and Families, Friendship and Friends

About the Author

Michael Thompson, Ph.D., is a psychologist, lecturer, consultant, and former seventh-grade teacher. He conducts workshops on social cruelty, children's friendships, and boys' development across the United States. He is the author of Speaking of Boys and coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Raising Cain, as well as Best Friends, Worst Enemies, with Catherine O'Neill Grace and Lawrence J. Cohen. The father of a daughter and a son, he and his wife live in Arlington, Massachusetts.

About the Author

Catherine O'Neill Grace, a writer and editor, is a former elementary, middle, and high school teacher, and was the editor of Independent School magazine. She wrote a column for young readers about health and psychology in The Washington Post for fifteen years, and is the author of numerous nonfiction books for children. She and her husband, a headmaster, live on the campus of a boarding school near Boston.

About the Author

Lawrence J. Cohen, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist specializing in children's play, play therapy, and parenting. He is the coauthor, with Michael Thompson and Catherine O'Neill Grace, of Best Friends, Worst Enemies, a book about children's friendships and peer relations. He is also a columnist for The Boston Globe. Dr. Cohen leads Playful Parenting workshops for parents, teachers, and child-care professionals. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, with his wife, Anne, and their daughter, Emma.