You, Your Child, and Your Child's Friends - Children's Social Lives

Excerpted from
The Friendship Factor; Helping Our Children Navigate Their Social World: Why It Matters for Their Success
By Kenneth H. Rubin, Ph.D., Andrea Thompson

Socially competent children almost always have competent parents.

Competent moms and dads are those who are responsive to their children's nature and needs and to the lay of the land at any particular time.

But competent parenting is no simple matter; it's as much about what a parent thinks and feels as it is about what he or she does. Indeed, being the kind of mother or father who-or providing the kind of parenting that-helps a child make friends and get along well with other kids derives from a rather complicated dance, a dance in which both child and parent take turns leading and following.

Think back to when you first welcomed your youngster into the world or adopted him or her into your family and began to discover what this little person was all about. You recognized that a certain cry meant hunger or tiredness, that a crooked grin invited you for a cuddle. You may also have soon enough realized that the same kind of tossing into the air that had your first child shrieking with delight caused this one to wail unhappily-and so you learned that baby tossing can have different consequences with different children, even children born and raised in the same house by the same two parents. And you toned down the horseplay with this son or daughter, while at the same time you kept up the robustness of play that the older brother or sister enjoyed.

Right from the start, in other words, you began to clue in to your youngster's desires and needs, and adjusted your actions to meet them. You recognized that at this stage of the game, your infant or toddler was leading the dance.

Deciding whether a bottle, a nap, or a hug was called for was just the beginning. The dance continues throughout the years of childhood and into adolescence; it gets trickier and the stakes get higher when friends and peer groups come onto the scene. Keeping the dance going requires knowing when to take the lead by setting clear limits, defining expectations, and nudging your child forward along the paths to both independence and appropriate dependence on others.

Some of the research that I will share with you in chapters 3 and 4 concerns precisely this match between how a parent thinks and behaves and what his or her child is like characterologically. Making the right match can be exhausting and emotionally draining for parents, especially at those times when they wish they could just erase their youngster's unhappiness or struggles. But it is essential. We know from many studies that, for example, the parent who is unfailingly warm and affectionate but offers little guidance may end up with a child who finds herself on the outs with her peers. Similarly, the parent who demonstrates warmth and control in all the wrong places and at all the wrong times can actually make matters worse for the child who has trouble making friends or joining kids at play.

Normal behavior is knowable (and not always so nice).

First appreciate what is singular about your son or daughter, and then know what is typical when it comes to children's friendships and groups. In the middle part of this book, you'll see what the latter look like across the age span from toddler to teen.

Normal development can, in fact, encompass a wide range of difficult, troublesome, and shifting behaviors. What's viewed as normal at one age may not be seen that way a short time later. Likewise, some behaviors are considered socially and emotionally normal for boys but not for girls.

(And for that matter, some behavior that is deemed normal in our North American culture isn't accepted as normal in other areas of the world.)

You will see what it takes for a child at each age, and of either gender, to make and keep friends and to be liked. If your preschooler can make himself understood through clear words and gestures, for example, he will probably have little trouble attracting playmates. For your middle-school child, not fighting, lying, or otherwise coming across in outstandingly negative ways is a key to social success. Somewhere during those years, having a best friend may become a crucial element in how your child feels about herself. For the adolescent girl, for example, being willing and able to talk over her emotional ups and downs is what matters most in her friendships.

Even when the passage seems relatively smooth, even when your child is basically getting things right, the peer world can be harsh and cruel. Almost all children are teased at times. Hierarchies dominate the life of the classroom and the locker room; cliques and crowds often rule the roost. Recognizing that some of these unpleasant experiences are part of the territory at any given age will give you, as a parent, a leg up. When you know what to expect when, you're ahead of the game! And you will gain a clearer sense of when to step in and when it's best to stay out of it and allow your child to learn-perhaps the hard way-his or her own social lessons.

Over the broad are of your child's life from preschool to high school, you will almost certainly take on and then cast off a variety of roles-as social secretary or monitor, comforter or adviser, devil's advocate or ally. Later we'll look at the various parenting skills that come into play at different points in a child's development. Even small adjustments in your actions, or reactions, can make the world outside the family a more pleasant place for your youngster, whether he or she is a toddler or a teen.

Not every child can be popular.

And sometimes being popular is not all that wonderful.

Speaking about her daughter's misery at being snubbed by the popular girls in her seventh-grade class, one mother said, "This crowd is a group of pretty girls who have lots of clothes and lots of freedom. They are also mean and bitchy to other kids, as I've seen firsthand. And Molly wants to be part of this group, and isn't."

This mother went on to say that she felt almost as bad about the whole business as her child did, because it was quite awful for her to observe Molly's efforts to be accepted by a group of classmates who had formed a little exclusionary world unto themselves. Maybe you, too, are very much aware of such feelings. A child's seeming lack of popularity-the party invitations are few and far between, the phone doesn't ring very often-can take as much of an emotional toll on the parent as on the kid, if not more of a toll. But the fact is, there may be any number of reasons for a child's high status among peers, not all of them terribly admirable or terribly lasting.

You may recall the movie Heathers (if you haven't seen it, I recommend that you rent it at your local video shop), about three high school girls with the same name: Heather One, Two, and Three. Every kid in school knows that the Heathers are the leaders of the popularity pack. These girls have the best stuff; they act confidently; they wield a lot of influence. They are also cruel, or what psychologists call relationally aggressive, spreading rumors and playing rotten tricks on the unattractive and out-of-it kids. Others long for acknowledgment and acceptance by the Heathers, because this clique can ruin reputations and make life miserable for those they target. But virtually no one trusts them, and no one really likes them.

Many schools and classes have their own Heathers. Typically they're the most visible kids in the group-everyone is aware of them, and the confidence they appear to possess is much envied. That's a kind of popularity, however, that actually says very little about how successful or happy a child will be for the rest of her life. It says very little, too, about a child's ability to make good friends-in fact, the popular child may or may not have such a talent. And most children, even while temporarily longing to be accepted, can distinguish between the peer they respect as a person and the peer they admire, or fear, as the embodiment of social power.

This is not to say that during childhood and adolescence some children-such as twelve-year-old Molly, evidently-won't suffer from being ignored or even tormented by the classroom hotshots. And it's also not to say that it isn't painful being the parent of a seemingly "unpopular" child. What I hope you will take away from chapter 8 is a set of key notions that will help put this whole troublesome matter into proper perspective-so it'll be easier for you to extend appropriate sympathy and support to your child without getting caught up in all the emotional turmoil yourself.

Not every child can be popular, and not every child has to be. Some kids who aren't listed in anyone's popularity polls in fact don't suffer unduly because of their apparently invisible status within their groups-and these kids are capable of forming fine friendships. Other children have a greatly harder time of it, for any of a variety of reasons. These are among the children we call rejected. If not everyone can be popular, rejection is just not where any child should be.