Best Friends?
Posted by Rebecca Teti in News on Monday, June 28, 2010 10:00 AM
“I think it is kids’ preference to pair up and have that one best friend. As adults — teachers and counselors — we try to encourage them not to do that.”
So says the director of counseling at a St. Louis school.
So say many other educators at schools and summer camps around the country in a hotly-contested article in the New York Times.
The counter-argument is expressed by a psychologist also interviewed for the article who asks: “Do we want to encourage kids to have all sorts of superficial relationships? Is that how we really want to rear our children? Imagine the implication for romantic relationships. We want children to get good at leading close relationships, not superficial ones.”
The idea of deliberately breaking up best friends has drawn harsh criticism from all kinds of people. Here’s one of my favorite responses.
It is a bizarre symptom of our hyper-rationalist age that people are forced to articulate why best friends are valuable to kids….Why would you voluntarily make someone’s life so much harder? Having someone with whom you can share the joys and discoveries of early life is a gateway into not just adulthood, but humanity.
The most offensive part of this whole enterprise is that it is aimed at making life easier for administrators, not better for kids. The social life of childhood is frustrating and unwieldy for educators, so they respond by making childhood less complicated.
I am inclined to think the two “sides” here are talking past each other. My own mother discouraged “best friendships” when I was little.
I definitely had close friends I called all the time and spent all my time with; Mom would never have discouraged that. What concerned her was the tendency of kids in school to wield the term “best friend” as a weapon.
That happened a lot in early grammar school days, and I vividly recall being bewildered by it—and by the dizzying speed with which best friends were dropped and changed. Even numbers of kids could play nicely, but in a group of three, someone would inevitably announce that one of the other two was her best friend and try to crowd the other kid out of play.
“Best friend” on the lips of a kid in my second or third grade class was usually a way of marking “ownership” or political status in the classroom—and telling someone else to buzz off—rather than a reflection on a deep relationship.
I don’t think an educator would be wrong to try to head off that dynamic by encouraging group play.
So my opinion comes down to…depends what the meaning of “best friends” is.
Bosom buddy in a genuine relationship that is also open to others? Encourage it.
Political weapon for determining classroom pecking order? Perfectly ok to break it up.
What are your thoughts?
Print Blog
Email a FriendPost a Comment
By submitting this form, you give Faith And Family Magazine permission to publish this comment. Comments will be published at our discretion, and may be edited for clarity and length. For best formatting, please limit your response to one paragraph and don't hit "enter" to force line breaks.
