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brendalaSo, turns out some teachers are actively trying to keep kids from developing best friend relationships.
Here's the text from the NYT article:
=====================================================================
A Best Friend? You Must Be Kidding
By HILARY STOUT
FROM the time they met in kindergarten until they were 15, Robin Shreeves and her friend Penny were inseparable. They rode bikes, played kickball in the street, swam all summer long and listened to Andy Gibb, the Bay City Rollers and Shaun Cassidy on the stereo. When they were little, they liked Barbies; when they were bigger, they hung out at the roller rink on Friday nights. They told each other secrets like which boys they thought were cute, as best friends always do.
Today, Ms. Shreeves, of suburban Philadelphia, is the mother of two boys. Her 10-year-old has a best friend. In fact, he is the son of Ms. Shreeves’s own friend, Penny. But Ms. Shreeves’s younger son, 8, does not. His favorite playmate is a boy who was in his preschool class, but Ms. Shreeves says that the two don’t get together very often because scheduling play dates can be complicated; they usually have to be planned a week or more in advance. “He’ll say, ‘I wish I had someone I can always call,’ ” Ms. Shreeves said.
One might be tempted to feel some sympathy for the younger son. After all, from Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn to Harry Potter and Ron Weasley, the childhood “best friend” has long been romanticized in literature and pop culture — not to mention in the sentimental memories of countless adults.
But increasingly, some educators and other professionals who work with children are asking a question that might surprise their parents: Should a child really have a best friend?
Most children naturally seek close friends. In a survey of nearly 3,000 Americans ages 8 to 24 conducted last year by Harris Interactive, 94 percent said they had at least one close friend. But the classic best-friend bond — the two special pals who share secrets and exploits, who gravitate to each other on the playground and who head out the door together every day after school — signals potential trouble for school officials intent on discouraging anything that hints of exclusivity, in part because of concerns about cliques and bullying.
“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,” said Christine Laycob, director of counseling at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School in St. Louis. “We try to talk to kids and work with them to get them to have big groups of friends and not be so possessive about friends.”
“Parents sometimes say Johnny needs that one special friend,” she continued. “We say he doesn’t need a best friend.”
That attitude is a blunt manifestation of a mind-set that has led adults to become ever more involved in children’s social lives in recent years. The days when children roamed the neighborhood and played with whomever they wanted to until the streetlights came on disappeared long ago, replaced by the scheduled play date. While in the past a social slight in backyard games rarely came to teachers’ attention the next day, today an upsetting text message from one middle school student to another is often forwarded to school administrators, who frequently feel compelled to intervene in the relationship. (Ms. Laycob was speaking in an interview after spending much of the previous day dealing with a “really awful” text message one girl had sent another.) Indeed, much of the effort to encourage children to be friends with everyone is meant to head off bullying and other extreme consequences of social exclusion.
For many child-rearing experts, the ideal situation might well be that of Matthew and Margaret Guest, 12-year-old twins in suburban Atlanta, who almost always socialize in a pack. One typical Friday afternoon, about 10 boys and girls filled the Guest family backyard. Kids were jumping on the trampoline, shooting baskets and playing manhunt, a variation on hide-and-seek.
Neither Margaret nor Matthew has ever had a best friend. “I just really don’t have one person I like more than others,” Margaret said. “Most people have lots of friends.” Matthew said he considers 12 boys to be his good friends and says he sees most of them “pretty much every weekend.”
Their mother, Laura Guest, said their school tries to prevent bullying through workshops and posters. And extracurricular activities keep her children group-oriented — Margaret is on the swim team and does gymnastics; Matthew plays football and baseball.
As the calendar moves into summer, efforts to manage friendships don’t stop with the closing of school. In recent years Timber Lake Camp, a co-ed sleep-away camp in Phoenicia, N.Y., has started employing “friendship coaches” to work with campers to help every child become friends with everyone else. If two children seem to be too focused on each other, the camp will make sure to put them on different sports teams, seat them at different ends of the dining table or, perhaps, have a counselor invite one of them to participate in an activity with another child whom they haven’t yet gotten to know.
“I don’t think it’s particularly healthy for a child to rely on one friend,” said Jay Jacobs, the camp’s director. “If something goes awry, it can be devastating. It also limits a child’s ability to explore other options in the world.”
But such an attitude worries some psychologists who fear that children will be denied the strong emotional support and security that comes with intimate friendships.
“Do we want to encourage kids to have all sorts of superficial relationships? Is that how we really want to rear our children?” asked Brett Laursen, a psychology professor at Florida Atlantic University whose specialty is peer relationships. “Imagine the implication for romantic relationships. We want children to get good at leading close relationships, not superficial ones.”
Many psychologists believe that close childhood friendships not only increase a child’s self-esteem and confidence, but also help children develop the skills for healthy adult relationships — everything from empathy, the ability to listen and console, to the process of arguing and making up. If children’s friendships are choreographed and sanitized by adults, the argument goes, how is a child to prepare emotionally for both the affection and rejection likely to come later in life?
“No one can teach you what a great friend is, what a fair-weather friend is, what a treacherous and betraying friend is except to have a great friend, a fair-weather friend or a treacherous and betraying friend,” said Michael Thompson, a psychologist who is an author of the book “Best Friends, Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Lives of Children.”
“When a teacher is trying to tone down a best-friend culture, I would like to know why,” Dr. Thompson said. “Is it causing misery for the class? Or is there one girl who does have friends but just can’t bear the thought that she doesn’t have as good a best friend as another? That to me is normal social pain. If you’re mucking around too much in the lives of kids who are just experiencing normal social pain, you shouldn’t be.”
Schools insist they don’t intend to break up close friendships but rather to encourage courtesy, respect and kindness to all. “I don’t see schools really in the business of trying to prevent friendships as far as they are trying to give students an opportunity to interact socially with other students in a variety of different ways,” said Patti Kinney, who was a teacher and a principal in an Oregon middle school for 33 years and is now an official at the National Association of Secondary School Principals.
Still, school officials admit they watch close friendships carefully for adverse effects. “When two children discover a special bond between them, we honor that bond, provided that neither child overtly or covertly excludes or rejects others,” said Jan Mooney, a psychologist at the Town School, a nursery through eighth grade private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. “However, the bottom line is that if we find a best friend pairing to be destructive to either child, or to others in the classroom, we will not hesitate to separate children and to work with the children and their parents to ensure healthier relationships in the future.”
====================================
Back when I was a kid, if any teacher/camp counselor had forced me apart from my best friend so I could interact with some new kids everyday, it just would have made me HATE the teacher/camp counselor.
Also, don't teachers have better things to do than keep track of how many friends each student has (like, y'know, TEACHING)? No wonder our education system sucks if it focuses on crap like this!
I had various types of friendships as a kid (bffs, "cliques", etc). And, personally, I prefer to have a few good friends than a ton of fair-weather friends. According to the loons in that article, that makes me a potential bully.
Here's the text from the NYT article:
=====================================================================
A Best Friend? You Must Be Kidding
By HILARY STOUT
FROM the time they met in kindergarten until they were 15, Robin Shreeves and her friend Penny were inseparable. They rode bikes, played kickball in the street, swam all summer long and listened to Andy Gibb, the Bay City Rollers and Shaun Cassidy on the stereo. When they were little, they liked Barbies; when they were bigger, they hung out at the roller rink on Friday nights. They told each other secrets like which boys they thought were cute, as best friends always do.
Today, Ms. Shreeves, of suburban Philadelphia, is the mother of two boys. Her 10-year-old has a best friend. In fact, he is the son of Ms. Shreeves’s own friend, Penny. But Ms. Shreeves’s younger son, 8, does not. His favorite playmate is a boy who was in his preschool class, but Ms. Shreeves says that the two don’t get together very often because scheduling play dates can be complicated; they usually have to be planned a week or more in advance. “He’ll say, ‘I wish I had someone I can always call,’ ” Ms. Shreeves said.
One might be tempted to feel some sympathy for the younger son. After all, from Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn to Harry Potter and Ron Weasley, the childhood “best friend” has long been romanticized in literature and pop culture — not to mention in the sentimental memories of countless adults.
But increasingly, some educators and other professionals who work with children are asking a question that might surprise their parents: Should a child really have a best friend?
Most children naturally seek close friends. In a survey of nearly 3,000 Americans ages 8 to 24 conducted last year by Harris Interactive, 94 percent said they had at least one close friend. But the classic best-friend bond — the two special pals who share secrets and exploits, who gravitate to each other on the playground and who head out the door together every day after school — signals potential trouble for school officials intent on discouraging anything that hints of exclusivity, in part because of concerns about cliques and bullying.
“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,” said Christine Laycob, director of counseling at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School in St. Louis. “We try to talk to kids and work with them to get them to have big groups of friends and not be so possessive about friends.”
“Parents sometimes say Johnny needs that one special friend,” she continued. “We say he doesn’t need a best friend.”
That attitude is a blunt manifestation of a mind-set that has led adults to become ever more involved in children’s social lives in recent years. The days when children roamed the neighborhood and played with whomever they wanted to until the streetlights came on disappeared long ago, replaced by the scheduled play date. While in the past a social slight in backyard games rarely came to teachers’ attention the next day, today an upsetting text message from one middle school student to another is often forwarded to school administrators, who frequently feel compelled to intervene in the relationship. (Ms. Laycob was speaking in an interview after spending much of the previous day dealing with a “really awful” text message one girl had sent another.) Indeed, much of the effort to encourage children to be friends with everyone is meant to head off bullying and other extreme consequences of social exclusion.
For many child-rearing experts, the ideal situation might well be that of Matthew and Margaret Guest, 12-year-old twins in suburban Atlanta, who almost always socialize in a pack. One typical Friday afternoon, about 10 boys and girls filled the Guest family backyard. Kids were jumping on the trampoline, shooting baskets and playing manhunt, a variation on hide-and-seek.
Neither Margaret nor Matthew has ever had a best friend. “I just really don’t have one person I like more than others,” Margaret said. “Most people have lots of friends.” Matthew said he considers 12 boys to be his good friends and says he sees most of them “pretty much every weekend.”
Their mother, Laura Guest, said their school tries to prevent bullying through workshops and posters. And extracurricular activities keep her children group-oriented — Margaret is on the swim team and does gymnastics; Matthew plays football and baseball.
As the calendar moves into summer, efforts to manage friendships don’t stop with the closing of school. In recent years Timber Lake Camp, a co-ed sleep-away camp in Phoenicia, N.Y., has started employing “friendship coaches” to work with campers to help every child become friends with everyone else. If two children seem to be too focused on each other, the camp will make sure to put them on different sports teams, seat them at different ends of the dining table or, perhaps, have a counselor invite one of them to participate in an activity with another child whom they haven’t yet gotten to know.
“I don’t think it’s particularly healthy for a child to rely on one friend,” said Jay Jacobs, the camp’s director. “If something goes awry, it can be devastating. It also limits a child’s ability to explore other options in the world.”
But such an attitude worries some psychologists who fear that children will be denied the strong emotional support and security that comes with intimate friendships.
“Do we want to encourage kids to have all sorts of superficial relationships? Is that how we really want to rear our children?” asked Brett Laursen, a psychology professor at Florida Atlantic University whose specialty is peer relationships. “Imagine the implication for romantic relationships. We want children to get good at leading close relationships, not superficial ones.”
Many psychologists believe that close childhood friendships not only increase a child’s self-esteem and confidence, but also help children develop the skills for healthy adult relationships — everything from empathy, the ability to listen and console, to the process of arguing and making up. If children’s friendships are choreographed and sanitized by adults, the argument goes, how is a child to prepare emotionally for both the affection and rejection likely to come later in life?
“No one can teach you what a great friend is, what a fair-weather friend is, what a treacherous and betraying friend is except to have a great friend, a fair-weather friend or a treacherous and betraying friend,” said Michael Thompson, a psychologist who is an author of the book “Best Friends, Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Lives of Children.”
“When a teacher is trying to tone down a best-friend culture, I would like to know why,” Dr. Thompson said. “Is it causing misery for the class? Or is there one girl who does have friends but just can’t bear the thought that she doesn’t have as good a best friend as another? That to me is normal social pain. If you’re mucking around too much in the lives of kids who are just experiencing normal social pain, you shouldn’t be.”
Schools insist they don’t intend to break up close friendships but rather to encourage courtesy, respect and kindness to all. “I don’t see schools really in the business of trying to prevent friendships as far as they are trying to give students an opportunity to interact socially with other students in a variety of different ways,” said Patti Kinney, who was a teacher and a principal in an Oregon middle school for 33 years and is now an official at the National Association of Secondary School Principals.
Still, school officials admit they watch close friendships carefully for adverse effects. “When two children discover a special bond between them, we honor that bond, provided that neither child overtly or covertly excludes or rejects others,” said Jan Mooney, a psychologist at the Town School, a nursery through eighth grade private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. “However, the bottom line is that if we find a best friend pairing to be destructive to either child, or to others in the classroom, we will not hesitate to separate children and to work with the children and their parents to ensure healthier relationships in the future.”
====================================
Back when I was a kid, if any teacher/camp counselor had forced me apart from my best friend so I could interact with some new kids everyday, it just would have made me HATE the teacher/camp counselor.
Also, don't teachers have better things to do than keep track of how many friends each student has (like, y'know, TEACHING)? No wonder our education system sucks if it focuses on crap like this!
I had various types of friendships as a kid (bffs, "cliques", etc). And, personally, I prefer to have a few good friends than a ton of fair-weather friends. According to the loons in that article, that makes me a potential bully.
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no subject
Date: 2010-06-18 08:22 am (UTC)Why oh why can't we allow for kids to be kids anymore, and to actually learn on their own without being coddled? We're not doing them any favors. This makes me wonder what these 'experts' believe about children befriending children of the opposite gender.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-18 09:04 am (UTC)Personally, I had a lot of "best friend" relationships when I was little (those friendships usually ended when someone moved or we got sick of each other). It hurt a lot when those friendships ended; but I learned a lot from them and I don't think it would have been right for a teacher to butt into those situations.
As someone who was picked on pretty viciously in middle school, I can understand the teachers' desire to encourage kids to be friendly with everyone. But that goal just isn't realistic. Part of being a kid is learning how relationships work and what set-up works best for you. And it's WAY better to learn those lessons as a child than it is to figure it out as an adult.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-18 06:14 pm (UTC)I think it really is important for kids to learn about friendship all on their own. Disregarding what I said above, around the same time I befriended an enemy (so, about 6th grade), a girl in my class had her leg nearly severed by a weed whacker. (She walked up behind her brother who had been trimming plants and she surprised him, causing him to turn his body. And..yeah, I imagine it was pretty gory.) This happened during the school year so she was essentially an invalid, having to stay indoors and off her leg at all times, which meant no playground. Some of her fellow female classmates, myself included, stuck with her. At first nothing came of it, but her newfound popularity went to her head, and at one point she decided I wasn't good enough for the popular scene, so I was cast aside. You hear stories of girls in Japan being ostracized by fellow female classmates, but it happens elsewhere as I learned. None of the girls, save two fellow unpopulars (they were smart and not afraid to let it show) would associate with me after that. Aside from hanging out with my fellow unpopulars (where one was a friend who rode the bus with me, the other didn't like me because years before a guy we both liked dared give me attention), I didn't really have close friends until about midway through 8th grade.
That was a very painful time to go through, but lessons learned then continue to serve me, as when I encounter women who lack sincerity, who get caught up in the popularity game even now, instantly set off an alarm with me. I'm sure people find it odd when I have such a strong repulsion to such people, but having played that game once, I refuse to go through it again.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, my older sister's ex-husband never experienced bullying at all growing up. He has zero empathy or even understanding for people who do go through such things, even as adults. It was pretty shocking to realize this since he saw nothing wrong with talking smack to his then wife's younger sisters (myself and my other sisters), and not understanding why we would react so negatively to him and not want anything to deal with him later on. All things considered, I'd not want to be in his shoes. He's going to have to learn lessons he missed out on as a kid.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-18 07:52 pm (UTC)My best friend in elementary school actually stopped talking to me when I teased her about her plans to marry Jonathan Taylor Thomas (the kid actor from Home Improvement). I still can't believe a 3 year friendship ended over that!
When the teasing got really bad in middle school, I had one best friend who kept me sane through it all. I would have gone crazy (or maybe ditched school every day) if I was kept away from her and forced to play nice with the catty girls who were making school miserable. Lots of bullied kids find comfort in bonding with other underdogs.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, my older sister's ex-husband never experienced bullying at all growing up. He has zero empathy or even understanding for people who do go through such things, even as adults. It was pretty shocking to realize this since he saw nothing wrong with talking smack to his then wife's younger sisters (myself and my other sisters), and not understanding why we would react so negatively to him and not want anything to deal with him later on. All things considered, I'd not want to be in his shoes. He's going to have to learn lessons he missed out on as a kid.
Whoa! Even if he never learned empathy, you'd think someone would have at least taught him simple manners! O_o
no subject
Date: 2010-06-18 11:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-18 01:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-18 01:23 pm (UTC)Best friends aren't bad. And having trouble isn't bad either! That's how you learn to deal we people. Parents should stay informed and swoop in if a child is clearly abusive and abrasive to another. But otherwise...
Kids need to fall down and learn from their bruises. This is just another step in what parents and schools are doing that I call "padding the room".
I think schools are trying to be proactive to avoid lawsuits from really weird parents or something.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-18 02:23 pm (UTC)this sounds like a bad marxist spin on social psychology: from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs. how dare you spend "disproportionate amount of time" with someone else? spread the love.
furthermore, they give kids too little credit. most kids have an instinct not to put their eggs all in one basket. there is of course the dependable and close friend. but you have a team of other friends for other things. hell look at stand by me: chris and gordon were close friends and it was obvious ... but teddy and vernon were there too. and for those who haven't figured out the advantages of having multiple relationships (in terms of degrees), they will either learn it or they won't and suffer appropriate consequences.
oi.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-18 11:21 pm (UTC)When I was younger, I ached for a best friend so badly. Now that I'm older, I noticed that I've formed pretty close relationships with a core group of people and I consider them all my closest friends.
I've also seen the downside of having a best friend. There's two girls here who went to high school together and they are one of these types of toxic best friends described in the article. They take all their breaks and lunches together and refuse to interact with the new people in the department and are actually pretty hostile to them. My manager is going to active lengths to split the two up because of how their behavior affects the team as a whole.
My last day working with one was yesterday and she has still to acknowledge me on the team after being here five months! And neither are receptive of having us new people talk with them as well.
So yes, you really need a best friend. I'm very, very grateful to have five of them (not including the husband!) But, you also need to know how to socialize outside of your inner circle as well.
I remember wishing inside so badly that an adult would order kids to be friends with me because I was so lonely. One of the best lessons I've ever learned (and one I continue to relearn as an adult) is that if these kids treated me that horribly, then I don't want to be around them in the first place.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-19 05:47 am (UTC)I got subject to the splitting twice, once going into 3rd grade and again going into 4th. If the latter hadn't happened, it likely would have prevented an incident that went on to haunt me for years.
Insult to injury: if you were separated from your friend, you were pretty much hosed outside of recess. You couldn't even eat lunch with them because everyone was partitioned off by class. Now THAT made no sense at all-- partitioning by grade, I could see (though still a bit nonsensical because the upper-tiers had a different lunch period), but forbidding lunchtime mingling between those of the same grade level? This was pretty strictly enforced, you were NOT allowed to jump to another class's table to eat with a friend. I really, really have no idea why that rule was in place, all it did was institute some twisted form of tribal mentality in each class. This fell apart late into 5th grade since at that point there was setup for spring events in the cafeteria and thus everyone got booted outside to some half-concrete hillside thing...
From what I could gather, it appears that West Heritage has since ditched a lot of those ridiculous social meddling practices. One of my far-fetched pipe dreams would be to, er, "infiltrate" as a teacher's assistant so I could see what the culture is like now.
Still, I could write a freaking book about how whacked-out that school was (friend-splitting and silent lunch aren't even the beginning... my greatest beef was with that damned "Student of the Week" system, aka "forced ass-kissing and waving around teacher bias like dirty laundry").
(clearly, Yoshi hated her elementary school and thought the teachers were drunk on some creepy kool-aid)
no subject
Date: 2010-06-20 09:19 am (UTC)Good lord! Your elementary school sounds awful. I bet kids in juvie have more freedom than that! O_o
My middle school in Big Bear did silent lunch and forced us to sit in alphabetical order for a week because a large group started a food fight in the cafeteria (they couldn't identify individual offenders, so they just punished us all). I think I would have quit school if I was forced to deal with that bullshit for a year like you did! >_<
no subject
Date: 2010-06-20 04:24 pm (UTC)It cannot be understated how much West Heritage was hung up on the idea that "kids should not talk freely, EVER." If it wasn't teachers holding in classes from recess over chatter (which, really, was never really as OMFGLOUD as they made it out to be), it was this nonsensical concept of "silent lunch." Holy crap, did the proctors/monitors get REALLY butthurt over kids talking in the lunchroom. Really? REALLY? They would lecture us about how we had "no respect for our elders" (many of them were indeed older women... probably early-50s) and would come up with these bizarre means of getting everyone to shut up, like turning out the lights, not letting kids leave to go to the playground for the recess phase, etc.
They were also the food police, I shit you not. I have no idea how, but the monitors were somehow able to swoop in and reprimand the kids who brown-bagged their lunches if they didn't eat it in the right order. Trading was also a no-no. They couldn't actually punish you for that, of course, but they sure as hell could guilt-trip the crap out of you.
Table-jumping, however, was so forbidden, you just didn't DARE try it-- seriously, I don't recall anyone ever doing it. I never got a straight answer as to why lunch tables were partitioned by class. The tables were super-long, though, so the internal friend groupings that evaded splitting (mostly the asian kids, presumably because they didn't talk and thus they got left alone) could spread out... or, inversely, force the undesirables to sit alone.
Oddly enough, to my knowledge, we've never had a food fight.
One could make the devil's advocate argument that at the time, West Heritage was a new school (I started in its first-ever kindergarten class) and thus had license to be experimental... also remember that this was long before the fixation on test scores and dress codes, so schools could get away with such shenanigans. But they went REALLY far here.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-23 06:17 am (UTC)*The La Verne school was one of the first in the country to ban certain foods and drinks (they did it back in the early 90s, before everyone was freaking out about the "obesity epidemic"). I once got detention for bringing a Pepsi in my lunch. -_-
no subject
Date: 2010-06-23 01:14 pm (UTC)...man, I should just do a bunch of posts on how weird my school was. :P