By Donna Shea & Nadine Briggs
For two people who focus on supporting kids with making and keeping friends, it may seem counter-intuitive for us to discuss ending a friendship. It is an important question that came up this summer and is worth considering when a friendship may be over. Friendships do end, though, and your child or teen may need or want to stop a friendship and not know how.
Sometimes friendships end with a bang. This can come in the form of a betrayal or argument, or something egregious enough that your child or teen no longer wants anything to do with the friendship. We would advise that your child or teen re-visit the thought of completely ending a friendship after he or she calms down. Good friends can be hard to find, so it may be worth looking at whether or not what happened is forgivable. There are times when it won’t be forgivable. In this case, encourage your child to make a clean break of it (blocking numbers and social media, etc.) and if he or she has to deal with the ex-friend at school, to do his or her best to act respectfully while maintaining the end-of-friendship boundaries.
More often, friendships fizzle out. This happens especially between age 10 and when moving into the first year of middle school but can occur anytime in a child’s life. Kids find that the friendships that fulfilled them in elementary school may markedly change as more specific interests (sports, band, etc.) emerge. It’s important to help your child understand that this shift in friendship is a natural and normal phase, despite as difficult as it can be. If your child is moving in a different direction and has friends that are having a difficult time letting go, encourage your child to again be respectful, but also to allow your child to refuse invitations politely or to “be busy.” We should also let children know that if their invitations or being refused, or a particular friend is now always “busy” that these are quiet signals that the friend may either need a break from the friendship or has moved in a new direction. When your child is sad about this, and he or she may be, empathize and allow a child to grieve the loss of the friend without allowing him or her to get stuck. Kids may experience a time when they don’t have any friends and this is also natural but usually only temporary. He or she can use the tips in our book on how to find and make new friends.
Friendship also ends due to distance or when a friend moves away. Keeping up long distance relationships, even in this day of video chat and social media, requires investment in friendship on both sides. Adults will have an easier time of this than kids do, so if you find that your child spends less and less time talking to his or her best friend that had to move away, that’s okay. However, some kids can be devastated when his or her best friend, and only friend, moves. This happens more than you may think. Encourage your child to have at least two good friends, just in case one of them does have to move.
There are times when you, as a parent, may have to end the friendship between your child and other friends. If you feel that another child or teen is having a bad influence on your child, or if your child has suddenly formed friendships with kids you are not familiar with, and has distanced themselves from from kids you know well, then it may be time to intervene. If your radar goes up, listen to it. Your child may be angry with you and even tell you he or she hates you, but your child’s safety and well-being are more important than a questionable friendship.
