Choosing (Your Kids') Friends

There was an interesting article on CNN titled, "When you can't stand your kid's friend", about dealing with situations where your kids have, for lack of a better word, bad friends. It's something that we're dealing with now, as our two older kids are starting to form friendships at school and a desire to interact with certain people and not others. Based upon their personalities and interests, they've been drawn towards some people and not others, and for the most part, we try to respect that and not force close friendships when there's a divergence of interests.

I struggle sometime with the degree I push or don't push. For example, our son can be quite content playing by himself. There are some contexts where a crowd of boys will be running around and playing, and he'll be quite content doing his own project with Legos. Should I encourage him to engage with the activity with the other kids, lest he fall into a pattern of being anti-social? Or do I support and validate that he knows what he likes to do, and there's no need to coerce him to partake in a group activity that he has no interest in?

The same thing can be roll into the types of friends that he has. Should I let him make whatever friends he wants unless the kid isn't blatantly encouraging or modeling disrespectful or destructive behavior? What does exercising proper parenting and good stewardship over my children (per an earlier post) look like? Am I being overly controlling by trying to influence my who my children befriend? I'm inclined to think the other way, that I would I be negligent in not being duly watchful and involved in the same way we ought to control what our children watch on television or eat. After all, there will be a time where they will decide what they make independent adult decisions, and that time isn't now.

At the same time, I'm also hopeful that our kids are the sort of kids that parents embrace and support having our children befriend. While I don't want them to be a pushover for other kids, I encourage them to be thoughtful when they have play dates with others, explaining to them that if their friends have a happy time with them, they're more likely to ask for another playdate. If they're abandoned while you do your own thing, they're probably not going to ask for an encore. We also try to remind our children to be polite and respectful to people when they're at other people's homes.

I suspect that it really comes down to my children's character, and how we nurture their them along the way. If, at the core, my wife and I can cultivate the right characteristics of faith, goodness, kindness, respect and honesty, hopefully that will necessarily influence the kind of people that they choose to befriend, and the kinds of people they don't click with. Culling bad friends is sort of the last line of defense, at seems, and if possible, I'd just as soon equip them to make the right decisions up front in terms of knowing how to stand up for righteousness and turning away from evil.