Navigating Kids' Friendships and Trusting Their Choices

Let's talk about friendships. Recently, because we've been staying home a lot, my son has been getting to know kids in the local area. He doesn’t usually mix with them since we used to go out a lot, spending most evenings at home during the week and going out on weekends. But we decided to slow down, spend less time and money out and about.

Of course, he still gets bored and wants to be entertained, so he started playing with the kids around the neighborhood. There's always one or two who might be a bit of a bad influence—maybe just a couple of years older and more daring in what they do. It’s just kids messing around, but I didn’t want it to be a negative influence on him, and I was really unsure about it.

Then, a month later, there was a parent conference, and one of the topics was children, friendships, and secrets. We were discussing how we should manage our children's friendships, how it affected us when we were young, and when our parents tried to do the same. It got me thinking that both my husband and I had friends who weren’t good influences. We believe that if we had stuck with certain friends, we wouldn’t be where we are today. We can see where those ex-friends ended up, and we're grateful we didn’t go down that path.

A question that came up at the conference was about how you make the decision to step away from certain friendships. For us, it was about wanting more out of life. It comes back to your own ambition—being willing to leave what’s wrong, even if it’s a comfort zone, is scary. Both of us going to different colleges and moving away early helped, as we naturally moved on, finding new friends at each stage of life.

This made me reconsider being so pedantic about who my son spends time with. I trust that he knows what is good or bad, right or wrong. I trust him to make those judgments. He might be around when bad judgments happen, like kids throwing snails in the drain, and he knows it’s wrong, but he doesn’t stop it either. It’s a fine line. Sometimes he comes home and says, ‘Mummy, guess what, this person did this—it was so naughty.’ I agree, but I also don’t want him thinking he's better than others or labeling people as naughty.

It’s really about balancing letting them hang around and potentially having bad influences rub off, with trusting him enough to know what’s right. At the end of the day, he just wants company.