Helping Kids Maintain Their Independence as Friendships Change

Friendships are an important part of being healthy, but they can be rough too. Most people change over time and this affects their relationships, including with their friends.

As a parent, it can be hard to watch your child go through a difficult time with their friends pulling away -- even ones you didn’t particularly like.

What can be even harder to handle is when you see your kid change in an effort to keep friendships alive.
The thing is, you need to allow you kid to pick their own friends -- even the ones you don’t like or think aren’t “good for him/her.”

What you can do is help your child to maintain their independence as their friendships change.

Sometimes their best buddy will develop interests that are perfectly natural (like sexual attraction), but before your kid.

This can tear some friendships apart, especially if your child feels abandoned every time his or her friend has a new love interest.

As kids mature, they naturally explore lots of different interests. Most of the time, you’ll encourage this. You want them to find what gets them excited and you want them to discover something to be passionate about.

Kids need to follow their dreams and to live the best possible life they can – this is not something you can stand in the way of.

Your child’s interests and those of their friends may diverge. As they pursue their different interests, they’ll each meet new people with whom they’ll have something in common. This doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the friendship, but it’ll certainly evolve.

Then there are the unhealthy interests that captivate some kids, such as drinking or taking drugs.
You don’t want to encourage your kids to damage their health, but it’s also not unusual to see some experimentation by all kids, good or bad.

Yet despite all of it, your primary role is to support your child. You can remind him or her to tap into their Internal Guidance System (IGS) as a way to remain true to their spirit. This’ll help them accept the changes in their friends, without attempting to cling to friendships that have served their purpose.

By using their IGS, they’ll be able to maintain their independence from their friends while still being there for them. Your kid will develop the confidence to take their own path even as it diverges from the people they know and like the best.

If your daughter’s best friend seems to dump her whenever she has a new boyfriend, that’s a good time to encourage your daughter to pursue her own interests. Remind her to check in with her IGS if she’s unsure what those interests are. When her friend comes back to her, your daughter probably won’t feel as if her only recourse is to pick up where things left off.

Tapping into her IGS will help her determine what action feels right to her. Is she okay with the status quo after all? Does she want to maintain this friendship knowing that she’ll be repeatedly put on the back burner? Or would she prefer to build stronger friendships with others who aren’t so boy crazy?

What if your son has a best friend whose interests take him down a different academic or extracurricular path? It can be difficult when someone you spent all your time with suddenly has something else that takes up their time.

It could be that an athlete hangs up his cleats and becomes an actor. Or maybe his focus is on working to earn money to get a car. If your son allows his IGS to guide him, he’ll have a better understanding of why his friend isn’t around so much. Not only that, he may be driven to learn more about this new passion or to develop one of his own.

Let your kid know that even though many of their friends may choose to experiment with drugs or alcohol, they have their own decisions to make. When they listen to their IGS, they may find that they don’t really want to follow the leader. It doesn’t mean that they can’t ever hang out with those friends, but it might mean that they choose WHEN they want to hang together and when they want to go their own way.

When your kid trusts their IGS, they can develop confidence and independence. They’ll then have an easier time being able to make choices about whether or not they maintain friendships, allowing them to evolve and consciously modify the relationships if they don’t choose to move on entirely.