Navigating Friendships: Adolescents

As your children continue to grow and enter adolescence, friendships continue to be incredibly important. Friendships help adolescents form their identity, establish independence, find a sense of belonging, and feel accepted. We all know that having good friendships makes us happier, but there are many other positive benefits. Teen friendships are supported with a better immune system, higher self-esteem, lowers the rates of anxiety/depression, and much more. Parents during the stage of adolescence you continue to be the role model for healthy friendships. Please be mindful of how you speak about others, avoid gossiping, and model how to interact with unpleasant people. You are not expected to be perfect, but when you make friendship mistakes your adolescents are watching very closely how you correct those mistakes. Below are some tips for supporting your adolescent with the ups and downs of friendships.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

Peer Influence

I prefer the term peer influence rather than peer pressure to represent how an adolescent's behavior can be shaped by wanting to feel that they belong and are accepted by their friends or peers. Peer influence can have both positive and negative effects. Parents can help adolescents manage peer influence in several ways. First, by providing adolescents with opportunities to interact with those from different backgrounds. This includes but is not limited to different race/ethnicity, spiritual practices, gender identities, neurodivergent, physically challenged, different family structures, etc. to create multiple options or sources of friendship support. Next, parents can make a list with their adolescent focusing on how to say no when they feel like they are being influenced to do something they don’t want to do. Last, and one of my favorite ideas, is to create a coded message for them to text or verbally say that signals to you they need a way out of a situation.

Gossip

Unfortunately it’s important to recognize that any adolescent is at risk of being a topic of gossip, even if they do their best to stay away from “drama”. Gossip can spread like wildfire with each person adding an exaggeration or distorting the truth a bit as they spread it. Social media has made it even easier to spread gossip to larger numbers of their peers, but also to unsafe adults. Being the subject of gossip can cause the adolescent to isolate themselves away from others, lower their self-esteem, and experience an increase in depression or anxiety symptoms. When it comes to your attention that your adolescent is the victim of gossip it is important to speak with them first before taking action. Invite them to share their experience and validate their feelings. Ask them what they have done to manage the gossip so far and how you can best help. If appropriate, support them in contacting school officials and/or law enforcement with them taking the lead as much as possible. There may come a point that you, as the parent, need to take the lead due to the negative effects on your adolescent’s mental/physical health. I suggest letting your adolescent know in what circumstances you will take the lead as a parent sooner rather than later.

Make The Time

During this stage in their development adolescents will push you, the parent, away for more independence, but this does not mean they need their parents any less. As they continue to grow through their teen years it is important for parents to prioritize time with them at least a couple times a week. I also highly suggest you prioritize time getting to know their friends or love interests to show them that you are interested in their lives and that they are important to you. Providing rides to places is a great opportunity to both spend time with your adolescent and get to know who they are spending time with. 

Please feel free to share some of your own tips and tricks below!

Lisa Torres, LMFT 48946