During the week leading up to my college graduation, I committed one of the great social slights of my life by advocating for the exclusion of one of my peers from a final friends-only dinner—not because he had done something horrible to me, but merely because I wasn’t as close to him as I was to the others, and I found him kind of annoying. So immature. So insensitive. So unnecessary. So full of myself. So cruel. So dumb. I still think about it now and then and wish I could take it back. Last night, my soon-to-be-10-year-old son started bellyaching about whether he had to invite certain friends to his birthday party. We talked.
My son is now old enough to be reasoned with, for the most part, and however reluctantly. Our birthday conversation centered on a few ideals, which he’s heard from me before: That you don’t have to be best friends with everyone to be friends with them; that everyone’s feelings are important, even if they’re not your best friends; that these friends, who you’re thinking about not inviting, are still going to be in your life, so is a dramatic step like that really worth the ongoing tension that might ensue? Who knows if he got it all? More than anything I probably wore him down until he acceded.
There is a part of me that wonders whether I’m wrong to encourage my son to maintain a few friendships that, on that balance, actually aren’t all pleasant for him. Adults decide to sever “toxic” friendships (I keep seeing toxic used in this context). Should children have the same prerogative? Or is this one of those areas where they really don’t know better?
Clearly, it depends on the child and their age and maturity. My daughter is 13, going on 14 in a few months. She still talks to my wife and I about her social dramas near and near by, and I feel really lucky to have her confidences, and the parent challenge, for me, has been in being helpful and supportive (to tell her what I want to tell her) without her feeling like we don’t have confidence in her. She wants the support, to a point.
Adam, at 9 going on 10, still needs more from us, I think. So, he doesn’t have final say on his birthday list, but he has room to navigate his friendships every day. During the birthday chat, he gave me an example of the kind of annoying behavior that is impelling him to want to exclude one boy from his party. In the back of my mind, I considered whether I could apply the “invisible hand” of the well-intended parent and speak to the other parents. (Recently, another mom came to me to delicately discuss an obnoxious remark about religion that Adam had purportedly said to her son, and I appreciated hearing about it because, if it was true, then it was wrong of him to say it and I needed to make sure he knew better.) But, of course, approaching other parents about their kids is fraught with potential land mines, and, more importantly, I feel like my son is in the beginning stage of learning how to sort out his social dramas.
And that’s what I told him.
“I feel like this one of those things that you should deal with,” I said. “If he annoys you, tell him why and ask him to stop. If he continues to do it in a way that’s clearly meant to further annoy you, you might want to bring it up with the teacher, and so she can help.”
When Elena was Adam’s age, my wife and I faced a very similar situation when she didn’t want to share her birthday party with a friend who was starting to be more and more unpleasant to her. The friend was ultimately included, but the friendship waned anyway as Elena just didn’t want to spend time with her (understandably, I should add).
Forward to the present: We’ve seen the kid at a few bat mitzvahs this year and she seems like a lovely and smart young woman, assured and pleasant, a person who Elena might well gravitate to if she was just meeting her. They were cordial, but no re-kindling.
If you know anything about Adam from this blog, you may have gleaned that I feel like I’m raising the future social chairman of the fraternity—I’m just hoping he’s the guy who tries to make life more fun and pleasant for everyone around him, rather than the guy who frets about who gets invited to the party.
