Fostering Friendship Edition
For the last several years, I’ve become acutely aware of the dearth of friendships in my life. For that reason, when I caught wind of The Friendship Project: The Catholic Woman’s Guide to Making and Keeping Fabulous, Faith-Filled Friends by Michele Faehnle and Emily Jaminet last year, I was eager to read it.
If you haven’t gotten a copy, I recommend it (and you can read my review here). There’s plenty of practical suggestions, but to be honest, I need to go back and make a list of baby steps to get started.
The Friendship Project was a catalyst for thinking more about friendships and how they arise and where they are missing in my family’s lives. This post is less about my friendships, but about helping my children foster friendships.
This post is my attempt to foster a conversation about how friendship may have changed for my children’s generation and how we as parents can help our children make friends.
Despite being a lifelong introvert, friendship was not an issue for me growing up. And while I grew up as the only girl in the cluster of 100 or so homes where we lived who did not go to public school and living on a dead-end road without any real neighbors, I had friends. Close, good, best friends from school. We frequently played at one another’s houses multiple times per month, including frequent sleepovers. We tagged along on vacations and day trips. Many of the girls in my class roller skated together weekly. Throughout grade school, high school, and college, I never lacked for a friend with whom I could share everything, one or more whom I happily “wasted” time going places or simply doing nothing.
Photo by Aman Shrivastava on Unsplash
–3–
We lead busy lives. Today, in most households, both parents work full-time, and children are involved in multiple activities. The dearth of free time and the lack of opportunities for unstructured play make it harder to make and keep friends.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
–4–
Neighborhoods used to be built for walking. Walking to the corner market, the penny candy store, the playground. We didn’t have any of those things in that cluster of homes where I grew up. (I don’t call it a neighborhood because it never felt that way to me.) What we did have, and what even my friends that lived in real neighborhoods had, was room to spread our wings. There was always an empty lot, a patch of woods, or in my case, acres and acres of woods to roam. I did a lot of roaming alone or with my dog, but when I had friends over, it was nothing for us to walk the hilly paths around my house, crisscrossing bike paths, hanging from tree swings or building shacks. And our parents didn’t worry about us going off to do those things independently.
Photo by Paul Jarvis on Unsplash
–5–
My friends and I communicated in two ways: in person and by telephone. The telephone, however, had limits. Most households had one line, and parents didn’t want you hogging it for hours at a time. We couldn’t communicate by personal cell phones, text messages, or via video game systems. We spoke, and mostly in person.
Photo by Pavan Trikutam on Unsplash
–6–
Here’s where I know my husband and I have failed our kids. What I enjoyed as a child and they do not, is a home that welcomes friends for parties, dinners, or just hanging out. While the house I grew up in was small, the age difference between me and my brothers was so great that I was, in some respects, raised as an only child. I had space to be with my friends, inside and outside the house. We lack space in our home for a variety of reasons I’m not going to go into here. Suffice it to say, our house with four kids of varying ages and precious little space, isn’t great for having friends over. There’s simply not physical space around a table or in bedrooms, and we haven’t even had adult friends over in many, many years. This one is totally on us.
Photo by pacoruiz64 on Pixabay
–7–
My children have friends, even ones they’d call best friends. But they don’t do things out of school with them. They don’t often go their houses or go places. They don’t even ask us to do those kinds of things. It’s not even on their radar. Help me out. Is this what modern friendship looks like, perhaps in part to the issues above or others? Or are we an anomaly? Is this unique to my family? Help a mom out.
Photo by Evan Dennis on Unsplash
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So funny, because that’s the theme of my 7qt post. Crazy, must be the Holy Spirit!
God bless!
Must be! We really do need friendships with people outside of our family. As you said in your post, they may not be our primary relationships, but they, too, are important.
We homeschool, so we are always thinking about the socialization/friendship thing. Each of my three teenage boys seems to have their own interests and needs concerning friendships. But their friendships are different than the ones I had when growing up. I was always on the phone. They occasionally send emails but rarely talk on the phone. And they don’t have cellphones (which most teens do). I used to see my friends after school every day, walking to their houses and then walking all over the neighborhood. My boys’ friends live too far for that. But they do get together with their friends often, usually with a group of homeschooling friends at a teen event, bowling, rollerskating, or something. And our house is small too, like yours, so we don’t have people over often. So don’t feel bad. You aren’t the only one!
I wish my kids were involved in more group things. That’s a good option, giving them a place to go and do stuff together for fun.