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The End of the Best Friend?


best friends.JPGI wasn’t a very happy kid.

I was intense. Moody. Liked things my way. Got mad—really mad—when things didn’t go my way.

God must have known I needed some help, because in 5th grade I met Joe. Joe was pretty much my polar opposite. He was even-keeled when I boiled over. He would look at me like an exasperated parent when I would drop all the dice on a game of Risk I was losing badly. (“Nuke attack!”) Joe put up with me, but he never shied away from telling me I was acting like an idiot.

Joe lived two blocks north from my house if I cut through the neighbors’ yards on the way to school. We did everything together—from fifth grade all the way through college. We played Risk and the arcade game Twin Cobra. We helped each other on our paper routes. Lived at the swimming pool in the summers. Listened to music. Talked a lot about girls. A lot.

In short, we were best friends.

Joe turns 40 this weekend; I’ll cross that threshold myself in a couple weeks. But we still keep in touch regularly, sharing stories about our kids and their exploits—not to mention the music we’re listening to these days. It’s impossible for me to picture what life might have been like without Joe as that steadying influence throughout the awfulness and insecurity of my adolescence.

And yet, according to a New York Times article published in June, a growing number of teachers, school administrators and other folks involved with children are actively seeking to discourage the classic “best friend” connection between young students. Why? Because they believe the inherently exclusive nature of a best-friend relationship may be hurtful to other students who feel excluded.

The Times talked to several people around the country who are increasingly adopting a skeptical stance toward exclusive friendships. “When two children discover a special bond between them, we honor that bond, provided that neither child overtly or covertly excludes or rejects others,” said Jan Mooney, a psychologist at the Town School, a nursery through eighth grade private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. “However, the bottom line is that if we find a best friend pairing to be destructive to either child, or to others in the classroom, we will not hesitate to separate children and to work with the children and their parents to ensure healthier relationships in the future.”

Christine Laycob, director of counseling at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School in St. Louis, echoed those sentiments. “I think it is kids’ preference to pair up and have that one best friend,” she said. “As adults— teachers and counselors—we try to encourage them not to do that. We try to talk to kids and work with them to get them to have big groups of friends and not be so possessive about friends.”

Times reporter Hilary Stout noted that the motivation behind this trend is to protect those who might feel locked out of the relational picture.

The days when children roamed the neighborhood and played with whomever they wanted to until the streetlights came on disappeared long ago, replaced by the scheduled play date. While in the past a social slight in backyard games rarely came to teachers' attention the next day, today an upsetting text message from one middle school student to another is often forwarded to school administrators, who frequently feel compelled to intervene in the relationship. … Indeed, much of the effort to encourage children to be friends with everyone is meant to head off bullying and other extreme consequences of social exclusion. 

Not everyone is convinced, however, that best friendships need to be viewed with such a wary eye.

“No one can teach you what a great friend is, what a fair-weather friend is, what a treacherous and betraying friend is except to have a great friend, a fair-weather friend or a treacherous and betraying friend,” said Michael Thompson, a psychologist and author of Best Friends, Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Lives of Children. “When a teacher is trying to tone down a best-friend culture, I would like to know why. Is it causing misery for the class? Or is there one girl who does have friends but just can’t bear the thought that she doesn’t have as good a best friend as another? That to me is normal social pain. If you’re mucking around too much in the lives of kids who are just experiencing normal social pain, you shouldn’t be.”