It's pretty well accepted that no kid who makes it through high school with his faith intact does so alone: Christian kids need Christian friends. It's also becoming accepted that spiritual growth happens in a community context. If you want to stunt a believer's growth, keep him far away from fellow believers. On the other hand, it's also quite apparent that the older a child becomes, the more they resent parental intrusion into their social lives.
Given this tension, what can a parent do to ensure that their child's social network includes some Christian friendships?
I have written many times in this space on the importance of Christian friendships. In short:
* I don't believe Christian kids should only have Christian friends. But they do need some.
* There is a difference between being "Christian buddies", the casual acquaintances that are kept at church but have no ties or bearing on the rest of a child's life, and being "Christian friends", where the relationship is actually edifying and holds influence over both children's behavior and character.
* It is one thing to know right from wrong; it is another to have the skills to act on one's moral convictions. A strong social network that shares your moral convictions is at least as important as the cognitive grasp of right and wrong.
* From surveys we've done, kids in our church generally have a handful of Christian buddies who they recognize here, but those attachments tend not to endure outside of church.
* And yes, given the size of our church, unless we are intentional about helping kids develop friendships in church, a kid really can come through our children's program and move on to junior high having developed few, if any, true friendships.
Kids are irked when parents try to engineer friendships. Why? Self-awareness is one reason. Already in fourth grade, kids are very aware of the social hierarchy of their school. They know that being friends with certain people will enhance their own status, while befriending others will hurt them. (Don't believe me? Think back to your own elementary school. How old were you when you started to notice that some kids were popular and others were shunned; that some were to be reckoned with and others to be dismissed? For me, this social awareness started to emerge in about 2nd or 3rd grade. By 4th grade, when I attended my first boy-girl preteen party, the lines between "in" and "out" were clearly drawn - and we invited accordingly.) There are kids who are either willing to risk their standing or oblivious to it and will "be friends with anyone", but such kids are rare.
[And I've sometimes wondered if we're setting an unrealistic expectation when we tell kids they should be friends with everyone, when we adults don't follow that mandate ourselves. Such an expectation usually springs from an observation drawn from our own, adult friendships, which is that they are mostly harmonious and that therefore, kids should also make an effort to get along with everybody. But this ignores the fact that we adults have the freedom to choose whom we associate with. We live, play, work, and relax with people of our own choosing - which tends to be folks who are just like us. Kids, by virtue of their attending a school, enjoy no such freedom. They are forced to interact daily with people who are very unlike themselves and don't have the luxury of excusing themselves or choosing alternate surroundings. Unlike a grown-up who can quit their job to get out from under a difficult boss or irritating co-workers, a child cannot divorce themselves from their teacher or classmates - though many have wanted to! Do we become better at handling difficult and different people as we get older? Probably. But I think the fact that social strife diminishes as we age reflects more the adult prerogative to choose one's environment than it does maturity.]
But the other reason kids jealously guard the power to make and break friendships is that this is one area of their lives that they almost exclusively control. Emotionally, they feel drawn to some kids and repelled by others, and they want the freedom to indulge those feelings and affiliate and play with those who make them feel good about themselves. When a parent or other adult tries to orchestrate a friendship irrespective of the child's affinities, it's as if the child is executing an obligation - even if the adult's matchmaking sprung from pure intentions. As a tennis coach, I saw this phenomenon among players well into high school. They would often rather have their close friend as their doubles partner than be paired with a better player who they weren't friends with. The social dynamic - will I enjoy myself? - outweighed the strategic - will we win?
So given a child's determination to choose her own friends-thank-you-very-much, what can a Christian parent do to influence those decisions so that their child won't reach high school without a supportive tribe around them?
First, start young. Fortunately, "friend" to a preteen roughly equates to "someone I do fun things with." (See my post from earlier this month, titled "Another Giant Leap: From Church buddies to Christian friends".) So a 10 or 11-year-old can join a new team or start at a new school and quickly make half a dozen friends (and they can just as quickly lose those friendships when the context changes). Because we value the development of friendships among our kids at church, we've gone "event heavy" on our schedule, with the hope that new friendships will be forged out of the crush of activity.
Which leads me to my second bit of advice: Involve your child in as many church-based activities as you can. Weekend attendance is important (I'm getting to that), but realize that one weekend service only exposes kids to a slice - and often the same slice - of kids. This is a huge church - nearly 700 different faces in 4th, 5th, and 6th grade came through our class last school year, from more than 70 elementary and middle schools. Is there a chance that the first time your kid comes to church they won't recognize anybody? Yes. Is it possible they won't really click with any peers at the service they attend? Possible, yes. Is it reasonable that among the hundreds of kids who call NCCC their church, your kid won't find anyone they have a kinship with? No, not very reasonable. But kids need to encounter each other and those encounters need to happen in social settings, outside of the educational environment that is Sunday mornings.
Third, we have always encouraged families to pick one service and stick with it. Why? Because otherwise, your child never gets accustomed to the other kids who they attend church with. In a given month, if you attend service at four different times, your child sees four different sets of leaders and kids, yet they never become a regular at any one of them. It's like sending your kid to a completely different church every week! We adults forget how intimidating it is to come to church alone, because most of us have the safety of a spouse to sit with even if the rest of the assembly is different. Regularity at one service also promotes the development of a relationship between your child and his or her small group leader. Your child becomes known, not just recognized.
Fourth, realize that inasmuch as the context of your child's life is constrained, you are the one who sets that context! As I wrote above, a kid doesn't get to pick their school, their neighborhood, their church, when the family is going over to Grandma's, what they'll study about in school, and any of a host of rather important life choices. Instead, you set the schedule and drive the taxi! How are you doing at investing your child's time? I urge you to sit down and inventory a typical week. How much time does your child spend in school? Doing homework? Watching TV? Outside? Playing organized sports? With you? Serving others? Resting? Doing something intentionally spiritually edifying? Recognize that you have determined, by your choices, what your child's time distribution looks like. Recognize further that you can adjust that distribution at any time, that you have the right (and it is your right) to blow the whistle and call time-out if you recognize that your kid's life has fallen out of balance. Kids don't enter iron-clad commitments, and while sometimes "sticking it out" does build character, if your kid is burning out because of overcommitment it's not only unhealthy but foolish for them to continue at that pace. What a shame if your child reaches high school - when demands on their time intensify even more - and lacks Christian friends because they (or you) simply couldn't find the time to invest when they were young!
[Let me add as a postscript to the above that if most of your child's friends are negative influences, then their involvement in whatever activity is creating a close association with kids like that isn't worth it. Regardless of the skill being developed, the most lasting imprint from a team or group experience will be on their character. If and when I have kids, I would never allow them to remain on a team with a coach who screams and swears - I don't care how great a teacher or motivator they are. The end simply doesn't justify the means.]
The last thing parents can do is to help extend church friendships beyond the walls of the church. Often it doesn't occur to kids that they should deepen a friendship with someone they know from church, especially if the geographical distance between homes is great. But this promotes the divide between "church life" and "the rest of life". We need to demonstrate, both by modeling it and by promoting it, that it's important to nurture Christian friendships. So, encourage your child to have someone over after church on Sunday, to bring them along on a roadtrip, to invite a church friend to their birthday party, to include them at a sleepover. These kinds of encounters bridge the church world and the real world and help kids to see that it's ok to carry the Christian label back to their everyday life.
Last winter I told the kids they should aim at developing seven Christian friendships by the time they reached seventh grade. It's still a good goal, and one I believe in, but I don't talk about it to the kids anymore because I quickly realized they don't, at this age, fully realize the importance or meaning of "Christian friend". You, however, do. And so perhaps the greatest contribution a parent can make toward developing this advantage is to be vigilant. Despite kids' wishes to keep parents at an arm's length when it comes to the social world, parents usually have pretty keen insight about who their kid hangs around with and the quality of their friendships. I would invite you to turn this analysis on your child spiritually: socially, is the groundwork being laid for a supportive cluster of Christian friends by the time your child reaches middle school? If not, what can you do to promote that?
Factor #2: Same-Age Christian Friendships
Key Question: Does my child have any Christian friends?
Info, articles, and thoughts for parents of kids at North Coast Calvary Chapel.
