With back to school time upon us, this is the perfect time to focus on friends and think about the impact we make on our friends and they make on us, and to help our kids understand what we mean when we say things like ‘find friends that are good for you’ and ‘weed out friends that are bad for you’.
Our friends play an enormous role in our health and well being. They can boost us up and rally us through when we need the push but can also pull us down when we least expect it because of their own issues.
Friendships and socializing are important in our lives but better to go for quality than quantity. So, this month, we’re going to focus on what’s important in friendship for our health and the health of our friends and help our family members do the same, especially our kids.
The issues to focus on this month include:
1. Kids and Friendship Issues. We don’t always take enough time to help our kids understand the roles their friends play in their lives so this week, as school is approaching, talk to your kids about their friends. Help them sort out who in their social circle helps them be better than they thought they could be and who has the same but negative impact. Helping our kids develop this awareness now will help them enormously when they are one day on their own.
2.Set a good example with your kids and how you manage your friendships.Our kids take our queues from us. They’ll pick up how to treat other people from us. If we treat our friends well, they will do the same. If we take advantage of people, they’ll try that hat on, too. Our best path is to truly treat others as we’d want to be treated. Sounds a bit spiritual, I know, but isn’t that the only way to really learn to be a good friend and the way we’d want our kids to be good friends?
3.The 2 way street rule. This is the lesson I try to reinforce to my kids with their friendships. If they are not getting from a friendship what they are putting in, the friendship is lopsided and may be worth taking a step back from. This is something that can become very draining and we’ve all experiened it. Emotional drain means we become unhealthy. The more we find friends we can have that 2 way experience with, the better quality our friends will be and the less drama we’ll have over all.
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