The stoners.
The partiers.
The disrespectful.
The underachievers.
The aimless.
The rule breakers.
Your teen has some friends you aren’t comfortable with. When you tell her your concerns, she defends them to you and claims you don’t really understand them. What can you do?
Defining the Problem
Kids are highly vulnerable to their peers’ attitudes and behaviors. Their peers can teach them about things you never wanted your kids to learn, and they can influence your teen to do things that are not only unwise but can be downright harmful to her.
Sometimes parents wonder if they should somehow find new friends for their teen and shut off access to old ones. While that might be necessary in extremely serious cases, in general this isn’t the best course of action to take. If you resist the friends your teen chooses or block her efforts to make best friends outside her nuclear family, you are putting at risk your teen’s ability to relate to a world that she will, sooner or later, enter.
Remember that God designed your teen to become more and more invested in relationships outside the family. His intent is for her to take the love, growth, and maturity you have helped her develop, and in turn give it to other people and in other contexts in the world. This is God’s grand design, and it is a good thing.
But if you think peers may be negatively influencing your teen, there are some things you can do.
Handling the Problem
Here are some things to think about and take action on.
Determine if there is a problem. If your teen has a few questionable friends, don’t take any action. Instead, look at the fruit of your kid’s life. If he is loving and connected to you, if he is responsible and honest, and if his primary friendships are sound ones, it may be that he is being a positive influence on those questionable friends. Be aware of and pay attention to how your teen may be influenced by these friends, but that’s it.
However, if you notice negative things happening from these friendships — your teen withdraws from you more, becomes more defiant, or starts having behavior, substance, or school problems — then you need to act.
Determine the attraction. Before you intervene, start figuring out what about the questionable friends attracts your teen to them. Let’s say your teen has a group of good-hearted, responsible friends, but she also has some friends who have bad reputations. Why does she want to be with them? Here are some reasons to consider.
Your teen likes variety. Your adolescent may simply want different sorts of friends. He is figuring out his interests, preferences, and values, and so he is venturing out into other relationships. He wants friends who are studious, athletic, artistic, serious, funny, lazy, and rebellious. Your kid’s friends can give you a visual of his insides. Monitor the way he is determining what kind of person he wants to be. (And remember the weird friends you had in your day!)
Your teen sees the good mixed in with the bad. Your teen may like the good aspects of weird kids. Adolescents aren’t generally as afraid of the negative attributes in their friends as parents are. So your teen may like it that some troubled buddy is kind, easy to be with, accepting, or more honest than most. Your teen values the good she sees, while you worry about the effects of the bad.
Your teen is attracted to the opposite. Sometimes a friend represents a problem a teen is having. Who your teen is drawn to may tell you about some part of him that is struggling. For example, the compliant kid may gravitate toward the rebels, signifying that he wants more permission to disagree. The high achiever may hang with slacker friends as an indication that she is not doing well with the pressure she feels. The teen who doesn’t feel approved will sometimes be with a dominant friend, who will approve of him if he does things the friend’s way.
If you can identify the attraction, then you can help your teen work on his vulnerabilities so that he becomes less likely to be attracted to the wrong kids.
Talk to your teen about friends. If you see your teen’s friendships dragging her down, talk to her about it. Tell her what you see and what you are concerned about. Let her know which kids you approve of, which you don’t approve of, and why.
Should you tell your teen you want her to stop hanging around those kids? It depends. If possible, it is better to strengthen your teen from the inside while she is still in relationship with the problem kids. This enables her to do the internal work that will help her make good relational choices as an adult. Also, she is then less likely to feel forced to choose between you and her friends. Parents often lose on that decision, so it is best if you can be “both and” instead of “him or me.”
Set limits on the amount and quality of time spent with troublesome kids. For example, you might say: “I know you like Josh, but I want you to know that I don’t think he is good for you. I am not going to tell you that you can’t be with him at all, because I don’t think that is realistic. But it’s not okay for you to be alone with him. In a group is fine; I don’t expect you to walk away if he is with a group of you. But I don’t want you driving somewhere with just him, for example. When you are with Josh, I want others with you.”
If you are wondering how you could enforce such a boundary and whether it’s a good idea to set a boundary you can’t enforce, understand that having expectations about your teen’s behavior is still a good thing. Besides, you’re not telling your kid, “I will make you stop seeing Josh.” You are saying, “I don’t want you to be vulnerable to Josh, not because I want to control you, but because I care about you. Obviously, I can’t know a lot about who you are with outside the home. But if I find out that you spent time alone with him, I will restrict your privileges. I want you to know that ahead of time.” You are simply letting him know your expectations and the choices he has.
If, however, your teen is vulnerable and the friends he’s hanging out with are toxic influences, you must rescue him from them. If you find that no matter what, your kid continues to struggle in major ways because of some friends, and your appeals and consequences aren’t changing things, act decisively. You may even have to take him out of his environment and put him in a healthier one — for example, put him in a different school.
Ultimately, you want your teen to become mature enough to be around struggling kids and not succumb, because that is what adult life requires. So as soon your teen becomes stronger, give him a little more relational rope and see what he does with it.
Get involved. If your teen is deeply attached to kids you are worried about, meet those kids and talk to them. Get to know them so that you know who you are dealing with. You are letting them know that your teen has an involved parent. This can build some restraints into some kids.
And meet the parents. Call them and say, “Hi, I’m Taylor’s dad. Taylor’s a friend of your son, Danny. They’ve been talking about doing something this weekend, and I thought that since they’re friends, maybe you and I could talk and get things on the same page.” So many parents don’t know the parents of their kids’ friends. In my experience most parents genuinely appreciate the contact.
When my kids have gotten into trouble while around other kids, I have also called the parents to let them know what happened and to talk about how to respond. I have also talked to the teens themselves, so that they know that I like them but that I know the scoop and will be watching them for a while. My kids aren’t crazy about this, but they put up with it. It’s been interesting, because the kids I have talked to about troublesome behavior are also the kids I am closest to. They seem to appreciate and respond to me as an adult who doesn’t judge them, who loves them, but who is also willing to confront them.
You Can Do It!
Remember not to make friends the core issue. Instead, focus on how your teen chooses and responds to friends. Don’t force her to choose between her friend and you; simply help her feel supported and structured toward wise decisions.