Relax
A Little Overview of
Best Friends, Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Lives of Children
by Michael Thompson, PhD. And Catherine O'Neil Grace with Lawrence J. Cohen, Ph. D.
New York: Ballantine Books, 2001
ISBN 0-345-4309-4
Relax. If we adults could do that one little thing, then we could look back at middle school and remember that, however hard it was, and however many days we came home crying because Suzy was mean to me, we survived. That is basically the message of Best Friends, Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Lives of Children by Michael Thomas and Catherine O'Neil Grace with Lawrence J. Cohen. Through a series of case studies statical analysis, Thomas, Grace, and Cohen argue that children need friends to teach them about today's world and to allow them to experiment with the social norms of their day in a way that us mature adults can't do. This isn't to say that all friendships are good or that we should allow bullying or other such negative behaviors in our schools; in fact, Thompson, Grace, and Cohen argue extensively for adult intervention to prevent such occurrences, but, for the most part, adults need to chill out and allow children to perfect their budding social skills through trial and error on their friends. Throughout the book, the authors explain the normal, healthy uses and structures of childhood friendships and groups, while giving parents and teachers strategies on how to stop and prevent negative behaviors such as name-calling, bullying, and hazing, with the constant reminder that most of the time we need to take a step back and allow children to learn and grow at their own pace.
Friends. We all need them— especially children. Friends, particularly those few close friends, are vital to the social well-being of a child, because “friends serve as informal classrooms. Good friends teach each other through example, through collaboration, and through conflict” (67). Parents and teachers can only lecture so much on how to be a team player or how to be a problem solver. Through their fights with their friends, children learn how to compromise as they work together to solve their problems. They learn how to be good team members as they invent the rules to their newest game. It is through the application of the principles taught by parents and teachers that children become fully functional in an adult social world. In addition, as children grow, friends are the sounding board for new more adult emotions that children are just feeling and learning to deal with, such as love and rejection. Adults cannot fill these roles because we have already learned how to do these things and are more prone to lecture and punishment than the trial and error children need. Friends are the safety haven where children can try out new behaviors before venturing into the larger social world.
And then there are those boy-girl relationships. Boys and girls separate into two groups as early as age three (160) and remain that way until high school (183). When the time comes to re-mix the genders, as with same-sex friendships, children need the chance to experiment with the new emotions of love and romance within the safe environment of their close friends and peers. Early “crushes are a healthy developmental state that allows children and teenagers to experiment with various feelings without the pitfalls of romance with actual human beings” (187). So as annoying as those twelve-year-old girls are as they giggle over Edward Cullin, it is a necessary part of their development. They need to practice being an adult with their friends where the emotional risks are minimal, before they step into real human romance, where the heart-ache is crushing.
When the real romance of high school comes, and we adults want to step right in and protect them from the pitfalls of young love. Relax. Adolescents need to experiment being intimate with each other because, like other friendships, it allows them the trial and error in “negotiation, self-disclosure, and intimacy” (192). We adults judge and instruct in a way that doesn't allow adolescents to really learn. This is not to say that we should encourage, allow, or stand by and watch as children launch themselves head first into emotionally or physically unsafe sexual relationships. Just as we instruct young children on how to share and then they apply those skills with their friends, so we need to teach adolescents principles of sexual attraction and interaction. They need to be shown “that good sex takes a depth of intimacy and maturity. We need to let kids know that the most gratifying and meaningful sex is to be found in committed, loving partnerships” (199). Although children and adolescents need to be allowed to explore their new romantic feelings through crushes and relationships with their peers, they should not be allowed complete freedom to explore sex as it has far more damaging emotional repercussions than realizing that Zac Efron will never love them.
Often peer pressure pushes children to sex before they are ready, but that doesn't mean peer pressure is inherently bad. In fact, Thompson relates an experience where he tells a groups of children that, “Your parents love peer pressure” (78). Well, they do. And so do teachers. Teachers love when students pressure each other into being quiet in class or into doing homework or studying. What we don't love is the peer pressure that works against the long-term best interest of children like smoking, drinking, having promiscuous sex, or just being mean.
But children, and any other person, need to be part of a group and giving into the pressure allows children to be part of the group. The need to be in a group is so strong that it often overpowers a child's desire to do as mother or teacher said. Not being a part of the group can have dire consequences from name-calling and exclusion to harsher punishments like bullying and hazing. Once in the group, children must follow the laws of group life to stay in there, which may include negative behaviors like name-calling, exclusion, bullying, and hazing. This isn't because the individual child is bad but because the desire to be part of the group is strong and “the presence of the groups seems to diminish the sense of morality and individual responsibility that children possess” (102). Knowing this doesn't exonerate children for their bad behavior, but helps us to better understand their actions and create a systematic approach to encourage positive group behavior and peer pressure.
Humans are inherently social creatures, and so we must accept that children need to be in a group. Just because some groups reward bad behavior does not mean that all groups are bad. Groups, like close friendships and boy-girl relationships, serve an important function in child and adolescent development—children learn communication, negotiation, leadership, and cooperation through navigating the treacherous waters of the middle school or high school group. These groups allow children the chance at exploration that is not available to them in the adult world. But, as stated earlier, we can use positive peer pressure to create democratic groups that involve large numbers of children in constructive activities and make it uncool to be part of the mean group.
What we need to do as teachers is to foster an environment that is friendly to positive friendships and groups. As teachers we can create a moral school or classroom (215) by setting rules of friendship and sticking to them; including everyone in the discussion of how to create a moral classroom and school (217); “be[ing] proactive [and] do[ing] preventative maintenance” (219) on the social environment; upholding high behavior standards (221, 223); and implementing a systematic approach (226) to dealing bullying.
The ideal classroom is one where students know the behavior that is expected of them because they were part of the decision-making process on how students would act and treat each other in class. They had and continue to have classroom discussions on what being moral means and how they can ensure a moral classroom. Simply having the discussion and repeating it throughout the year, creates children and adults who are more cognizant of how they act and treat other people. The class doesn't have to come to a single, clear definition of what moral means. In the book, Thompson relates and experience where Tom Lickona, author of Education for Children: How Our Schools Can Teach Respect and Responsbility, describes a moral school as one “where people spend a lot of time discussing what a moral school is'” (216). When teachers create a systematic approach like this in their classrooms and have clearly set forth expectations, then teachers know what to do when the incidents of bullying, teasing, name-calling and hazing occur. They refer back to the rules and ask how did we do today on following our rules? (222). Addressing the issue before it becomes a problem does much more to prevent and cure problems at their core than does running from mishap to mishap trying to maintain some sense of sanity in the classroom. Involving children in a systematic program to foster a moral, safe environment allows children the opportunity to, once again, practice and master those democratic skills of communication and compromise we so value. And then the classroom becomes the perfect incubator for the types of positive friendships and interactions we want our students and children to enjoy.
So teachers, relax. Although at times we may need to step in, for the most part children need their space to figure the adult world without us breathing down their necks and lecturing them. They need to try out their emotions in a safe, friendly positive environment where their friends can help them learn how to better communicate and negotiate. While we can and should instruct children on the basics of human behavior, like learning anything else, they need to try it out to really understand how and when to use the adult skills we want them to learn. The best thing we can do is create a safe place for children to practice through creating a moral classroom with a systematic approach to preventing bullies and supporting democratic, heterogeneous groups. Start today with a classroom discussion: What is a moral classroom? How can we make our classroom more moral?
