The redcoats are coming — for your kid’s best friend.
Americans love reading how Europeans are superior parents. We read the books, whether it’s “Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting” in 2012 or, out this month, “Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children,” and believe the hype. So when news broke that Prince George, the eldest son of Prince William and Duchess Kate, goes to a school that bans best friends — well, there was only one thing to do.
Our schools began to ban best friends, too. Most parents know that schools have been doing this informally for some time, but psychologist Barbara Greenberg caused a stir with a recent piece in US News & World Report, noting that she sees a trend of American schools implementing an actual ban.
Greenberg approves of the move because she is concerned by what she calls the “emotional distress” of a kid losing the status of best friend or the “inherently exclusionary” nature of best-friendship itself. Greenberg writes that “child after child comes to my therapy office distressed when their best friend has now given someone else this coveted title.”
Is it tough for a 6-year-old when their best friend drops them? Of course. But shake it off, kid, life gets much harder than that. As my babushka used to say, “Let this be the worst thing that ever happens to you.”
We don’t say that enough to children anymore. Our desire to shield kids from all pain results in them growing into adults who are unable to handle adversity. When we start meddling in the dynamics of their friendships, it should be a universal sign that we are going too far.
It’s not just about the folly of trying to shield kids from theoretical emotional distress. The best-friend ban shields children from actual joy. In the backlash to Greenberg’s piece, people argued the benefits of best-friendship. On Fox’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” psychotherapist Nell Daly cited a University of Virginia study that found that kids who have a best friend growing up have “less social anxiety” and better mental health.
But there’s a good case to be made that even debating the relative merits is a concession to nanny-staters they don’t deserve. If a study released tomorrow showed that kids will grow up to be healthier, smarter and richer if they don’t make any friends at all, we still shouldn’t encourage that.
The extent to which we’re normalizing meddling in the details of our children’s lives is itself a problem. Some kids will be naturally drawn to one person and have a best friend. Some won’t. For adults to spend their time hand-wringing about the friendships of children is downright weird.
Besides, there’s so much more we should be worried about in our schools. We already do too much protecting of feelings. The 2011 documentary “Waiting for Superman” found that “among 30 developed countries, we rank 25th in math and 21st in science. The top 5 percent of our students, our very best, rank 23rd out of 29 developed countries. In almost every category we’ve fallen behind, except one.”
That category? Confidence. Our children have the highest self-esteem in the world. No surprise there: Educators and parents focus so intently on blocking out bad news that our kids think they’re the best while being among the academically worst. To reverse this trend, we need to prioritize actual education over social politics.
Teach your children to be kind, to give other kids a chance and to be the type of good person who is sensitive to excluding others. But don’t tell your kids what kind of friendships to have or how to conduct those friendships.
If you must helicopter your children, do it while they do their math homework, teach them proper grammar or just talk to them about how to conduct themselves as they move through life. If you want to really help your child, focus less on the friendship studies and more on the studying.