Do you keep in touch with the friends that you had at each grade level in school? Did some people move to other schools and you were left behind or did you yourself move and need to make new friends? If you came across these ‘old’ friends would you just fit straight back into being able to spend time with them. If so, what types of things would you do together? As kids move through from primary school, into high school and then out of school and potentially into work those friendships may last on a daily basis or they may be those that you catch up with every so often to complete favourite things together. The friendships that we have when we are counting up how many we have at the current point in time need to be considered against the friendships that we ‘had’ in previous times, which may have been there for a few years. Kids are often measuring their ‘friendship success’ by how many people they can ‘count’ as their friends right now. How many are linked on their social media accounts, so that they meet the criteria of having a lot of friends and are therefore ‘socially fitting in’ when someone else ‘looks’ at how they’re doing ‘health wise’.
Kids who move through different school systems often leave behind friendships that have been there for 3-4 years in a row and may never see those kids again as they are now no longer in the same school system because they didn’t live near each other before but travelled to go to the same school. It can be helpful to re-frame thinking about that individual friendship with that one other child as friendship with that ‘entire’ family. Kids interact with their friends siblings, their parents often spend time together and they may even know their grandparents.
Kids may age out of different types of services such as gymnastics or swimming after having spent years at the same centre. It may be that the kids had someone in that group of other kids that they sought out when there was a requirement to do something in pairs, or they would simply spend time talking to each other whilst completing in between the activities set for them. It may be that the parents spent an extra half hour talking post the gym class so that the kids would run around with each other ‘playing’ to entertain themselves by filling in the time whilst they waited – this is ‘friends’.
As kids grow up they may have spent considerable amount of time around their parents friends and know them well. Whilst they aren’t the ‘actual’ friend, they have a friend type of relationship with this person, having spent time socially interacting with them for often decades as they’ve aged.
One of the challenges is the subjective use of the word friend. It can mean different things to different people. Yet when meeting someone for the first time the concept of ”will you be my friend?” is still how it starts with that first physical approach to share time together doing something. This is then where it changes for each individual and what works for them and those that they spend time with. As a friend what do I spend my time with you doing? talking, listening, eating out, making things, playing sport, problem solving issues, gaming etc. As a friend what activities do we do together that show others that we are friends when we are interacting with other people: you support me, you stand up for me, you show that you are my friend, you help me, you talk nicely to me etc. As a friend what environments do we spend time in: you come to my house and I come to your house, I share my toys / personal belongings and you share yours with me, we go to other places together and we physically walk around together, show others that we are physically linked by how we reference each other etc. These are also skills that we learn within our families. It is important when looking at social skills of individuals to look at how they interact not only with ‘friends’ that they would like to have but with each member of their family.
It is important to note that kids / teens who spend a lot of time talking with their treating therapists will have very different language skills, understanding of concepts at a much deeper level than their age peers. This may make it challenging for them to successfully interact with class peers because of gaps in what others have been exposed to or don’t know how to talk about as easily.