What To Do When Your Teen Is Making Friends You Don’t Approve Of
Banning your teen’s friends won’t work — collaborate and discuss friendship qualities, instead.
Your child’s teenage friendships can be complicated. Maybe they can’t seem to make friends — or, at least, friends you actually like or approve of.
More than likely, you already know that banning your teenager from anything rarely works. When you push, they pull. And this goes for your teen’s friendships, too.
So, what do you do when your teen can’t make friends or are making friends who are questionable?
The answer is collaboration.
When it comes to teenage friendship, peers are the biggest influencing factor.
Your teen either can’t make friends or is changing their behavior and making poor choices in order to fit into a certain friend group.
There are many types of friends, but no one can doubt that the friend who has your back is, by far, a greater asset than the one who’s, well, just questionable.
What can be more troubling than watching from the sidelines as your teen engages with peers who don’t treat them well?
Yes, this is a rhetorical question because this is on the top of the list of parental heartbreaks.
Should you ban the friendship? There’s no doubt that you’d jump in front of a train to protect your kids, so why is subtle stuff more difficult?