How Do I Help My Kids... Make Friends?

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Osage News

Last week our Osage Campus and Prairie Lakes Staff learned that Pastor Andy Schumacher, our Osage Campus Pastor for the last 6+ years, announced that...

For those of us closest to him, this wasn’t a surprise; he had been sensing/praying/discerning with us for the last couple of years...

We’re so sad to see him transition out of this role, but are so glad that he and his family will be sticking around...

Pray! Pray boldly! Pray optimistically...

Series Intro: How Do I Help My Kids?

Not new that we talk about parenting at PLC, but this one’s a little different...

Post-Easter, some of you are newer to PLC and maybe even to church—so if that’s you, we’re speaking each week with you in the center of our minds…

So, starting a couple of weeks ago, Pastor John talked to us...

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How Do I Help My Kids...

Week 1: Be “Successful?”

Week 2: Navigate Gender?

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Side note: as we were planning this series, there were a lot of different topics that we considered talking about, including gender—but I’m usually the one in the room that advocates pretty strongly for including some of the more difficult, complicated, sensitive, or even loaded topics (like gender can be).

And the reason for that is this: I just think that if we as a church don’t talk about it (whatever “it” is), someone else will. And I love that we’re a church like that—a church that isn’t afraid; that tries to talk about the more difficult or sensitive subjects with grace and truth.

But what that also usually means is that if I’m the one advocating for it, then I’m the one tackling it.

However:

This time, my friends…

This time, my wife and I took our kids to Disney World—and it just so happens that our vacation overlapped with last weekend.

So: I cannot begin to express the level of joy that it brought to my heart to know that Pastor John got the privilege of diving into one of those this time around.

But, in all sincerity: if you missed it last week, go back and listen on our website. And also: make sure that you check out our parenting resources page on our website, prairielakeschurch.org. It’s right on the home page.

Introduction: How Do I Help My Kids… Make Friends

Ok. So there’s where we’ve been these last couple of weeks. Here’s where we’re headed this weekend. Parents:

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How Do I Help My Kids...

Week 1: Be “Successful?”

Week 2: Navigate Gender?

Week 3: Make Friends?

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Illustration: Middle School

So, show of hands in the room: how many of you remember your Junior High or Middle School days?

How many of you remember those days with either a shudder down your spine or a sinking feeling in your stomach?

Yes. 6th, 7th, and 8th grade. (or, 7th, 8th, and 9th grade if you’re in Cedar Falls, which, I’m sorry, makes you a weirdo. Because 9th grade is high school, and I won’t hear anything different.)

For a lot of us, those were not the easiest years. Now, for some of us, they were awesome. We were Zach Morris and Kelly Kapowski as soon as we hit 12. (Google that one, Gen Z).

But for the rest of us, including myself, our memories of that time in our lives are mixed at best.

Certianly true for me. Here’s what I remember from that time in my life:

Contrary to the tall, masculine, linebacker/lumber jack physique (or… dad bod) that I got going for me now as I stand before you today, I was not this way in middle school.

(By the way, I gotta tell you this story quick.)

So we’re at Disney World last week… took kids out of school the last week of April… “less busy”

Day 1, Magic Kingdom, packed

But I’m leading our pack of four through this mass of people down “Main Street.” And all of a sudden I hear another dad somewhere behind me shout this out to his wife and kids: “Follow the guy in the red shirt!” And here’s who he was talking about:

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Show Disney Picture

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And so we make our way through, them in our wake. And after we get into a little bit of an opening he turns to me and says in all sincerity: “Were you an offensive lineman?”

Uh… yeah… yep. That’s it. It’s not that I just really like pizza; it’s that I was an offensive lineman. For the Hawkeyes.

So, that’s who I am today. But in middle school, I was one of those kids that was young for his grade… didn’t hit the young man transformation until well after most everyone else did…

And so, for me, most of my middle school memories are… getting bullied. Getting made fun of. Being intentionally on the outside looking in. Not getting the invites to the birthday parties or the sleepovers or whatever.

And it was the first time in my memory that I became conscious of the fact that I wasn’t… “in.”

Everyone else seemed to have these great friendships. These natural groups that ate together at lunch or played together on teams or whatever. But not me.

But then I grew about 8 inches as a sophomore and I have been exacting my revenge ever since.

The Problem: Projection

So: now I’m a parent. And I’m a parent of a middle schooler who is just finishing his 6th grade year.

And I cannot tell you how much I worried about this stage for him on the front end of it all—because I remembered what it was like for me.

And that’s the place I want to start this weekend and really draw your attention to, parents, because that’s a pretty vulnerable place for us to be.

Here’s what I mean:

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When it comes to helping our kids “make friends,” it’s easy to project our own experience as a kid on to our kids...

Making our baggage theirs.

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I got bullied, so...

I didn’t have friends, so...

I wasn’t popular, so...

I felt left out, so...

And hey—it works the same way on the other side of that coin:

I was popular, so...

I was the captain of the team, so...

I had a 4.0, so...

It’s just a huge vulnerability for us as parents | to project our experience as a kid onto our kids. It just is.

And here’s the deal:

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When we project our experience as a kid onto our kids, we add to their burden—rather than help them carry their own.

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Think about this for a second, because it works the same way for us as adults:

When someone has an anxious presence around you—even if they’re anxious for you—what’s that like? What’s it like to be around them? What do you feel like when they’re around?

Well, it feels like in addition to everything you’re already trying to manage, now you have to manage whatever they’re worried about, or whatever they are thinking.

They might have the best of intentions. But what it feels like is another burden.

We’re at risk of doing the same thing with our kids:

If you were popular (and you kinda need them to be as well)...

Or if you weren’t (and you’re constantly worried about that around them and for them)...

If you project that on to them, that’s just one more thing that young person has to carry along with everything else in their world.

3 Ways to Help

So when it comes to helping our kids make friends, if projection is something we want to avoid, what should we do instead? Because there’s a pretty long list of things our kids are facing in this area that we as parents I’m sure are wanting to be helpful in:

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How do I help my kids make friends...

If they are “different”/different than me?

In the digital age?

If their friends aren’t a good influence on them?

Text us about your kid! Send your question to 99581.

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So, if you’re taking notes, these are the (3) I’m gonna hit this weekend, in that order.

Helping When They’re Different

Let’s start with the first one:

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How do I help my kids make friends...

If they are “different”/different than me?

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We got our kids some Amazon Fire tablets for Christmas this year. And one of the cool things about that is that it allows my son, Jude, and I to play some of the same mobile games.

Recently Jude started playing this golf game called “Golf Clash.” It was one of those games that he would watch me play on my phone from time to time.

Anyways, he picked it up, and asked me if I was still playing it. I wasn’t… but that was all the invitation I needed to download that again and start playing along with him.

So one night we’re sitting next to each other, him on his tablet, me on my phone, and we’re playing Golf Clash.

And here’s what he says to me (probably as he’s watching me get inappropriately frustrated with how I’m doing in the game):

“You know… I’m not really competitive. Like, at all. But when I get into playing a game, then I can start to feel competitive. But usually before the game I just don’t really feel it.”

And as I heard him say that, my first thought was:

That. Is. Not. Me.

As long as I remember, I’ve been competitive. Like, annoyingly so. Just really, really hated to lose at most things.

And so is my wife, by the way. She’s also competitive. In fact, I remember one of my first visits out to her parents’ place in Seattle. They (of course) pulled out some of their old home movies. And there was this one from when my wife was 5 years old and they were doing some sort of “family olympics” in the back yard. Well, there’s one point in the video where 5 year-old Erin is racing her twin sister, Emily. And she deliberately lets Emily get a little ahead of her until the very end where she races past and wins the race.

So, two people, both annoyingly competitive, get together and have a son who… isn’t.

So what do we know as parents?

Well, even though our kids come from us, and take on some of our qualities, our kids aren’t us. They are… them.

In fact, that’s how God designed it:

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Genesis 1:26-27 “Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

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This is from the creation account in Genesis. And this particular part of the account—the part where God creates humans—gives us some really, really helpful insights as parents when we’re thinking about our kids.

So that phrase: God created us in his “image,” in his “likeness”—those words are pretty critical to understanding your child and why they are different or different than you.

Here’s what those words “image” and “likeness” means:

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Image: A reflection; a physical representation; a representative.

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In other words: when God created human beings, men and women, he created us to represent him. God is spirit; we are flesh. And so when God created this physical world and then created us physically in it, he created us to represent him in this world.

We’re God’s ambassadors in this world, so to speak. He put us in the world to live and act and love and build and relate... just like he would.

And so here’s what that means for us as parents:

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Before your child is a reflection of you, they are a reflection of God himself—because God made all of us in his image.

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I was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed kid and I married a dark-haired brunette. But dominant genes apparently mean nothing because we have two very blonde-haired, blue-green-eyed children. They’re a reflection of me in that regard.

But before they reflect me, they reflect their Creator. God himself. Because God made all of mankind in his image. Before any of us are a reflection of our parents, we are a reflection of the Creator—God himself. He created your son or your daughter with qualities that reflect him. Really, really good things that align with who he is.

Maybe you’re annoyingly competitive and your kid isn’t. That’s a good thing, because it reflects a part of God’s character. More peaceable. More content. More calm.

And so here’s the practical tip, then, parents, as you think about helping your kid make friends when they are “different” in some kind of way—or different than you:

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Be a student of your child, constantly learning to discover what is good about their unique wiring.

Call it out in them and to them, because what is good is godly.

Know (and rest in the fact!) that others will do the same.

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(Tell Jude’s 6th grade friends story.)

Okay, that’s #1. How do you help your kids make friends when they’re different or different than you.

Helping in the Digital Age

#2:

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How do I help my kids make friends...

2. In the digital age?

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So… there’s an increasing amount of study, concern, and alarm surrounding the negative impact of social media and screens, especially on kids. We’re witnessing for the first time a generation of young adults who grew up in a digitally native environment. Facebook and Twitter became global phenomenon back in 2006—which was 16 years ago. iPhone was 2007. And so if you’re 18-24… your world has never been without updates and likes and shares and text messages and screens.

Fortunately, there’s plenty of tools now to monitor and regulate screen usage—but that can’t undo what has been at least a decade+ of this digital revolution that happened on such a large scale and at such a fast pace that it left an indelible mark on an emerging generation.

Fast forward to March of 2020, when we lived through another time of accelerated immersion and dependence on everything digital—from contactless delivery, to Zoom meetings, to online school and online church—a time that we’re still kinda wading through the effects of.

In fact, we spent the first part of this year at Prairie Lakes talking about just that—a series we called “Attention War.” You can go back on our website and listen or watch those again if you want.

So this is the world that our kids are growing up in, and one that we as parents are really grappling with.

When should they have a phone?

How much time is too much time on devices?

How do I know who they’re talking to?

How do I protect them from predators?

How do I protect them from mean kids in Virginia who are saying hurtful things in the Roblox chat?

Right? I mean, my parents didn’t have to worry about the mean kid from Virginia. But we do.

So, couple of reminders first:

Get to our parents resource page on our website. Our Family Ministry staff have been very intentional these past few years in connecting parents with a ton of great instruction from experts on how to parent “Generation Screens.”

Go back and listen to what we shared in January in our Attention War series. Pastor Cody, our Digital Pastor, had a ton of really great things to say and share.

Let’s get to some practical tips now. Take a look at this:

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Proverbs 13:20 “Walk with the wise and become wise, for a companion of fools suffers harm.”

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So, that is true. It was true thousands of years ago when it was first written, and it’s just as true in the digital age.

The internet did not invent fools. They’ve been around a long, long time. Maybe the internet spotlighted them or gave them a microphone; I’ll give you that.

But we’ve had to deal with foolish people as long as there’s been people.

Here’s the point:

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Stop approaching “screen time” like it’s “break time” for you as a parent.

Instead, monitor your child’s digital relationships and coach them up.

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Listen—here’s what I’m seeing, and here’s what I’m afraid of:

We’re waking up to the danger of screens, the affect of social media, all of it.

And what I’m watching is this pendulum begin to swing. It swung way too far in the “ignorance is bliss” direction as we let our kids just mess around on their phones or tablets or Chrome Books or Xboxes or whatever. Screen time was break time, and screen time was not good for them.

And now the pendulum is beginning to swing pretty fast in the opposite direction. No screen time. No phones. No social media in any form until you’re in high school… stuff like that.

And with each new study that shows something about shorter attention spans or lower grades or psychological damage or what have you, there’s going to be more and more calls for more and more reaction and restriction.

And some of that I’m sure is appropriate.

And listen: you gotta do what you think is right by your kid. You’re in charge of yours. I’m not trying to tell you your business here or overstep.

But if you would give me just a little space to hear something from someone who’s seen a few of these kinds of pendulum swings:

Overreacting and overcorrecting usually do an equal amount of harm that under-reacting and under-correcting did.

Don’t get me wrong; there’s going to be things that you’re going to want to do to regulate the medium—setting limits on screen time, filters, things that are off limits… great.

But it’s still going to be true that the world our kids are growing up into is a world where digital relationships are the norm. Period.

And so while you’ve got them, let me just encourage you:

Don’t just settle for the “kill switch.”

Regulating and restricting are tools you’ll need to use from time to time. You’ll need to just switch it off from time to time. For sure.

But what you really need to do, parents, is coach your kids on how to have healthy relationships—including digital ones.

Which means... you need to sit next to them as they play and watch how they interact online (rather than scroll mindlessly on your phone).

Which means.. you need to say, “Hand me your phone” (instead of just allowing them to go off to their room and shut their door).

Which means... you need to ask them who they are talking to and what they are talking about.

Because: walk with the wise, and you’ll become wiser. That’s true, physically or digitally.

A companion of fools suffers harm. That’s true, physically or digitally.

Don’t let screens teach your kids about relationships. Teach your kids about relationships—and help them apply that when they’re on their screens.

Helping If Their Friends Are a Bad Influence

Okay. Last one:

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How do I help my kids make friends...

3. If their friends aren’t a good influence on them?

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This one’s really simple:

Lock them up in their room until all of those bad friends are... dead.

Problem solved.

You can read about that and other parenting advice in my upcoming book, “Why I Went to Jail.”

No… this is a tough one. It really is. But there is one thing I would want to encourage you with, parents. Couple of passages of Scripture. First:

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Proverbs 18:24 “One who has unreliable friends soon comes to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.”

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And here’s another:

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1 Corinthians 12:24-26 “...God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.”

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Here’s the picture we get in Scripture: it’s a community. Friends who act like family. People who maybe aren’t related by blood, but who have a bond that runs deeper than blood—where they feel each other’s pain and celebrate each other’s successes. That’s what God is designing here through his church. A church… family.

And ultimately, that’s what we want for our kids—isn’t it? We want them to be a part of that kind of community, right? Not one that does them harm or leads them down the wrong path, but one that connects them to people who love them, care for them, and want what’s best for them. Where they can be known, accepted, challenged, and grow.

Here it is:

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The best way to help your kids when their friends aren’t a good influence on them is to introduce them to a competing influence:

A community that wants what’s best for them: a church family.

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(End with nod toward Family Ministry environments.)