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Ban Best Friends?
Should adults “ban” best friends for our kids in the interest of being socially inclusive? I think this is a horrible idea, asked in this US News, Should Schools Ban Kids From Having Best Friends? Adults deciding who kids get to be friends with? That will not only breed resentment, it will reduce engagement in school. I have seen children without a best friend at school (in 6th grade I was one), and it hurt my performance in school. In 12th grade, when my then best friends and I broke up, I made it a point to find a new best friend, one whom I am still best friends with, so take that, social do-gooders. Think of all the friends I “excluded” by having this one.
To look at it another way, having someone force the kids in 6th grade who did not like me to be my “friend” would have made things 100 times worse. I was already being bullied. Having teachers force apart cliques to include me would have breed resentment on their part, and guess who would have born the brunt of their ire?
Gallup has shown that having a best friend at work is one of the factors of workers being engaged at work. This question on their Q12, while the most controversial, has held up. People who have a best friend at work are more engaged with their jobs, and happier at work. It stands to reason, less emotionally mature children have at least as much need, if not more, as adults for a best friend.
Instead of trying to guide our kids’ number of friends or size of their social circles to fit some outcome of research on circle size, my suggestion is to let children find their way with relationships that fit their personalities and traits. Some people naturally have a limited number of deep relationships, and some people a broad circle. Trying to fit everyone into a middle of the road “best” option is working against human nature.
To quote a popular song from my youth, “Leave those kids alone!”
Published in General
Now I think if it, this is a good metaphor (metonymy? Simile?) for the way Leftists think about wealth: if you have it, then someone else is necessarily deprived. Instead of recognizing the personal wealth that is created, anew, when two people choose each other, they focus on the fact that someone else has not been chosen. Never mind the obvious fact that, as with wealth, that other individual is in no way restricted from creating his/her own intimate relationships. Friendship is created, not consumed.
It is…puerile.
Well, President Trump is beginning to disabuse them of these ideas.
Old and Busted: bosom buddy
New Hotness: same-sex attraction
Brilliant observation! If I have a best friend, then I’m depriving other friends of my friendship.
Is that really a negative for them? ;)
LOL some of them probably want to be more deprived!
I read the linked article. I swear there is a mental illness that 20-50% of the country has that is somehow caused by marterial excess, where people no longer think clearly because they’re not facing any sort of adversity that clear thinking keeps you from getting into when your life is slightly less than opulent.
Let’s unpack the following quote from the article:
Since when is “judgement” a bad thing? I think judgement is something that should be developed and shaped so as to be useful, not something that should be discouraged. Like, I think it would be great if my (hypothetical at this time) children used their judgement to stay away from their peers who want to use drugs. Or engage in violence. Or have unsafe sex. Or even relatively benign things that kids occasionally do, like steal, play with fireworks, throw snowballs at moving cars, throw rocks at windows, or whatever.
And as for “inclusion”, I think it’s overrated. I mean, I was the fat kid who liked Star Trek and I had conservative political opinions in a blue state, so I got excluded from everything. It was somewhat miserable at the time, but looking back on it, it was great, because I managed to avoid every dionesian excess that ended up thrwarting the future success of many of the people who did the excluding. I learned self reliance, and I basically became nigh-impervious to peer pressure. That’s why I don’t have a drug habit, bad debt, herpes, a child out of wedlock, a prison sentence, or a job as an Assistant Professor.
It would be better to teach values besides being “non-judgemental” and “inclusive.” Like, maybe something that would help kids use their judgement on who to include effectively instead of stupidly. But that might include saying that some choices are bad, and people like the author of that piece implicitly insist we can’t do that for some reason.
I am truly blessed. I have three “best friends”. One from my first day in high school and two from college. We still stay in close touch. When we get together, it is as if no time has passed since we last saw each other. (Other than we have all gotten grayer and heavier.) I cannot imaging what my life would be without any one of them much less all of them.
Dear, old, wonderful best friends are the shining stars in one’s life.
@joep you are so right. When did “judgment”, or even “prejudice” get such a bad rap? Everybody makes “value judgments” every day–and each particular choice would be monumentally challenging, like reinventing the wheel, if we didn’t have “prejudices”, which means a sort of springboard inculcated by our culture, from which our reasoning can evaluate the leap we’re about to take. How do we decide which products to buy? Where to live? Where to send our kids to school?
To repudiate “judgment” is to dethrone reason.
I totally agree!
One of the things I’ve noticed about liberals is when a conservative starts to bring morality into a discussion, the liberals say, “Judge not, lest ye be judged” (I wonder how many know they’re quoting Jesus?) in a lame attempt to get out of the argument.
There are two problems with this. First, we are all going to be judged eventually, so that is not what this is about. Second, the context they use is wrong. Of course we can judge people, but we have to do it fairly and not unjustly. We can’t judge others by a different standard than we judge ourselves.
Speaking of judging, liberals who use the quote forget that many of their victories come in courts, handed down by judges passing down judgments.
How facist to even choose friends for people. It seems like they want to make humans not human.
Being kind is very important, and part of that is inclusion. Teach kindness, let kids choose their own friends, but teach them to be kind to everyone.
Teach kindness.
Teach kindness indeed. Everyone is fighting a great battle.
The highlighted section certainly seems to say that those in vowed life are in a similarly forced, negative situation to the one Bryan describes in the OP. I merely wanted to point out that even if such rigid boundaries around ‘particular friendships’/family ties *had been* the norm at one time, it is no longer the case. Members of religious communities do, indeed, “choose” one another’s company – and have ample opportunities to test the fit – before a commitment is made permanent. Thanks for the chance to make my point more clear.
My mother was furious when the school told her that they purposely put me and my best friend in different classes in first grade so that we would have to make new friends. It didn’t actually bother me much, since I then had a best friend at home and a made a best friend in class. This was in 1959, so the idea isn’t all that new.
Goldberg wrote about this idea in 2010, back before voting for Trump became an issue – or even an idea.
Just part of the tyranny of the left: we will control who you associate with.
I suspect the two of you stuck together like glue and chattered like magpies, sitting in the same chair at the same desk. Sometimes the teachers separate a couple of kids in shear desperation for survival.
Friends are how we shelter through hardship. Maybe the left only wants us to turn to the state. I don’t think this is explicit, but part of their unconscious thinking.
I doubt they construct it that way, for several reasons:
1. Most ordinary people who are left-leaning don’t tend to think about “the state” in very clear terms like that. They tend to be muddled about it, thinking of it as “we” or whatnot.
2. The author’s bag seems to be about “inclusion”, e.g. children should have friends, just not a best friend, and not all friends who are like them. E.g. your children should have a black friend if they’re white. Cause that’ll like, automatically make them not racist or something.
“Inclusion”, by the way, seems to be codeword for the latest scam to keep affirmative action running in perpetuity. I don’t know if the author thinks of it that clearly, but activists are definitely trying to do it at larger tech companies and open source projects.