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Best Friends, Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Lives of Children

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Michael G. Thompson

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“First and foremost, you need to talk with your child’s teacher. If you think that your child is on the margins of the class, ask the teacher if that is true. It is a painful question to ask and a tough question to answer. Be blunt. Explain your worry and lay out the facts as you see them. It may take this kind of bold appraisal before a teacher will say, “Yes, I’m sorry to say that your child doesn’t have a friend in the class,” or “Yes, he is teased an awful lot.” Parents need to know that teachers are generally very kind, diplomatic, and supportive. It is difficult for them to be direct about a child’s terrible social situation unless he is a bully who’s causing problems for other children. If a child is the real victim, teachers sometimes hold themselves responsible for fixing the problem and feel defensive if they cannot.”

ChildrenFriendshipParenting
Book:Best Friends, Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Lives of Children
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“To listen to children dissect one another in public and respond with weak words is not helpful. Wait for an opportunity, catch the malefactors in the act, and then label their behavior for what it is: “That’s cruel.” If it continues, you may have to stop the car and declare, “I have to ask you to stop talking about Isabel that way. It is unbearably cruel and I cannot tolerate it.” Your child and your child’s classmates should know that you do not condone their horrible treatment of one another and will not collude silently with it.”

ChildrenFriendshipParentingGossipBullyingInterventionBystander Intervention
Book:Best Friends, Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Lives of Children
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“By the end of that semester of free therapy, I was very tired of talking about myself. I was tired of myself. Each week I dutifully showed up, because I was supposed to, and relitigated whatever I had talked about the previous week. Replaying the details of that night demystified it, at least in terms of my involvement. More accurately, noninvolvement, because how could it have ended any differently? That was just the historian trying to wedge himself into a story that was not his. Talking so much did nothing to lessen the fact that I missed you, and that I could now periodize different eras of that feeling. I miss missing you circa Oct 98, I wrote in my journal. I miss not watching my back, I miss going out for dinner at night, I miss your balcony and cultivating minor league tobacco habits. I missed that feeling of having once known exactly what to say. That feeling of writing a series of perfect sentences. In a sense, I was still, years later, stepping down from the podium at the funeral home, shuffling slowly back to my seat in the pews between Anthony and Sean. But this was exactly why Derrida resisted the eulogy form. It’s always about “me” rather than “we,” the speaker burnishing his emotional credentials rather than offering a true account of the deceased.”

FriendshipMemoryTherapyGrief And LossEuology
Book:Stay True
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