Latest / Campfire Guide to Parenting / Helping Kids Make Friends: What Screens Are Replacing
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- Lydia Hernandez: It's the opening day of overnight camp several years ago. And campers are being dropped off by their parents. There's lots of hugs, a few tears. And among all those campers are these two girls, right? One is named Jade and the other is Lindsay. Both stood alone, quiet, head down, feeling totally awkward and totally nervous. But what happened to those two girls altered their lives, and it's what today's Campfire Chat is all about. This is Campfire Guide to Parenting. I'm Mike McDonald. I want to talk about something a lot of parents are quietly worried about right now, including me. And I don't think we are wrong to worry. So there's this study from the University of Michigan called Monitoring the Future. They've been tracking teenagers for decades. So back in 1996, the average teenager was hanging out with friends in person about two and a half times a week. And by 2020, that was down to about one and a half times a week. And it's not a slow slide, like it falls off a cliff around 2012, which, if you're doing the math and remember, is right around the time the smartphone showed up in almost every kid's pocket. So here's the part that should actually change how we think about this one. There's newer research out from the Journal of Adolescent Health that looked at teenagers and asked a simple question. What predicts whether a kid is doing well mentally? Their screen time or the quality of their real relationships? It wasn't even close. Friendship quality mattered almost three times more than how much time they spent on a screen. So this isn't really a story about phones being bad. It's a story about what the phone might be quietly replacing. Right? Too often I feel like we as parents are dialing in and identifying this problem. The problem isn't really the phone, it's the absence of real face-to-face interactions. It's what the phone has taken the place of. And that's where 30-some years of watching kids meet total strangers and becoming friends by lunchtime comes in. Those two girls standing awkwardly alone that morning at camp drop off could have been our girls. In fact, there's probably been several times we as parents have stressed out about our kids in those moments. I certainly have. Will they be accepted? Will they find someone to talk to, share time with? Will they make friends? It's one of the most important things that we wish for our kids. Why? Because we wish it for ourselves. Those two girls, Jade and Lindsay, found a way to each other that day, and it didn't happen because the counselors assigned them bunkmates. No one paired them up in some get-to-know-you game or forced them to interact in an icebreaker. They simply did what all kids have the ability to do if given the opportunity. They made friends. I have four kids of my own, right? My oldest is 29, my youngest is 13. I've watched all my kids make friends. Lose friends, cry over friends, and cry because they didn't have any friends. You would think after all that, I would be battle tested and on cruise control with my youngest. But no, I probably yearn more for him and stress out more for him, connecting with his peers and finding someone he can call his BFF. It's ironic. I've spent 32 years creating environments where kids can come together to make friends, and I find it ironic and humbling that it is my own four kids. And it caused me the most heartache and headache over making friends, you know, but that's how it is. Today is a very different place than when we were kids. In our neighborhoods of our childhood, we just headed out the front door, jumped on our big wheel, rode to the end of the block, and hung out with any of a drove of kids doing the same exact thing that we were doing outdoors. If we weren't making friends at the park, it was at the roller rink or the empty lot down the street or the cul-de-sac. So, yes, we're faced with a challenge parents, but intentional parents plan for this contingency because we know that giving our kids the opportunity to create positive relationships on their own terms is what allows them to do so when they're older like us. So if you heard that Michigan number a minute ago and felt a little sick about it, here's the good news, and it's real good news. The ability to do it, to make fringe is already built into your kid. And it doesn't have to really be taught. It just has to be allowed. So, three things I'd actually like for all of us to sit with. One, let's stop engineering the getting to know you conversation. Kids don't bond face to face making small talk. They bond shoulder to shoulder doing something. Hand them a task, a game, a project, anything with a shared gold, and let the friendship happen sideways instead of head on. Two, protect the awkward 10 minutes, right? Every single time there's this stretch where it looks like, my God, it's not gonna happen, it's not working, that's not the sign to step in. That's the sign it is working. And that's exactly how friendship happens. It's how it evolves and it's how it's supposed to be. Three, and given what that research says, this is the one I think that matters most. Let's stop measuring the risk by how much screen time your kid gets and start measuring it by how much real in-person, unscripted time. They get with somebody their own age. That's the number that actually predicts how they're doing. That summer camp season, many years ago, Jade and Lindsay did what all kids do best when left on their own. They make friends. And for several years after that, they returned to camp as best friends. When they got too old to go to camp, they went off to school and they stayed in touch. They went on vacations together. And when Jade got married a few years ago, Lindsay was there at her side as her maid of honor. And me? I got to sit in the second row and watch what happens when real friendship blossoms and stands the test of time. So before you go, here's what I want you to sit with this week. Where this week can we hand our kids an hour of unscripted time with somebody they don't know and just let it happen. That's Campfire Guide to Parenting from this week. I'll see you around the fire.