ENCORE: Best of Ask Lisa: Friendship Breakups & Conflict

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Dr. Lisa Damour:
Friends, if you’re tween or teen has run into some friendship drama, it can be really unpleasant for both of you and very hard to know what to say. In this Best of Ask Lisa compilation, we’ve curated my guidance on social conflict and falling outs and bullying and friendship breakups. Listening to it, watching it with us will help you know exactly what to say to your kid, how to help them through it, how to be calm, how to be clear, how to be compassionate. Wherever your kid is in their social life, I hope this episode gives you a steady place to stand.
The reason kids worry about social power in the middle school especially is that they have- You know, I think about this like they’ve left the shore of the comfort of their family life. They are working towards the shore of peer connections. They are very anxious. And unfortunately, Reena, in middle school, the shortest route to social power is to demonstrate the willingness to be mean because not everybody will do it. This kind of meanness among boys is often done like, “Just joking.” There’s a lot of “just joking,” which is such a trap because what’s said is hurtful, but if you react, you’re “being a baby.” And so the kids on the receiving end of this are left with these terrible choices, participating, pretending like it doesn’t bother them or showing that they’re hurt, at which point they actually subject themselves to more punishment.

Reena Ninan:
I want to ask you, how would you define what is bullying and conflict?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So when we walk up to the question of what is bullying, the way that psychologists define it, and it matters to us to be very, very specific about this. Bullying is when a kid is targeted by another kid or a group of kids and is unable to defend themselves. Everything else we call conflict. Kids not getting along at school or one kid’s giving it on Monday, the other kid’s giving it on Tuesday. That’s conflict.

Reena Ninan:
Lisa, why do kids do this? Why do they bully?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
There’s no one reason that describes all situations, but there are some things we see that explain why kids bully. Sometimes kids bully because it’s how they’re treated elsewhere. They’re being mistreated either at home or in another relationship. And they can start to sort of construct this idea of like, well, there’s one of two spots you stand in. You’re either the bully, you’re either giving it or getting it.
Sometimes we see kids who get drunk on the social power of it. Every once in a while they’ll come across a kid who either is willing to be mean or is willing to experiment with being mean.

Reena Ninan:
So it’s some sort of weird social power is what you’re saying.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah. They just sort of get drunk on power.
Sometimes kids bully because they’re bored.

Reena Ninan:
Just out of boredom? That’s why they do it?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah. Like you know what? Nothing going on. Why don’t we stir something up and start it? Those are some of the reasons we see.
We call this relational aggression as opposed to physical aggression. It’s where kids use social forces to hurt one another. And relational aggression tends to take a couple forms. One is excluding, icing kids out, and the other is spreading rumors about them. When kids are willing to be mean, their classmates will sort of cower in the seventh grade, cower in the eighth grade, be nervous around that kid in the ninth grade. By 10th grade, kids are over it. And they do not allow queen bees to make up rumors and tell lies. Queen bees or king bees, whatever you got in that grade. Now that’s the old schedule. One of the things that I am hearing across the board in schools is that the pandemic delayed the typical social trajectories we were used to.
If I’ve heard one thing consistently from schools in the wake of the pandemic is, “Oh my God, the ninth graders feel like seventh graders.”

Reena Ninan:
Still?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think if we’re really, really honest about kids in schools, we are still seeing pandemic after effects. No question.
One of the ways I’ve started to think about seventh graders is they are between the shores. On one shore is being embedded in family life. Over there on that other shore is adult friendship. Usually like 10th grade, 11th grade, like you got your people. They’re in the water between these shores. They’re all looking for a raft to be on. This kid just got pushed off the raft. All his friends are looking around being like, “I don’t want to be next. I don’t want to be next. I don’t want to be the one pushed off the raft into the water. So I’m going to save myself. And buddy, I hate that you are drowning, but if it’s me drowning or you drowning, I’m going with you.” I have seen kids who try their hand at meanness, just say something kind of cutting. And I’ve seen kids of all genders do this, this isn’t just boys.
They suddenly discover all this social power flows to them. Everybody’s scared of them now. I’ve seen kids get, for lack of a better word, drunk on power almost by accident. And they’re like, “This is amazing. If I just say a few cutting comments here and there, no one wants to be on my wrong side.”

Reena Ninan:
So they get a taste of it and it feels really good and they keep doing it.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So one way I have helped kids out of situations like this is to help them take it less personally, help it feel less personal, right? Because of course it feels intensely personal. So the first thing a parent can do is to give the explanation I just gave. “You know what, honey, maybe they are really struggling to find ways to feel connected to each other and you have become the victim of their attempt to feel tight is to box you out.”
I think of friendship groups, certainly middle school, early high school, but honestly, Reena right now, early high school looks like middle school socially. I mean, it’s really not good.

Reena Ninan:
You’re saying they’re delayed because of-

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Oh-

Reena Ninan:
-not being in class, masks and all that.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Totally. Totally. I mean, we are seeing the kind of base bullying nastiness that we usually can check at the door by seventh or eighth grade is creeping well into ninth or 10th, which is its own misery. And this child would be in the 10th grade probably. So what you can say is, think about social groups as almost like chemical compounds. And every kid in the social group is an atom and they have their chemical compound. They come together. Some compounds are more stable than others. So you know those friendship groups where everyone gets along and it’s kind of happy and they sort of click along. And then there are friendship groups where the friendship group wasn’t all that stable. And let’s say there were four other atoms in this group besides this child. And they decided, oh, I know how to stabilize. Let’s kick out that atom and that will strengthen our bonds.
We’ll be this group of kids who come together around this strengthening bond of having kicked that atom out. So it can start to help us. If we think about this girl who’s been iced out as like she’s now a free floating atom. And it’s in the name of that former friendship group trying to strengthen their bonds. The whole goal is to strengthen our bonds and to keep that atom out as a way of having an attempt at stabilizing our chemical compound with stronger bonds. So that’s a start on how to think about it. I think the gift that parents can give adolescents is the gift of perspective. When you are a 15-year-old and you have been dumped by your friends, it really feels like the end of the world. It really feels like there’s no point to anything anymore. And that is a very powerful sense of just, “This is awful. How do I move forward?”
As a middle-aged parent, you know this stinks. It’s awful, but it will be a really yucky chapter in a very long book. We want to walk a very delicate line as adults in both validating how deeply upsetting this is for our kids and then saying, “I want you to know I am 100% confident that you will look back on this and it will be something that happened. It will not be the story that defines your life.”
As adults, we don’t tend to have our friendships in these elaborated networks. We have this friend here and that friend there, and maybe a few times we’ve got a group of friends. But for kids, especially at school, all of this is happening in this complex web. And so if there’s a kid that is a problem for you for any variety of reasons, it’s not like you can just sort of stop engaging with them because they are at your lunch table, right?
Right. Or they’re invited to all the same stuff you’re invited to. And so this is a tough question that is very real. And I think so often as parents, when we hear about this, we’re like, “Well, just stop hanging out with her.” And the kid’s like, “Oh, did it work so easy?”
They don’t want to be in the friendship anymore with a kid who’s in their group. And so they start to align the entire group against that child. So as to excise the child while keeping all the other friends. I think that’s often what happens when a kid is dropped unceremoniously from a group is that someone in the group is like, “I feel done with this friendship, but I don’t want to lose all these other kids in the bargain, so we’re going to do a gang up.” One of the things that I hear about a lot is where one kid feels done and the other kid continues to text and say, “Do you want to come over?” Or, “Can I come over?” Where there’s a lot of asking and asking and direct like, “Let’s get together.” And I’ve heard parents talk about like, “Oh my gosh, it sometimes feels like there’s this kid with a stranglehold on my kid.” That they’re always reaching out and my kid doesn’t want it anymore.
And my kid is trying to not be mean and doesn’t want to be harsh with this kid, but does not want to hang out. That can be really delicate. So if that’s happening, I think one strategy that can help is to blame the parent. To be like, “We’re really busy tonight. I’m sorry.” Or, “My mom’s got something going on. I’m sorry.” And answering, getting back to the kid, and not necessarily promising, “I’ll call you when I’m free.” What I often see kids do is they feel super awkward. The kid who wants the friendship will say, “Can you come over to my house? Or do you want to do something later?” And what I’ve seen kids do for lack of a better strategy is they’ll say, “Okay, sure.” And then they’ll cancel at the last minute. Or they won’t respond at all. And I’ve cared for the kid on the other side of that who’s like, “It’s super weird. I’m texting her and asking her over and she’s not even replying.” And I’m like, “Oof, I get that, but it’s not really okay.” So another strategy I think that sometimes kids need is to say, “Oh, we’re really tied up. I’ll let you know when I’ve got some more time,” or something like that. And then leave it open, but give an answer. But blaming parents can be really helpful here.
What I think we need to say to ourselves as parents, and we can also say to our kids, is just because a friendship isn’t good forever doesn’t mean it was never good, but we all have chapters in our life. Reena, you can point to chapters of friendships, people you were really close with and then you were less close with as different parts of your life unfolded. We need to remember that’s true for us, that is true for our kids. It doesn’t mean that kids are bad or mean or naughty or cruel. It’s that these things evolve over time. One of the things that comes up in girl world, which I know pretty well, is this pressure to be authentic. I’m being “two-faced” is sometimes what you’ll hear. If I’m nice to her, but don’t want to include her on the weekends. I think we need to disabuse our kids of the idea that this is two-faced.
I think we’re going to call it polite. And I think Reena, honestly, we all do this as adults. You and I have worked in settings with lots of other employees, some of whom make us bananas. When they walk into the coffee room, we’re not like, “I won’t speak to you because I don’t find you pleasant.” We’re like, “Hey, how’s your family?” I mean, we keep it polite.
We don’t know very much about the complexities of kids’ social lives, even when we think we do. And when I picture a seventh grade lunchroom, for me, the activity in that lunchroom is happening in like 50 dimensions. And our kid comes home and tells us one or two dimensions. And anytime we want to guide them or weigh in or maybe make a phone call, we want to remember we are 48 dimensions short of understanding what was really going on in that situation. And so our goal largely will be to ask questions, seek guidance, be open-minded. We very rarely have the whole story and we never want to forget that.

Reena Ninan:
Having issues with your good friends is really a normal part of growing up. Kids need to know that they don’t have to have a humongous social network. What Lisa says they really need is one good friend, a caring adult, and the reassurance that what they’re going through is just a normal part of life. Every full episode we pulled from today is linked below. So if a clip resonated, you can listen to the whole conversation. And if you’re new to Ask Lisa, we hope you’ll take a look around. We put out new episodes every week on Tuesdays and we’ve covered everything from screen time and anxiety to college pressure and how to talk with your teens who won’t talk back. Whatever you’re navigating right now, there’s a good chance that we’ve done an episode on it. We hope you’ll join us for more. Thank you for spending time with us.
We’ll see you next week.