HEALTH PLUS: FORMING POSITIVE friendships is an integral part of an adolescent's personal and social development. It is essential to adolescent stability, happiness, sense of worth, self-esteem and sense of self.
Without friends life is lonely, isolated and arid. Friends are important to share enjoyable activities with, companions with whom to share worries, people to rescue us if we are in difficulty and confidantes to comfort us at times of stress, disappointment or loss.
While friends in childhood are primarily found at school, children of parents’ friends or in the neighbourhood or at activities such as karate or scouts, the network widens for adolescents who may have friends who are not known to their parents. The peer group becomes an important connection for young people and there is a strong need to belong to and be accepted by a network of friends.
Additionally adolescents begin to form more opposite- sex friendships and to move in groups of boys and girls which can be exciting but can also cause stress or embarrassment depending on how socially skilled the adolescent is and whether the group is welcoming or rejecting.
This is important for later heterosexual learning of the boundaries of behaviour and the supports that derive from mixed friendships. Adolescents today also have the advantage of race, ethnic and cultural diversity in their peer groups enhancing perspective and appreciation of life.
Friendship has enormous developmental implications. It promotes the natural move towards greater independence in adolescence. It helps the socialising process: a skill which is increasingly important in today’s world where family size is small which reduces the opportunity to acquire skills in this safe context.
In peer groups, adolescents have the challenge of learning about group conformity, considering peer values, parental values and how to retain their own values while remaining part of the group.
This is, perhaps, a lifelong challenge: the balance between popularity and belief, of retaining a position despite rejection by the group for doing so and of being prepared to march to a different tune if the melody is discordant with what one truly believes is right.
Adolescent friendships also provide a connection to others who are at the same stage, who are facing the same developmental dilemmas, asking the same questions, experiencing similar upsets, stresses, or difficulties or the excitement, invulnerability and enthusiasm, energy and activity of being young.
Being part of a peer group teaches a young person how to accommodate the wishes of others and how to assert one’s own wishes through negotiation, skills required for the rest of their lives.
Adolescents have to discover the differential between assertiveness and aggression, and the balance of rights and responsibilities that group participation entails. The group can also act as a source of constructive criticism that would not be tolerated from parents and of particular encouragement that might not be available elsewhere.
Peer groups provide the support of comrades in adversity, of people sitting the same exams and facing similar longings and fears for the future.
Visiting friends’ families exposes the adolescent to different ways of living which can challenge prejudices, assumptions and teach appreciation and tolerance of difference.
The hallmark of most large groups of adolescents is the classic trying out of identities, sometimes done by individuals in the group, sometimes by the group as a whole.
This is the context in which identity exploration takes place: not just in the externals such as clothes and style, but in mood, manner, personality traits and investigating the many possible aspects of the adolescent’s developing self.
While much is written about the negative potential of peer groups, not enough is said about the support of peer groups and how important it is that their parents encourage it if it is a safe group.
That is why parents who listen, preferably with minimal commentary, to all the complex convoluted tales of friendships ruptured and miraculously reconvened, of the falling in and out of relationship, of the intricacies of communication and miscommunication, play an important protective role.
It is a lucky parent who hears what is happening in the young person’s life, a wise parent who asks (without interrogation), who shows interest (without an agenda) and who welcomes and respects their child’s friends, guides him or her in these choices and supports them through the joys and intricacies of friendship.
mmurray@irishtimes.com Clinical psychologist and author Marie Murray is the director of the Student Counselling Services in UCD