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Join me, Jess VanderWier, a registered psychotherapist, mom of three, and founder of Nurtured First, along with my husband Scott, as we dive deep into the stories of our friends, favourite celebrities, and influential figures.
In each episode, we skip the small talk and dive into vulnerable and honest conversations about topics like cycle breaking, trauma, race, mental health, parenting, sex, religion, postpartum, healing, and loss.
We are glad you are here.
PS: The name Robot Unicorn comes from our daughter. When we asked her what we should name the podcast, she confidently came up with this name because she loves robots, and she loves unicorns, so why not? There was something about the playfulness of the name, the confidence in her voice, and the fact that it represents that you can love two things at once that just felt right.
Welcome to Robot Unicorn.
We are so glad that you are here.
Today's episode is on friendship.
And what is the reason we actually chose to do an episode
On friendship, friendship struggles, all that.
Our daughter is going through friendship struggles for the first time.
But also when I asked people at the end of last year what topic they want to hear more about
Friendship or bigger kid struggles was like the number one thing.
People were telling me like I think because of a lot of our followers on
Instagram at least.
They've been around for so long.
And so all of our kids are getting older.
Yeah.
And facing different struggles like puberty.
friendship, bullying, peers, that kind of thing.
So we wanted to be able to create some content that's going to be really helpful as your kids get older, not just focusing on the taller years.
Yeah, and I I would also correct what you said there.
It's not the first time our oldest daughters had friendship struggles, but I think they're a little more complex as they get older, obviously, makes sense.
So it's just been something that we
have been talking about.
I wouldn't say her friendship struggles are the most serious at this point yet.
I think they're very typical.
Yeah, definitely.
It seems like they're a typical
Friendship struggle.
So I'm just gonna get right into it and hard-hitting question right off the bat.
Oh boy.
When a child struggles with
friendships.
How often do you think at least one of the parents is like processing or projecting their own childhood experiences on the experience that their child is having or facing currently
Is this a question directed straight to me?
Well, a little bit.
It is a little bit, but because of the way you have been reflecting on
at least your friendships growing up.
I just wonder how often do you think parents are just projecting or processing their own struggles that they had on their kids?
Yeah, often.
And I I don't know if I said this on a podcast or if I said this on Nurtured First, but when our child hits the age that we were out and we were most hurt, we're gonna feel the most triggered
And so for a lot of people, male and female, when their child hits that school age and they start seeing their child be hurt for the first time from peers, friends, even like teachers saying things to them, your first reaction is gonna be
whatever it is that you had in the past, right?
So that feeling that you had in the past is gonna be brought back up unless you reflect on it.
So for me
I had various friendship struggles throughout my life and I remember times being lonely and feeling left out and all of those experiences that many children go through.
I remember that and that was painful for me as a child
So when I'm watching our daughter go through that for the first time, of course my own feelings and experiences are being brought back up.
And it is really difficult at times to not project that onto her and be like
Oh, you must feel so lonely or so sad or so upset because that's how I felt.
When maybe she doesn't feel that way.
Yeah.
So to be fair, I feel like sometimes you have made like the small issues that she's facing almost feel like
there are major major things where I feel like it's just typical child thing like children I'll give a really good example of when that happened one time.
One time I asked her, oh, who'd you play with today at recess?
Oh no one.
I just walked around the playground by myself.
And in my mind, every alarm bell is ringing because I'm like, wait, I remember walking around the playground by myself and feeling very lonely and not liking it
So I am interpreting this situation through my lens as her parent.
And I'm like, oh my goodness, you must have felt so lonely
Why were you walking around?
No one wanted to play with you.
She was, I don't know, just didn't feel like playing with anyone, so I just walked around by myself.
And she was confident.
Like she was fine.
She just needed a break from talking to people.
But because I projected that on her, now all of a sudden she's questioning herself, right?
Like
Oh, should I have walked around by myself?
And so because I was at that time projecting my own experiences onto her, now she's questioning something that actually she felt totally confident about.
And so when I looked back on that and reflected, I was like, it's
totally different.
My daughter had made a choice to walk around the playground by herself.
She wanted that break to be alone.
And she wasn't interpreting that as I'm a loner or no one wants to hang out with me.
To answer your question, I think a lot of
our own insecurities and the things that hurt us or we felt in pain by get brought back up when our kids go through the same thing.
Yeah.
And that happens to me too.
So if you're like, oh man, I've definitely been projecting onto my kids, we're gonna hopefully talk about that.
throughout this episode and know that you're definitely not alone because that's been a big eye opening experience for me.
Yeah.
You like that question?
Well I I saw that one coming.
I didn't know it was gonna be your first question, but I think it is important because how many of us are feeling triggered?
I don't know.
I well I noticed that.
And I think the difference might be that we have all daughters.
So their friendships and the way they interact with kids at school is a little bit different than how I would have.
I feel like I'm not going to be as likely to project my experiences on them because it's very different.
And I also see how much better they are than me.
Yeah, and they're really good at coping with these things.
I know a lot of men struggle and they get triggered by their their sons when, let's say when they were boys, they were kind of told, you know, just fight back.
Just be mad, just get angry.
And then when their sons like are more sensitive or don't fight back or are crying.
I think sometimes dads from my experience can get triggered by that.
Oh just you gotta just push back, you gotta man up, you know, and and it might take a lot to go against their own messaging and programming that says
you can't cry about being sad that a friend was mean to you.
Right.
So I feel like dads listening, if they have sons, they might be kind of struggling with that.
Or I think when we were kids, maybe fighting back to your peers was
the normal thing to do, right?
Um I'm sure f it was for you.
Yep.
And now it's a lot more talking about it and that might be hard to
If you're dad and you never learned how to talk it out with your friends, you only learned how to punch them in the face and then get over it.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Like I even I even remember my dad saying that when we were kids
Oh, when we were kids, just throw a punch and then yep, just move forward, you're done.
And I remember as a little girl sometimes being like, oh, wouldn't that be easier?
Yeah, and I I wonder if I don't have like I don't put that same pressure
I don't know.
Maybe it would be different if we had a boy and then if I would maybe feel that way.
I don't know.
It's hard to say, 'cause that's not my experience
It's hard to know, but I wanted to bring that up for the dads who are listening.
Yeah, 'cause I would like with the girls, I mean, we put our oldest into karate and then our middle will soon start as well.
But I don't feel like there's this pressure that they have to
like fight back.
It's more of a just helping them build confidence so that they can at least protect themselves from anything that might happen.
But yeah, maybe if we had a boy I would feel differently about that.
So that's a good perspective.
Okay.
As both a mom and a therapist, how do you navigate that delicate balance between allowing our children or allowing our child to
feel a bit of that social pain that comes along with these friendship struggles and because I think there's there's an important piece where they need to learn a bit of resilience.
Yeah.
and understand.
Like maybe the playground is a good place to learn.
Like not everyone can be trusted.
You don't need to believe everything every person tells you.
And I feel like it's a good way, a starting point for them to learn some of these things.
But
It's also inherently I feel like we want to protect our girls from having this pain that they experience with friends
So how do we help them develop the social skills and resilience while also protecting them a little bit from major pain?
I'll take the therapist lens.
It's such a balance.
So first off, there's a difference between normal friendship struggles, which kids will have, because you're with a bunch of other kids who have immature brains and their own different ways of
coping and everyone's kind of out for themselves trying to figure out how to exist with peers for the first time, right?
So there is such a normalness to friendship struggles and an importance to friendship struggles.
We were just talking about this in the car yesterday, right
Or it through friendship struggles if you have the proper coaching from your parents, you can learn how to problem solve.
You can learn about trust
you can learn about who do you share your secrets with and who do you want to form a relationship with and maybe who's just a peer that's in your class.
Like
you can start to learn those valuable skills.
So I think that's one thing we can talk about that more, but that is very different from a child being bullied.
Yeah, yeah.
Right.
I often would be working with parents and my first thing when they come in and be like, hey, my kid's having a lot of friendship struggles, like, is it friendship struggles or is it bullying?
Because when it's bullying, a parent has to intervene
And that's really important too, because I think sometimes it is actually bullying that's happening.
And bullying is there is someone who is
purposely trying to inflict hurt or pain on your child, whether that's through words, through actions, maybe both, behind their back.
And children should not be alone to fend for themselves in terms of bullying.
And
parents need to really be in the know as to is this a normal friendship struggle where I actually want to equip my child to use their strong voice and stand up for themselves and be assertive?
Or is this a case where there is a child who specifically is trying to harm my child?
And if that's the case, parents need to get involved because that's too much for a child to take on themselves.
But if we go back to what I asked originally and maybe we're projecting some of the things that we experienced as kids.
How would you define bullying then?
Right?
Because I feel like some of the normal friendship struggles are I don't want to play with you.
Like you're not allowed to play with us today and I mean there's obvious bullying where
People are posting pictures online of your child or something like that and they're purposefully trying to tear them down publicly and but how
I feel like there's a lot of in between there, so how would you determine what is bullying and what's not then?
So a bully, I love how Gordon Newfeld says this, like
A bully is the most aware of someone else's emotions and they know how to use them against that person.
So a bully, it's intentional.
I think there's a difference between like
I don't want to play with you.
I only want to play with so-and-so.
To me, that's a child who has an immature selfish brain.
And it's just like, I don't feel like playing with this person today.
And I just all I can focus on is what I want to do
that's different than like specifically saying things that is gonna hurt or harm your child.
The difference would be in that scenario
I don't want to play with you because and then naming some like really personal hurtful reasons why they wouldn't want to play with that child.
Or yeah it's it's posting things online.
I I think our bullying definition does expand because now we have social media
And so much bullying happens on social media.
You have another reason not to be let your kids on there for a very long time.
Yes.
So much bullying happens on social media.
It's way easier to bully
on social media, right?
But bullying is an intentional act where there's manipulation involved and the ability to purposely hurt someone emotionally or physically.
Whereas some friendship struggles are more just the child is acting selfishly because they're a kid and they're just not thinking about the way that this is gonna hurt somebody else.
And so I I see that in our daughter.
Like if she comes and she says, So and so told me she doesn't want to play today, she only wants to play with so-and-so.
To me that's not bullying.
That's just a child who's not thinking like, hey, that would actually really hurt her feelings.
Yeah, yeah
So that's where I would say the difference is.
So the way I'm understanding what you're saying, and I think you maybe will want to change your answer a little bit.
But the way you're saying is bullying definitely intervene, but normal friendship struggles, let them deal with it on their own.
But I think you still want to help them.
You coach them.
Yeah, so you're coaching them at home versus you're contacting the school.
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And I mean trust your gut always if you feel like this is something the school needs to be contacted about.
contact them, like err on the side of caution.
But with normal friendship struggles, your job as the parent is to be the coach.
Right.
So they come home, they say, hey, so-and-so said that they don't want to be in my group project today.
And they want to be in a group project with this other person.
That is a friendship struggle.
That hurts.
It's painful.
So our job would be to coach, okay, so how did you feel when that happened?
Well, I was really sad.
Yeah, that makes sense.
I'd probably feel sad too, and talk them through the situation that happened
decide if there's anything that actually has to be said to the friend or are they just sad?
Like do they just need to express that feeling and maybe have a little cry with you and then go back the next day?
Yep.
Do they need to roleplay it out?
You know, I love a roleplay, everybody.
You sure do.
Do they need to roleplay it out with you so that they have words that they can say the next time that happens at school?
So think of your job as the coach, rather than just to be to call the teacher and be like, my kid wasn't in this and this and this person's group project, and they should be.
We do want to let kids have
time to practice being assertive on their own and and be coached through it.
Well we had that with with our oldest, so she last week was just telling us about one situation where someone didn't want to play with her and was just being a little rude
to her, which again that's kids that's what they do.
They're not necessarily thinking through the consequences of the th everything they say or most things they say, likely.
So we coached her
to say the next time she's invited to play, to just say, I'll think about it.
I don't know if I want to play with you right now, and just give her time to think through who she actually wants to play with.
Because if that's how she's being treated, maybe she wants to play with other kids that desperately want to play with her because I feel like s often kids are desperate to play with her.
And then she'll have situations like this and she doesn't necessarily need to play with everyone, like I've told you too, just you're allowed to be acquaintances with people too.
You don't have to be friends with every single person that lives
I feel like that was such a revolutionary concept to me because I always was someone who just like, if I know you, I just want to be your friend
And I'm friendly and I like to be like that.
And and for you to be like, you know, it's okay for you to just be their acquaintance.
You don't actually have to be their friend.
And I was like, oh, yeah, that that's kind of nice.
It's kind of a relief.
Yeah, because I think our oldest also feels the pressure to be friends with everyone and she feels deeply if she isn't friends with everyone and
It's kind of like her other friend who is sad because she doesn't give enough time and attention to all of her friends that she thinks they deserve stuff.
I can relate to her too, right?
Like there'll be so many nights that I used to just sit there and be like, Okay, I have to text every single person I know and try and keep up with all of them because otherwise I'm a bad friend.
And when I see my daughter doing the exact same thing, this is where I say, It brings up a lot of your own stuff and I'm like, Oh shoot, I don't want her to have that same pressure.
And I even said to her about this specific scenario, I said, what if it's okay that not everyone's your best friend?
And you don't have to have like one best friend that you are like, I'm their best friend, and now we're best friends for life.
Like I think even with girls specifically like the BFF trend, that can be a bit tricky 'cause Is it still a thing?
Yeah, I think it is.
Yeah.
Cause they'll be like, well, she's my best friend though
It's like, well, actually you guys are really good friends and you can still be good friends, but that doesn't mean that you can't also hang out with this person.
So there can be that exclusivity that can be difficult, I think, in female friendships.
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So how as a parent would you say we can
Avoid passing on our social anxieties to our children.
Because I feel like that's what it is.
Like some parents and I think
you might fall under that category too.
Like want to be friends with everyone.
You want to please people.
You want people to like you.
But that's just not possible.
And that's way too much pressure.
So that's I feel like that's one social anxiety you can have where when we talked about the two of us, like you don't have to be friends with everyone.
You're allowed to just have acquaintances, people that you're friendly with, but you don't need to know every single detail about their life.
They don't need to know every single detail of yours.
Mm-hmm.
That's one example, but how do you not pass on some of these social anxieties
I truly think conversations like this are really important as a starting point.
Yeah.
And with your own f close friends or your own partner who's ever in your life, talk about how friendship makes you feel.
Because even with our own closest friends, we have conversations like this about friendship.
And even as adults, friendship can be tricky, right?
So reflect on it.
So what I've been doing is when something happens with our daughter, I first ask myself, how do you feel about this situation?
And
Before I respond and and coach her through it, I'm asking myself, are you coaching little Jess through this?
Or are you coaching your daughter?
And it's been so important for me to remember that, yes, my daughter's similar to me, but she is not me.
And I'm not actually coaching little Jess through it.
I'm coaching my daughter through it
And what I maybe needed as a child because of all the different experiences or things that happened to me with friends is different than what she needs.
Yeah.
And so really separating because I think a lot of times even online I see people say like give your child the childhood you never had
But like we need to remember that our children are not us.
They're not a little version of us.
And so we can see that with all three of our daughters.
They're very different.
Like there's characteristics that they share from us.
Yeah.
But they are definitely not either one of us.
Yeah.
Nor should we parent them as if they are.
So sometimes I need to tell myself this is woo-woo, but here we go
No no.
So let's say she's s saying something to me, I'm feeling triggered, I'm remembering a time when I felt left out or people were talking bad about me or something like that.
Okay, what did I need in that moment as a kid?
First I gotta go there.
First I have to like go to that part of myself.
Okay, I probably needed to talk to my parents about it, which I often did.
I needed to know that my concerns were heard
and I needed to feel protected.
Okay, so that's what I needed.
Okay, now what does she need?
And most often all our kids need is to know that we're on their team.
And to have us help them find the words that they want to say to their friends.
And usually they already have it.
So a lot of it is
just asking them questions.
It's not even like saying any specific thing, right?
It's like, well, what did you feel you wanted to say in that moment?
Maybe they don't know.
And then, okay, well let's think about it.
When she said that to you, how did you feel inside?
Like what were the words that you felt you couldn't say?
Well, I kinda wanted to say that that hurt my feelings.
Okay.
So maybe next time maybe you could say that hurt my feelings.
Oh, okay.
So sometimes it's just asking our kids the questions instead of projecting our own emotions.
And and I think not to keep going on a rant on that, but my problem
when our daughter first started having friendship struggles, which by the way started in kindergarten.
Just like little things here and there, nothing huge.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Right?
But my first instinct would be like, oh, that must have been so lonely and so hard.
And so I stopped doing that.
I stopped putting my own emotional labels on her circumstances.
And again, projecting
How I felt.
And then all of a sudden she's like, oh yeah, I guess it was really like she wasn't actually thinking that.
No.
We do the same thing with anxiety.
Like before we label it as anxiety, let our kids tell us that they're scared.
Because otherwise you're just projecting an emotion and now they're late, they're like, oh, I guess that is scary.
So I'm letting her tell me the feelings that she's having versus me projecting that onto her.
But aren't you sort of giving them
potentially the labels for the things they're already feeling.
So we're on one hand we're supposed to give them the labels for the things that they're feeling, but then you're also saying that we shouldn't do that?
So for let's say the example of
She didn't want me and her group, right?
Yep.
Then I would just say, okay, so she didn't want you to be in her group?
No.
Okay, so
How did your body feel when she said that?
Oh, well, yeah.
Like and for our daughter, because we've helped her understand emotions already, she'd probably be able to be, Oh yeah, I felt like a little bit sad.
Okay, so you felt sad.
What was that like?
And so instead of like telling her, oh, oh, she didn't let you in her group, you must have felt so sad by letting her tell me.
Okay.
That's the difference.
Yeah, okay.
I understand.
Do you think there are any and maybe we've already covered this, but do you think there are any big mistakes that you think like well-intentioned parents will often make if their child is struggling with friendship issues?
Yes.
Okay
So I'll like just list off a few common things I've seen because I don't know if people know this, but I actually worked in a school counseling kids and the majority of the things that we're talking about were friendship struggles
Especially as kids got into like grade two, three, four, five, you know, six, seven, eight.
Yeah.
Once their brains are like developed to want to hang out with other kids.
So that's a mistake that parents make is pushing friendships too hard on their kids
Who's your friend?
Who are you hanging out with?
And like getting stressed out if their child doesn't have like a core group of friends.
First off, I think we've talked about this on a separate episode.
We we did do one other episode on friendship where we talked about a couple other like different topics
But our relationship with our kids should always matter more than friendships.
And if your child doesn't have like ten super close friends they want to hang out with all the time, like
that's okay.
We don't really need to stress out about that, especially in the earlier years.
Like in the earlier years their job is to kind of just play with everyone, get to know who they like, who they don't like, what's interesting to them.
Is it
Safe to say that it's a social skill building time of life.
Like you're really trying to build those skills to be able to relate and play with other people?
Yeah, like I would say our daughter that's in junior kindergarten
She does have a couple friends that she gravitates towards that she really likes, but she will kind of play with anyone in the class.
And there's certain issues that she'll have where
her main issue is when someone's not listening, then she'll have to come home and tell us about it.
And because she's a rule follower.
She likes things to be just so and so sometimes again that's like a friendship issue.
Well so-and-so wasn't listening today, so I don't like them
Okay, well, let's talk about that.
You know, 'cause we don't want her to not like someone just because they don't listen.
But that's like junior kindergarten, kindergarten grade one, you're kind of just playing with everyone.
Then we do see a change in grade two, three, four, kinda like that age where now you start to have like
your friends friends.
But as parents, I think back to the mistakes is like pushing that too hard.
So we see that and we're like, ooh, we want them to have a best friend.
Okay, so every weekend let's have this person over and let's really cultivate that friendship.
And we don't want our kids to feel that pressure to like
have these best friends.
So that's the first thing.
The second thing is not coaching kids through it and being like, Yeah, it's fine.
You know, just go back tomorrow, tell her whatever.
And not taking the time to actually sit with our kids and have these dialogues that we've been talking about.
Like
How did that feel in your body?
What did you want to say to them?
And mostly it's just asking our kids questions, getting curious with our kids, helping them understand how they actually feel and what they want to say, and then giving them the support
to be like, it might be uncomfortable, but maybe tomorrow you say this to your friend.
Because when we just assume our kids will just figure it out, like, ah, all kids have friendship struggles, they'll just figure it out.
That leaves a kid to feel really alone.
And what we don't want is the child to stop coming to you, to be like, well, they're not gonna help me anyway.
So I'm just gonna deal with it by myself.
We want the child to always know I can come back and talk to my parents about what's going on.
The third mistake that I see a lot of is kind of again going back to like not being super involved with bullying, not standing up when it's time to stand up for your kid.
I mean, I even think about a scenario that we had, you know, I won't get into details, was on the bus and there was certain things going on and we ended up making a call just to say, hey, look, this is what's going on on the bus
We always laugh about the bus as like it's a lawless society on the bus.
That's quite the shit show on there.
And our kids have a long bus ride and like there's no adult supervision on the bus, right?
So there's things like that.
Yeah, exactly.
Who's focused on taking care of the kids.
getting them home safely as they should be.
So I would say sometimes parents like they don't wanna interfere.
They don't want to be that parent.
But again when it comes to bullying, which is like intentionally doing mean things to hurt someone's feelings.
we do need to step in.
And our kids definitely need more support.
And if we leave them alone with that, that can have lifelong impacts because these peers, these relationships
our kids remember that.
Like I remember times when I was a kid and that is stuff I've had to work through, you know?
So we just want to be really mindful of that as well.
One more mistake I see and I'm gonna lump, let's say, cousins in with this
friends, cousins, is giving our kids hours of just unsupervised time.
And we've talked about this in other episodes about how sometimes there's this like glorification of like this atheist parenting that's
been coming back up like the pendulum swinging back the other direction where people are like, you know when we were kids how you could just run around free with your friends for hours and your parents didn't know where you were and I was at a conference
And the person facilitating the conference was basically glamorizing that time with the life.
And they were like, Yeah, when we were kids, you know, eighties and nineties, we could just run free.
I would just go biking with my cousins all day long.
We would be hours alone in the basement.
And I was like
Um, hello, isn't that when a lot of abuse happened?
And aren't we hearing, at least in my practice, from so many people who were hurt
bullied, abused, because of hours of unsupervised time with the door closed.
Like let's not glamorize that time alive.
Yeah.
So I think that's another mistake that we make and for some reason is becoming trendy again.
Like, hey, yeah, let's just leave him alone for hours.
I think any time society swings to one extreme or another.
Yeah.
It's usually not the best outcome
And I'm not saying hover over your kids, of course.
Like let's say our kids have friends over.
Again, that's that's swinging in the exact opposite extreme, right?
Yeah, exactly.
There's a balance
Let's say our kids have friends over.
The door is open, right?
We're not like, hey, go in your room with the door closed for hours on end.
They can go to their room, depending on the friend.
Also, you kinda gotta know your kids' friends and know what's gonna be okay.
But depending on the friend, sure you can be in your room, but the door is open and
Oh hey, you know what?
Every once in a while I have to go pee.
And while I'm going to the bathroom, which is beside your room, I'm just peeking in.
Hey girls, how's it going?
And just making sure things are okay.
I'm just checking in and depending on the friend, if you don't know them super well, well maybe they're not in the bedroom.
Maybe they're just in the the family area.
And there is some sort of supervision while you're giving them their time.
And I do think
We need to be mindful of that because again, you're dealing with kids whose brains haven't developed logic, reasoning, or they're still developing it.
They're very selfish because that's how they should be, because they're a kid.
So just be mindful of the unsupervised time.
I would say that's the last mistake I'll kind of pick on today.
Yeah, and like we've talked about on many episodes, life is rarely black and white.
And if someone glamorizes something that is very definitive, they usually have no idea what they're talking about.
I felt like you at that conference when I was like raising my hand like I disagree.
Like channeling my inner contrarian, my inner Scott.
I like this question for multiple reasons
And I asked this in another one that's gonna be released in I think a week or two.
Yep.
Is there anything about friendship or friendship struggles since becoming a parent and therapist?
Both
Is there anything that's challenged or sort of changed the way you look at friendships in children?
Like something that you had a preconceived I mean especially since you had
some challenges with friends growing up.
Is there anything that changed the way you view friendships and friendship struggles after you became a parent and a therapist?
Yeah.
I mean, I feel like this is something that I've thought about so much because growing up I did have a lot of different friendship struggles.
And yeah, I'm not really gonna get into them here, but things that impacted me for a long time
And when I was going through it, I definitely talked to my parents and I have shared different stories of the insights that they've given me that were really helpful.
And I always knew I could go back to them.
So I will say that that was really helpful.
But I think becoming a therapist and realizing
how impactful those early relationships are on you for the rest of your life and those feelings that you have when
you're hurt or bullied or betrayed early in life and how that can actually impact the way that you act.
Like let's say my
desire to be friends with everyone and make everyone like me, right?
Like how much of that was actually rooted in those early struggles that I had when I felt unliked and I felt alone and I felt isolated.
So I think one thing I learned
when I was doing my training to become a therapist was, yeah, it makes sense, Jess, that those early friendships would have had such an impact on your life.
And I was very lucky that I could talk to my parents about it.
But if you don't have the ability to talk to your parents about it and unlike it still impacted me, even though I could talk to my parents, right?
But like if you don't have that, so I think the other eye-opening thing for me was just
how essential that parent-child relationship is and how we don't want to let friends take over.
Like if I didn't have that relationship with my parents where I could like tell them what was going on or at least know that I was safe at home
And I was unsafe at home and unsafe at school, that would have led to even more struggles.
I forget who said this.
It might have been Dr.
Gordon Newfield, might have been uh someone else, but
You can see the parent-child relationship in the way that peers interact with each other.
And so sometimes you can see in in the peers that are really bullying and mean, like you can see the words that they've been told
Yeah.
And for me, I think a lot of it was like I didn't want to partake in like gossip.
I didn't want to partake in like petty things because I didn't really have that at home.
So I'd just be like, I don't want to do that.
And then that made it really hard for me to fit in with friends who wanted to do that.
Yeah.
Type of thing.
So I think that was another really eye-opening thing for me too, is realizing like A, how impactful the friendships
are and how beautiful they can be.
Like I still have one of my really good friends from that era, even though we had some fights in the day.
Like she's still one of my best friends now and we worked through it.
Right.
And like
how beautiful healthy friendships can be, but how harmful unhealthy friendships can be.
And how parents need to be in the know.
And they can't just
send their kids off and and hope everything's fine.
Yeah.
So I I think that was really eye-opening for me.
And then another thing that was even more eye-opening is when our daughter started to have her own
little friendship struggles and it's not even anything big, but how much that like brought up my own experiences and memories that I didn't have until she started having her her own struggles.
It's like, oh my goodness, I totally forgot about that
Yeah, that would have really impacted me.
You know what I mean?
Yep.
So I think that's another thing that I'm sure a lot of moms are going through too, and dads too.
Yeah.
Again, it's different I would say I think the only reason I don't have that as much is just because I can't relate to the same friendship-related topics that our girls are going through necessarily.
Yeah
And I think I've learned through I'd say like the last five years of our life, maybe a little bit more, we've developed some really strong adult
friendships.
And I think I've learned how also how yeah, like I mentioned, how beautiful friendship can be and how fulfilling and how life-giving and how important it can be.
And we talk about our friends a lot on the podcast because they are a really important part of our life.
And these intimate, vulnerable, beautiful friendships can be really important and I want to model that for our kids.
But whenever you're vulnerable and intimate and like
share personal things about yourself, you do open yourself up to hurt.
And I think that's why the hurt can be so great too.
Yep.
For sure.
Now, having been a therapist for a while now and you've talked to th parents and kids about friendships, one thing I've been wondering
And I mean you hear about this on social media or on the news that people are more awkward.
Like it's harder for people to make friends, especially millennials, because we're at this weird
point in life where we've been on social media and like a lot of our life is online.
But then I hear the older community saying no one knows how to talk to each other and no one calls each other on the phone and
Do you think that has had an an impact on kids now, even?
Or do you think it will?
Yes, I definitely think social media
and our digital communications and stuff like that will have an impact on our kids and does have an impact on the kids who are on it.
I have heard from so many parents that come in worried about, let's say, their preteens and their teens
who they've just got a phone and they'll just sit there all day on Snapchat, right?
And I think there is something too sitting across from each other, sitting in a room, you know, and
I remember when we were teens, we just sit in a big room and everyone's on the couch and none of us had a phone.
We're all like looking at each other, talking, how we did it was a brick.
If we did it was a brick and it's not like you were scrolling anything on it, right?
You maybe would text your friend or something.
There's something we gain about making eye contact, understanding someone's expression, understanding the tone of voice.
And a lot of teens are losing that because let's say they're just on Snapchat or they can manipulate their message to sound how they want it to sound, whether or not they are happy or they are sad or they are mad
And so it's becoming harder to actually read someone's emotions and it's not the way that we were designed to be in community together.
And That's interesting because for the first time in human history.
Yeah
We now have this intermediary like this thing in between humans to communicate with each other.
Yeah
And it makes communication much faster and, let's say, more efficient, but it's not necessarily making us better at actually relating with one another.
If anything, it is potentially doing the opposite.
Right.
I remember this last summer I was at the park and there was two teenage girls at the park and they were beside me on the swing and and they were both on their phones on this swing that had like
chairs on both sides.
It kind of goes up.
They're sitting there and they're completely oblivious to the fact that I'm there with my kids, you know.
They're just and they're both on their phones.
sitting on the swing and they're texting this boy and they were deceiving him essentially on the text.
And I could hear them talking and and they were trying to lie to him about who likes him and and they're like, oh he believed us, you know
Oh, I can't believe it.
He's gonna go meet up with her later here and she's not gonna be there.
Ha ha ha like laughing like it was so funny.
And
I'm just thinking to myself, so you have this other this boy, teenage boy on the other end, who's now thinking that this girl he likes, he's gonna go meet up with her later.
These other two girls, friends of hers, are like
laughing, think this this is so funny, we're gonna fool him and like how is he gonna feel when he goes there and he's fooled?
Like how do you build trust?
How do you actually start to believe anyone when that's happening?
That's such a common experience.
And I think you lose important social skills, important things that you need to know for life if all of your communication is happening over text and you can deceive people so easily.
Yeah, you're not actually seeing the impact of what you're doing or the way you're interacting with people that way.
Right.
Like would you lie to someone straight in the face?
Maybe.
Some people might.
Some people might.
We've experienced that
Yeah, exactly.
Some people might, but it's gonna be much less likely if you're sitting across from someone.
But if you grow up always having this ability to
change your words so that you don't actually say how you feel or you're deceiving someone or whatever.
Like as you get older, that's just gonna be normal for you.
And I don't want that for our kids either.
So Yeah.
So how do we help them make sure that that's not what they're using?
Again, it goes back to I think we've talked about this in many episodes now.
delaying social media as long as we can in our kids.
Certainly not in elementary school, as many kids already do have it in elementary school.
And getting a device of their own.
And getting a device in their own, like delay that as long as we possibly can because
as soon as you do that, you're actually like taking away your child's ability to develop these really important skills.
So I mean blah blah blah.
We've talked about that lots.
Uh other things I think that we can do
One thing I do with our kids, I've never talked about on a podcast episode, but whenever I'm out in public and I see, say I see a mom who looks frustrated or I see teens who are giggling or I see whatever, I'll just be like, hey, what do you think they're feeling right now
They might be like, oh yeah, she looks really frustrated.
I'm like, yeah, she kinda does look frustrated.
Then we just move on.
But trying to help your kids learn how to read other people's expressions can be a really valuable skill for them because then they can start to understand the impact of their words on someone else too.
Do you think that there is a real possibility of stunting developmental growth?
Like I just wonder how long lasting that is, because you you your most formative years are up till around twenty-five.
It's not that you can't
Continue wiring your brain to be able to relate with others, but it becomes at a slower rate after around that age
So do you think that there's a real possibility this will actually stunt the growth of those who are on social media or using devices like this and not going out and specifically trying to relate with others and
Hang out and look someone in the eye and I mean we start sounding like we're very old when we say that, but I feel like there is legitimate developmental psychology that needs to be experience a shape
who you are, right?
And like you said, like these experiences we have under the age of twenty-five, they're gonna shape our entire adult life.
And if we are replacing human interaction, human conversation with
screens and doing it over screen, like it for sure is gonna shape you.
Like that's just how behavior works.
So we do run the risk of stunting these important developmental like these skills that our children learn
And uh it's honestly if we go back to our original discussion about coaching your child versus stepping in every time, it's the same thing.
Like if you step in every single time there's any struggle in your child's life, we said this in the anxiety episode too.
And we never give our kids a chance to like feel lonely and not be unsure of what to do or feel sad at school or like have these emotions that are not happy.
then we also will stunt our child's ability to problem solve and to stand up for themselves and develop resilience.
Like our job as parents is not to make our kids' life
flawlessly easy and to bubble wrap them and make them happy.
That would be really upsetting if my job was to make my kid happy all the time because I I would never be able to do it.
And if I did, I'd be like going over myself constantly in order to do that
Yeah.
Oh and as soon as they go to school or move out and they have to deal with all of that on their own, they're not prepared for it.
That doesn't seem like that's a very fair thing to do.
Yeah, exactly.
I I wanna
equip my children to experience loneliness, but know that they have a place where they're always safe and they're always welcome and and that's why that relationship it like it comes back to the relationship with you again.
I'll tell you a story and this I think will be a really good story.
Like when I had struggles with friendship at school and I would be at school and I'd be walking around
Or like be the only one not to make the volleyball team and be walking around.
Like a lot of my memories of school is like walking around the playground alone.
But I knew when I got home I was safe
You know, and I knew I had someone at home who was gonna welcome me in, have a tea ready for me and a place where I could go where I was safe.
Yeah.
And so no matter how hard things were at school and they were hard, I was safe at home.
And I think that's what we can offer our children
And even more so now, like we're teaching parents how to coach their kids through it, right?
Like my parents didn't have someone being like, and then when Jess gets home crying, because whatever, this is how to coach her through it, but now we can even coach our kids through it
and help them learn how to stand up for themselves and protect themselves and stuff like that.
So I think that's a takeaway I want because if we can do that, if we can provide safety at home, then our kids can feel more resilient at school
And I also think about the toddler years, like to go way, way, way back for those toddler parents that are here.
And I think about the times when our toddler's disappointed because I won't give her pepperettes for breakfast or
ice cream for breakfast or whatever.
And she's disappointed and again I don't try and fix that feeling.
I'm not like, yeah, here's an ice cream cone for breakfast.
I'm like, hey, come into my arms, let's cry it out together, and then let's move on with our day.
Like we're already teaching them at an early age.
how to cope with disappointment, how to have hard feelings, and that they can always come back to us as a soft place to land.
And so I think if that's the way you're raising your toddlers, once they get into these
school age years, they're gonna be used to having a soft place to land when things feel hard.
And that's why it is all connected.
Like helping your toddler with a tantrum is connected to
when they have a friendship issue or they do super bad on a test or something's hard at school, right?
It's not one event that's happening that you're trying to solve your child being upset about the fact that they have
Yeah.
They're not getting ice cream for breakfast.
Yeah, and then guess what?
Years and years from now, like I had a struggle last year and I talked to my parents about it.
Right?
So you're setting the stage for
But you're setting the stage for this like lifelong of a safe base, a safe place to land.
Yeah.
So anyway.
Wait, can I ask one thing and then I think
We can close out this uh this episode because it's been a good conversation.
We have talked about friendships and how there's all these things that we're doing that don't feel related, but they are because you're creating that
relationship with your child.
Now, when it comes to friendship and maybe friendship struggles, I am able to relate less to those things with our girls than you would be.
So I think
By default they seem to not necessarily like all the time, but they would default to going to you.
Mm-hmm
to talk about it compared to with me.
Mm-hmm.
And not because I'm not a soft landing for them, but more I think they understand that you understand what they're going through.
Yeah.
Whereas I can't.
So in a situation like that, if a parent
wants to help but can't relate, how can they?
I think it goes back to being curious with them and even sometimes you can ov
I think relating is important.
Relating feels makes us feel less alone, right?
So you could relate in terms of like, oh, I do remember mom telling me the story of blah blah blah.
Right.
So you can even share my stories as a way to like, hey, I am in the know, you know.
But finding the those moments to be like, hey, it looks like you had a really hard day at school.
What's up?
Or they're they're talking to you and you're like, can you help me understand what's what's been going on between you and and so and so?
Or tell me more about school today.
Tell me more, what's up, and help me understand are three very important things that you can say.
What you're saying is it's more on me to
actually pursue them and ask for more information.
Yeah, show them that you want to be involved and that you're curious.
And I have noticed that you do that and then they do respond to it.
Yeah, they'll always tell me
Yeah.
But I was just wondering like if is there a way that I can help better that.
I would say those three.
You know those three by help me understand, tell me more, and what's up.
Yeah.
That'll get you far.
Sounds good.
Well, thank you all for listening today and let us know if you have any questions on friendship.
I feel like I could go on and on on this topic, and we'll talk to you again next week.
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