My Child Has A Friend I Don't Like

We all have people we run into or know that we don’t like, and hopefully it is for a good reason (vs. jealousy). As adults, we hopefully know how do deal with our level of interaction with someone who falls into this category. But what do we do when we don’t like a friend of our child’s?

There was this one little girl that could irritate me til my skin crawled when my daughter was four. They were friends for the longest 18 months of my life. Fortunately, my daughter had no idea about my dislike of this over-indulged, manipulative child. That’s because I taught her that “we include and invite everyone to our home, and we must share everything.”

Two thoughts about what I learned about that generalization.

One: the other girl nearly broke my girl’s brand-new bike because of my “sharing insistence” and her lack of ability to ride. (We changed our policy to exclude special toys that a careless child may have little regard for.) Two: God forced me to pray for this irksome, irritating, whiney kid. Her parents had groomed her to be like that and she took it from there. God showed me that if I spent as much time praying for this “piece of work” as I did thinking and ranting about her, my time would be much better spent. (Once I started praying for her, I ended up having a fond heart for this girl and looked at her through much different eyes.)

I doubt my daughter remembers that former neighbor, but when I learned to limit her access to things and to tell my daughter there were some things that we did not play with in groups, plus began praying, everything changed.

What about when our kids are drawn to a troubled kid and your kid is being placed in the same category by association?

This too has happened to both my kids. Both were around second grade at the time. My parent sonar went right up once I saw that the newly discovered “friends” would not look me in the eye and had body language about a decade more mature. In both cases, these school-generated friendships lasted almost an entire school year. Both friendships dragged my children down and got them in trouble. I was frustrated to think these were their choices and sought to learn what was so attractive about these blooming problems.

It wasn’t so much the charm these kids had, because frankly, they lacked that. But what they did do was seek out my children, and my kids gratefully accepted the attention and followed the lead. Both of my kids were susceptible at the time and in need of peer affirmation. Reminds me of adults making poor choices in people because of who pays the most attention.

We managed by keeping the play dates at our house, where we closely supervised. We bit our lips. We prayed. We firmly enforced our house rules. And, we quietly and consistently encouraged friendships with positive kids as well.

Our dialog included age-appropriate discussions about what makes a good close friend vs. being friendly and kind to others. We affirmed positive character strengths we observed in our kids, and helped them see there are people we help, people who walk alongside us, and people who inspire us. It is good to have all 3 categories in our lives. We read lots of Bible stories and tried to remain as unemotional as possible. Each of the above actions took place in very small doses, and never behind a lectern.

As time passed and our kids developed more self-confidence, they drifted away from the negative influencers. I think because we never said “no”, but were calm and welcoming, not only did they learn to choose differently, their hearts opened to be loving to a wide range of people. Plus…they had learned to find their own worth in hobbies and skill development.