Daily Excerpt from Clean Your Plate! (Bayardelle): Be Nice to Your Friends

 



Excerpt from Clean Your Plate!


 Be Nice to Your Friends

[ILLUSTRATION 6, CHAPTER 6 WARNING GOES HERE]

As anyone who has ever talked to a toddler can tell you, toddlers can be brutal. Like, soul-crushingly, life-ruiningly frank. There’s a lot of truth to the Internet meme that says “if a woman calls you ugly, she’s jealous; if a man calls you ugly, she’s flirting, but if a kid calls you ugly...you’re ugly.”

Kids have absolutely no sense of social niceties. They also occasionally spaz out with small bursts of poorly-controlled demonic meanness of unknown origin. (No, it’s not just your kids. It’s all of them.)

Why We Say It

The fact that parents across the globe tell their kids to be nice to their friends is entirely unsurprising. We’re terrified our little monsters will alienate their peers and doom themselves to a life of social isolation and misery (sticking us with the therapy bills).

However well-meaning this parental plea for our kids to exercise their still-developing mouth filters may be, it does still have some unintended consequences.

Research Says (What They Hear)

Despite the fact that you do in fact want to ensure that your kids aren’t rude, little, demon spawn, you telling them to be nice to their friends before they go to school, as a warning when they start to act up at the park, and as they go into a brand new situation can send two pretty harmful messages:

      Everyone is your friend.

      You have to be nice to your friends no matter what they do.

So, let’s look at these two important constructs involved in the parental edict “be nice to your friends:” the concept of nice and the concept of friends.

Niceness, Respect, and Childhood Turrets

First, let’s take a second to acknowledge the ambiguity in the concept of being “nice”.

Say your coworker comes up to you and asks if you like his shoes. You look downward only to be immediately blinded by an abhorrent medley of colors so bright it may qualify as a traffic hazard. Is it “nice” to tell him that you like his shoes?[1] I mean, lying to people is supposed to be not nice, right? But so is hurting people’s feelings. If you were to honestly inform your obviously color-blind coworker as to the human rights violation situated around his metatarsals, would it qualify as “nice” or “not nice”?

Regardless of the correct answer to the great shoe debate, it illustrates the important point that being “nice” isn’t always as clear-cut an instruction as it sounds. Not only does the definition of “nice” contain a lot of grey area, it also differs dramatically from person to person.

In this shoe example, if the coworker is a relatively new acquaintance the “nicest” thing to do is probably respond with a polite dodge or mild white lie to save feelings while contemplating the quickest way out of the situation. However, if it’s someone you have worked with for years and have developed a strong and resilient friendship, the “nicest” thing to do might be to tell the brutal truth, possibly in a humorous way that reaffirms the strength of your friendship.[2]

So, if there is a fair amount of grey area in the concept of niceness for adults, you can see that it would be even more difficult for children who are still learning the different protocols for basic social situations.

Each parent might handle this nebulosity in a different way, but I personally think that it’s much more helpful to kids to use more concrete concepts in your parental requests.

Politeness

This is the first concept I would introduce to most children, as it is usually considered to be a universal constant. I wouldn’t want my children to be affectionate to everyone, nor would I necessarily like them to even be friendly to everyone. (In fact, we are trying very hard to train our 4-year-old not to be so friendly to everyone. Seriously, the people behind us in line at Starbucks really don’t need to know about our dog’s potty training accidents. Tone it down, Smalls.) [PULL QUOTE 52]

However, there are very few exceptions to the rule that your children should be polite to most of their fellow humans. Unless someone is actively abducting, assaulting, or otherwise violating your children’s basic rights, they should probably treat all people with basic politeness. This includes things like not screaming at people, keeping their hands (and feet and teeth) to themselves, not saying objectively mean things, saying “please” and “thank you” when appropriate, and maintaining a basic sense of decorum and social consciousness as they bumble their way through early life.

While this might not be easy to train your kids to do, it isn’t very hard to teach them when it needs to be done. You can safely try to train your kids to default to a baseline of polite behavior without much grey area. Basically, act like a human, not a monkey, and you should be good.

Respect

The next level up from politeness is respect. While politeness is something to which all humans are entitled, respect should (at least in my opinion) be earned.

It’s not hard to earn respect. The litmus test I use for my kiddos is that, if someone treats you with a basic level of respect, you treat them the same way. However, if someone is rude, hurtful, or otherwise disrespectful, my kiddos know they have my full blessing to choose not to interact with that person. They still have to be polite as they nope their way out of the situation (because almost everyone is entitled to a baseline of politeness), but they don’t have to subject themselves to someone who doesn’t treat them the way they should be treated.

This distinction comes in handy when dealing with some of the more old-timey perspectives. By this, I mean things like telling a boy to “turn the other cheek” when someone bullies him or telling a girl that a boy is allowed to treat her a certain way just because he asks her out or buys her dinner. The difference between politeness (to which almost everyone is entitled) and respect (which must be reciprocally earned) helps your kid deal with things that used to be societal norms but have since proven to be counterproductive (or downright creepy).

To sum up, I’d say politeness is the global rule that your child should be as courteous as is situationally possible, whereas respect is a deferential way of treating people that is earned only by reciprocity.

Friendliness

This one really kicks in around the ages of two to three. Your kiddo is so excited to show off burgeoning social skills that all the sudden the kiddo is best friends with every kid around, the checkout clerk at the grocery store, that lampshade over there, the stray cat sitting on your car, and your newly-planted nectarine tree (literally…my kiddo named it “Friendly,” and they talk every morning)[3].

It’s a fantastic sign that your kid is willing and capable of creating social bonds with so many different people (and the occasional inanimate object, I guess). It means their verbal skills are blossoming and that you have done a great job as a parent in making them feel safe and secure. Give yourself a high-five.

Friendliness Downside #1: Issues of Safety and Childhood Stranger-Friends (aka Dear Toddler Please Stop Telling Strangers Our Address)

When reading the last paragraph, it may not have escaped your notice that, while we want our kids to feel safe and secure, the world they live in is not an entirely safe and secure place. Far from it.

While there are very few long-term downsides to your toddler having pretend conversations with a plant, there are very real consequences to a child being too friendly with the wrong type of people. Telling strangers where you live or when you’re going on vacation could increase your risks of a robbery or home invasion. We all know the horror story of a child trusting a stranger that says he’ll show them a new puppy if they only come into his house or get into his car.

While we want our kids to feel safe, happy, exuberant, and friendly, they also have to know that they have to marry these qualities with an appropriate serving size of caution and common sense as well. Teach your kids that while they should be polite to (almost) everyone and demonstrate respect with (almost all) those who respect them in return, friendliness shouldn’t be exercised indiscriminately. Things like physical contact, sharing of personal details, and feeling comfortable being alone with a person should be reserved for those who are truly your proven and long-term friends. This means people you know well, people who have proven to be trustworthy, and (for littler kids) people who have been approved as “trustworthy” by parents.

Friendliness Downside #2: Emotional Dangers (aka A Tale of Cookies and Neediness)

As your kids grow up and start school, they stop having indiscriminate conversations with lampshades (hopefully) and enter a much more complex social realm. While it might seem like, with the increasing social competence of an elementary, middle, or even high schooler, the dangers of friendliness have passed, this is actually not the case.

And now I would like to tell a tale of the worst (and most incorrect) social lesson I ever learned—and how it took me the subsequent decade to unlearn it.

If you couldn’t tell from my biting sarcasm and fervent insistence on a strict adherence to grammatical intricacies, I didn’t have the easiest time making friends as a child. The briefest explanation of my particular social problem is this: A child who is raised by wolves never learns how to eat with a salad fork. As the only child of incredibly intelligent parents (with whom I was and still am insanely close), I never really learned how to relate properly to other kids. I was much better at talking to adults and actually became friends with many of my teachers.[4] As you could probably guess, this did absolutely nothing to endear me to my peers.

In high school, after a solid decade of wondering just why I didn’t fit in, I discovered two of the girls in my English class who were in the technical theater group (i.e. the people who do the lighting and paint the scenery for the drama club) had “hell week” that week and would be staying at school until 9:00 or 10:00 at night every day until the show opened. That night, I showed up at the theater room at 8:00 p.m. with a giant tray of warm, freshly baked cookies. High schoolers are ravenous monsters so it will surprise exactly no one that this gesture was very appreciated (and the cookies rapidly consumed). Like the good little Skinnerian rat I am, I then showed up with cookies the next four nights and, by the time the show opened, I had successfully baked my way into my first friend group.

Now, if any of you were thinking ahead about what conclusions my developing mind might have been drawing from this experience, you probably just experienced the literary equivalent of the background music that is played in a horror movie as the side character walks down a rickety staircase into a poorly-lit basement.

What adolescent Liz took from Cookiegate was the fact that if you just performed acts of service for other people you can make them like you. Extraordinary! There’s no conceivable downside to this whatsoever! Nothing can go wrong now!

Yup, everything went wrong. I then spent the next decade of my life trying to bake, buy, lend, toil, and work my way into friendships with people who had no real desire for a reciprocal friendship (or later a mutual romantic relationship) but were plenty content to consume the goods and services I was only too happily offering. What I “learned” in one week of adolescent cookie baking took me a half-decade to realize was a horrible idea and another goodness knows how many years to stop doing. Even now, as a (mostly) secure, happily married, mother of three, I still have to tamp down the urge to try to buy people’s affection (usually with food).

If only for my sake, please tell your kids early and often that they should not bestow their friendliness on anyone who does not willingly and freely offer it in return.

Kids are often told to be friendly or to be nice to their friends in order to ensure they have a social network. I’ve definitely been tempted to tell my violence-prone daughter that no one will want to be friends with her if she didn’t stop accidentally hug-tackling them. [PULL QUOTE 53] However tempting this line of thinking may be, try to ensure your kid gets the message that friendships are born from mutual compatibility and interest. No one has to “earn” friends’ attention via friendliness or anything else.

Affection

The final tier on the relational hierarchy is the demonstration of affection. This can mean physical demonstrations of affection (e.g. hugs, holding hands, pats, kisses, etc.) or it could just be verbal expressions of affection.

Kids should be taught two primary things about affection:

1.     Affection is reserved for those close to you who have earned your trust.

2.     You never have to show anyone affection if you don’t want to.

Let’s go over these one by one.

#1: The Relationship Hierarchy

With our affection-prone toddler, I’ve started using the categorization of strangers, acquaintances, friends, and family. Strangers are people you’ve never met, acquaintances are people whose names you know, friends are those you have known for a while and who have earned your trust over time, and family is those members of your tribe (whether related by blood or mutual weirdness [PULL QUOTE 54]) whom you trust implicitly in all circumstances.

Kids should know that these categories exist, how to place people in the proper category, and that their behavior toward people will vary depending on what category that person is in. They should know that most of their classmates are acquaintances and not friends, and they should know that this is completely okay. Not everyone has to be their friends, nor should they be.

By saying “be nice to your friends” insinuates that everyone they meet that day should qualify as a friend. Not only is this rarely ever going to be the case, it also gives your kids false expectations of the hellishly brutal social atmosphere that awaits them just inside the doors of their school. Your kids should be polite to everyone, but they shouldn’t be expected to show friendliness to the kid who tries to bully them in the lunch line, the jerk who makes a snide comment about them in homeroom, or any of the other horrible inhabitants of your child’s social landscape.

Exhibiting politeness to (almost) everyone will keep your child from becoming the bully, but there is no reason we can demand or should desire that our kids be friendly to everyone.

#2: Affection Is Voluntary

The entire next chapter is devoted to this concept, so I won’t go into it in too much detail, but ensure your kids know that they are never obligated to show affection. Affection is the top level of the polite-respectful-friendly-affectionate behavioral hierarchy and should only be demonstrated when it is 100% authentic and heartfelt. [PULL QUOTE 55]

Forced affection is not only disingenuous for the recipient but it is also a violation to ask someone to demonstrate a feeling they might not have. This top level of the hierarchy is completely voluntary, and your kid should know that no one can or should ever demand this if they aren’t feeling it.

What To Say Instead

As discussed above, your kids should know the difference between friends and acquaintances. This is important because, as they go through life, a vast majority of the people they meet will never proceed past “acquaintance” to “friend”. This is okay, normal, and good.

There is an overwhelming notion especially around small children that they should be friends with everyone. “Let’s all be friends!” is the rallying cry of preschoolers everywhere, yet it couldn’t be farther from the case. Any adult can tell you that a true friend is someone whose loyalty, common interests, and compatibility have been tested extensively and have held true over time. Having a real friend, who likes you for exactly who you are, isn’t afraid to tell you when you do something stupid or get an ugly haircut, and appreciates your bizarre sense of humor is both incredibly rare and immeasurably valuable. Most adults have at maximum a handful of people they consider to be true friends, and these cherished weirdos hold an irreplaceable role in our lives. [PULL QUOTE 56]

Given this incredibly high bar for the concept of friendship, it seems kind of silly to expect our kids to form this kind of bond with everyone in their classes. Heck, it’s a pretty high ask for them to be expected to find even one or two true friends by the time they finish high school. It’s totally fine for you to expect your child to be pleasant, polite, and respectful, but insinuating that they can or should be friends with everyone they encounter is just setting them (and you) up for disappointment.

Schemas for Dummies (and Your Child)

There is too much information in the world for your child (or you, or any human) to absorb and consider each fact individually. Our brains simply don’t have the processing power. We would be stuck so indefinitely trying to process all the information available to us that no decisions would ever get made, no actions taken. So, to help us make sense of this incredibly information-rich world, we use mental shortcuts to help us reach mostly accurate conclusions in much quicker ways.

Schemas, one such mental shortcut, are basically preconceived groupings of interconnected information.[5] For example, if something has four feet, fur, and barks, it’s probably a dog. We don’t have to assess its exact coloring, behavior, ear size, or other features to know that it’s probably a dog. We then activate our schema for “dog” and know exactly how we should treat that barking, four-footed, furry thing. Even if we’ve never met that particular dog before, our schema for the concept of “dog” helps us know how to act. Our brain can create a fairly accurate guess at how we should act while taking a very small amount of time processing information.

The reason schemas are relevant in this section on friendliness is that your child has schemas for everything. Information your child gathers about the people they meet, situations they experience, and types of encounters all get sorted based on their preexisting schemas.

Typical childhood schemas are for things like “friend,” “trusted adult,” or “bad guy”. Usually, this works to your children’s advantage. They can assess a new situation fairly quickly and, using their schemas to guide their behavior, know exactly how they should act at any given moment. Is this new kid a “friend”? Then I should probably be nice, share my toys, and wave goodbye to them before we leave the park.

However, where your kids can get into hot water is when they select the wrong schema for a given situation. For example, what if your child meets an adult at the park and instead of triggering the “stranger” schema, your kid activates the “trusted adult” set of behaviors? You can see how a mistake like this could have serious ramifications. After all, schemas are mental shortcuts, and shortcuts mean that you’re sacrificing some accuracy for a higher degree of expedience. There is a chance that, in not processing all the information, your child will come to the wrong conclusion and activate the wrong schema.

Quick Rant: This is another reason why Disney movies (and other made-for-children media) make me incredibly mad with their depictions of villains. By constantly presenting the villain as a fat, ugly, or old character who wears all black and is accompanied by creepy music, they are giving your kid the misperception that real life “bad guys” will always come with these schematic clues. In real life, bad guys look just like good guys and cannot be easily identified on sight. In real life, you have to devote some real time to getting to know someone before you can tell if they are a “bad guy” or a “good guy.” Stop making our kids think that they’re safe around someone as long as they don’t cackle, twirl their mustache, or carry a sinister-looking walking stick. End of rant.

So, what do schemas have to do with not telling your children to be nice to their friends? Simple. They need to know that, when they meet a stranger, they have to activate the “stranger”  schema even if the person looks nice, acts nice, or offers to give them free candy or show them a cute puppy. They should know that they should use the “acquaintance” schema for kids in their class until they earn the status of “friend.” Later on, when they begin dating, they need to know that it’s okay to downgrade someone from “potential romantic partner” or even "steady boyfriend" to “molesty jackass” the second they push them to do something they’re not comfortable doing.

Kids need to know what schematic categorizations exist for the people they’ll encounter, what behaviors they should show in each situation, and that people have to earn their titles as “friend” or “trusted adult” with long-term behavioral consistency.

The End Goal

The end goal is a child who is confident in many different types of situations, from meeting new peers or adults to correctly interacting with people they’ve known for years. Children should have appropriate schemas of what behavior is appropriate for what type of person, and they should be able to tell who falls in what category. Most important, they should know that, while politeness should be a universal constant, they are not obligated to show respect to those who do not demonstrate it in return. They should know that friendliness is reserved for people who have earned the title of friend, and they should feel confident in the fact that affection is a 100% voluntary way of expressing their feelings toward a trusted member of their tribe, blood-related or not.[6]

If your kid can internalize these categorizations and their corresponding sets of behavior, they will have a much easier, safer, more successful, and less painful time navigating their social surroundings.

Cheat Sheet

      Teach the behavioral hierarchy of politeness, respect, friendliness, and affection. Your kid should know that their behavior has to be different based on whom they’re interacting with at any given time. Teach that politeness should be a constant, but that respect, friendliness, and affection should be reciprocated and earned via good behavior (on the other party’s part) over time. They should also know that if someone does not treat them with the appropriate level of respect (or friendliness or affection) it is acceptable and expected to downgrade them without hesitation or guilt.

      Teach the difference between strangers, acquaintances, friends, and family. Strangers are people you’ve never met before, acquaintances are people whose names you know, and friends are people you have known for a long period of time and have earned your trust. Once kids get this categorization system, you can start helping them put their actions into perspective. They will know what is acceptable behavior for a friend versus an acquaintance and how to tell the difference.

      Teach reciprocity and a willingness to walk away from one-sided relationships. Your kid does not need to go above and beyond for people that would not do the same for them. There are 7.8 billion people in the world. Your child cannot be friends with all of them, so your children get to select which ones make the cut. If your child has someone who is not as invested as he or she is in the friendship, teach your kid that it is not mean and is actually perfectly acceptable to walk away. Politeness must still be shown (because almost all humans deserve politeness), but no one should ever feel the need to stay in a one-sided relationship.


 



[1] Bet you thought this was a woman, right? Check your gender norms, pal. Men can have ugly shoes, too.

[2] I don't know, but I'll let you know when my retinas heal.

[3] True story: my teenager saw an ant crawling up my toddler’s arm and attempted to blow it off for her. My toddler shielded the ant and screamed “Nooooo! He’s my best friend!” My teenager didn’t stop laughing for days.

[4] When I say I was friends with my teachers, I’m not kidding around. My sixth grade English teacher let me knit in her class. My second grade teacher is still considered to be a close friend of our family. My high school geometry teacher and I still email at least once a month, and she sends my kids stuffed animals from fun places when she and her husband go on vacation.

[5] Torney-Purta, J. (1991). Schema Theory and Cognitive Psychology: Implications for Social Studies. Theory and Research in Social Education, 19(2), 189-210.

[6] Some may have a different opinion on this, but it is my fervent belief that not all blood relatives are family and not all family is blood related. Family (or one’s tribe, if you like that term better) is the word for people you trust implicitly to put your best interests over their own. This is the highest schematic ranking a person can achieve (in my book), and the title should not be used loosely.


Chapter 6: Be Nice to Your Friends

[ILLUSTRATION 6, CHAPTER 6 WARNING GOES HERE]

As anyone who has ever talked to a toddler can tell you, toddlers can be brutal. Like, soul-crushingly, life-ruiningly frank. There’s a lot of truth to the Internet meme that says “if a woman calls you ugly, she’s jealous; if a man calls you ugly, she’s flirting, but if a kid calls you ugly...you’re ugly.”

Kids have absolutely no sense of social niceties. They also occasionally spaz out with small bursts of poorly-controlled demonic meanness of unknown origin. (No, it’s not just your kids. It’s all of them.)

Why We Say It

The fact that parents across the globe tell their kids to be nice to their friends is entirely unsurprising. We’re terrified our little monsters will alienate their peers and doom themselves to a life of social isolation and misery (sticking us with the therapy bills).

However well-meaning this parental plea for our kids to exercise their still-developing mouth filters may be, it does still have some unintended consequences.

Research Says (What They Hear)

Despite the fact that you do in fact want to ensure that your kids aren’t rude, little, demon spawn, you telling them to be nice to their friends before they go to school, as a warning when they start to act up at the park, and as they go into a brand new situation can send two pretty harmful messages:

      Everyone is your friend.

      You have to be nice to your friends no matter what they do.

So, let’s look at these two important constructs involved in the parental edict “be nice to your friends:” the concept of nice and the concept of friends.

Niceness, Respect, and Childhood Turrets

First, let’s take a second to acknowledge the ambiguity in the concept of being “nice”.

Say your coworker comes up to you and asks if you like his shoes. You look downward only to be immediately blinded by an abhorrent medley of colors so bright it may qualify as a traffic hazard. Is it “nice” to tell him that you like his shoes?[1] I mean, lying to people is supposed to be not nice, right? But so is hurting people’s feelings. If you were to honestly inform your obviously color-blind coworker as to the human rights violation situated around his metatarsals, would it qualify as “nice” or “not nice”?

Regardless of the correct answer to the great shoe debate, it illustrates the important point that being “nice” isn’t always as clear-cut an instruction as it sounds. Not only does the definition of “nice” contain a lot of grey area, it also differs dramatically from person to person.

In this shoe example, if the coworker is a relatively new acquaintance the “nicest” thing to do is probably respond with a polite dodge or mild white lie to save feelings while contemplating the quickest way out of the situation. However, if it’s someone you have worked with for years and have developed a strong and resilient friendship, the “nicest” thing to do might be to tell the brutal truth, possibly in a humorous way that reaffirms the strength of your friendship.[2]

So, if there is a fair amount of grey area in the concept of niceness for adults, you can see that it would be even more difficult for children who are still learning the different protocols for basic social situations.

Each parent might handle this nebulosity in a different way, but I personally think that it’s much more helpful to kids to use more concrete concepts in your parental requests.

Politeness

This is the first concept I would introduce to most children, as it is usually considered to be a universal constant. I wouldn’t want my children to be affectionate to everyone, nor would I necessarily like them to even be friendly to everyone. (In fact, we are trying very hard to train our 4-year-old not to be so friendly to everyone. Seriously, the people behind us in line at Starbucks really don’t need to know about our dog’s potty training accidents. Tone it down, Smalls.) [PULL QUOTE 52]

However, there are very few exceptions to the rule that your children should be polite to most of their fellow humans. Unless someone is actively abducting, assaulting, or otherwise violating your children’s basic rights, they should probably treat all people with basic politeness. This includes things like not screaming at people, keeping their hands (and feet and teeth) to themselves, not saying objectively mean things, saying “please” and “thank you” when appropriate, and maintaining a basic sense of decorum and social consciousness as they bumble their way through early life.

While this might not be easy to train your kids to do, it isn’t very hard to teach them when it needs to be done. You can safely try to train your kids to default to a baseline of polite behavior without much grey area. Basically, act like a human, not a monkey, and you should be good.

Respect

The next level up from politeness is respect. While politeness is something to which all humans are entitled, respect should (at least in my opinion) be earned.

It’s not hard to earn respect. The litmus test I use for my kiddos is that, if someone treats you with a basic level of respect, you treat them the same way. However, if someone is rude, hurtful, or otherwise disrespectful, my kiddos know they have my full blessing to choose not to interact with that person. They still have to be polite as they nope their way out of the situation (because almost everyone is entitled to a baseline of politeness), but they don’t have to subject themselves to someone who doesn’t treat them the way they should be treated.

This distinction comes in handy when dealing with some of the more old-timey perspectives. By this, I mean things like telling a boy to “turn the other cheek” when someone bullies him or telling a girl that a boy is allowed to treat her a certain way just because he asks her out or buys her dinner. The difference between politeness (to which almost everyone is entitled) and respect (which must be reciprocally earned) helps your kid deal with things that used to be societal norms but have since proven to be counterproductive (or downright creepy).

To sum up, I’d say politeness is the global rule that your child should be as courteous as is situationally possible, whereas respect is a deferential way of treating people that is earned only by reciprocity.

Friendliness

This one really kicks in around the ages of two to three. Your kiddo is so excited to show off burgeoning social skills that all the sudden the kiddo is best friends with every kid around, the checkout clerk at the grocery store, that lampshade over there, the stray cat sitting on your car, and your newly-planted nectarine tree (literally…my kiddo named it “Friendly,” and they talk every morning)[3].

It’s a fantastic sign that your kid is willing and capable of creating social bonds with so many different people (and the occasional inanimate object, I guess). It means their verbal skills are blossoming and that you have done a great job as a parent in making them feel safe and secure. Give yourself a high-five.

Friendliness Downside #1: Issues of Safety and Childhood Stranger-Friends (aka Dear Toddler Please Stop Telling Strangers Our Address)

When reading the last paragraph, it may not have escaped your notice that, while we want our kids to feel safe and secure, the world they live in is not an entirely safe and secure place. Far from it.

While there are very few long-term downsides to your toddler having pretend conversations with a plant, there are very real consequences to a child being too friendly with the wrong type of people. Telling strangers where you live or when you’re going on vacation could increase your risks of a robbery or home invasion. We all know the horror story of a child trusting a stranger that says he’ll show them a new puppy if they only come into his house or get into his car.

While we want our kids to feel safe, happy, exuberant, and friendly, they also have to know that they have to marry these qualities with an appropriate serving size of caution and common sense as well. Teach your kids that while they should be polite to (almost) everyone and demonstrate respect with (almost all) those who respect them in return, friendliness shouldn’t be exercised indiscriminately. Things like physical contact, sharing of personal details, and feeling comfortable being alone with a person should be reserved for those who are truly your proven and long-term friends. This means people you know well, people who have proven to be trustworthy, and (for littler kids) people who have been approved as “trustworthy” by parents.

Friendliness Downside #2: Emotional Dangers (aka A Tale of Cookies and Neediness)

As your kids grow up and start school, they stop having indiscriminate conversations with lampshades (hopefully) and enter a much more complex social realm. While it might seem like, with the increasing social competence of an elementary, middle, or even high schooler, the dangers of friendliness have passed, this is actually not the case.

And now I would like to tell a tale of the worst (and most incorrect) social lesson I ever learned—and how it took me the subsequent decade to unlearn it.

If you couldn’t tell from my biting sarcasm and fervent insistence on a strict adherence to grammatical intricacies, I didn’t have the easiest time making friends as a child. The briefest explanation of my particular social problem is this: A child who is raised by wolves never learns how to eat with a salad fork. As the only child of incredibly intelligent parents (with whom I was and still am insanely close), I never really learned how to relate properly to other kids. I was much better at talking to adults and actually became friends with many of my teachers.[4] As you could probably guess, this did absolutely nothing to endear me to my peers.

In high school, after a solid decade of wondering just why I didn’t fit in, I discovered two of the girls in my English class who were in the technical theater group (i.e. the people who do the lighting and paint the scenery for the drama club) had “hell week” that week and would be staying at school until 9:00 or 10:00 at night every day until the show opened. That night, I showed up at the theater room at 8:00 p.m. with a giant tray of warm, freshly baked cookies. High schoolers are ravenous monsters so it will surprise exactly no one that this gesture was very appreciated (and the cookies rapidly consumed). Like the good little Skinnerian rat I am, I then showed up with cookies the next four nights and, by the time the show opened, I had successfully baked my way into my first friend group.

Now, if any of you were thinking ahead about what conclusions my developing mind might have been drawing from this experience, you probably just experienced the literary equivalent of the background music that is played in a horror movie as the side character walks down a rickety staircase into a poorly-lit basement.

What adolescent Liz took from Cookiegate was the fact that if you just performed acts of service for other people you can make them like you. Extraordinary! There’s no conceivable downside to this whatsoever! Nothing can go wrong now!

Yup, everything went wrong. I then spent the next decade of my life trying to bake, buy, lend, toil, and work my way into friendships with people who had no real desire for a reciprocal friendship (or later a mutual romantic relationship) but were plenty content to consume the goods and services I was only too happily offering. What I “learned” in one week of adolescent cookie baking took me a half-decade to realize was a horrible idea and another goodness knows how many years to stop doing. Even now, as a (mostly) secure, happily married, mother of three, I still have to tamp down the urge to try to buy people’s affection (usually with food).

If only for my sake, please tell your kids early and often that they should not bestow their friendliness on anyone who does not willingly and freely offer it in return.

Kids are often told to be friendly or to be nice to their friends in order to ensure they have a social network. I’ve definitely been tempted to tell my violence-prone daughter that no one will want to be friends with her if she didn’t stop accidentally hug-tackling them. [PULL QUOTE 53] However tempting this line of thinking may be, try to ensure your kid gets the message that friendships are born from mutual compatibility and interest. No one has to “earn” friends’ attention via friendliness or anything else.

Affection

The final tier on the relational hierarchy is the demonstration of affection. This can mean physical demonstrations of affection (e.g. hugs, holding hands, pats, kisses, etc.) or it could just be verbal expressions of affection.

Kids should be taught two primary things about affection:

1.     Affection is reserved for those close to you who have earned your trust.

2.     You never have to show anyone affection if you don’t want to.

Let’s go over these one by one.

#1: The Relationship Hierarchy

With our affection-prone toddler, I’ve started using the categorization of strangers, acquaintances, friends, and family. Strangers are people you’ve never met, acquaintances are people whose names you know, friends are those you have known for a while and who have earned your trust over time, and family is those members of your tribe (whether related by blood or mutual weirdness [PULL QUOTE 54]) whom you trust implicitly in all circumstances.

Kids should know that these categories exist, how to place people in the proper category, and that their behavior toward people will vary depending on what category that person is in. They should know that most of their classmates are acquaintances and not friends, and they should know that this is completely okay. Not everyone has to be their friends, nor should they be.

By saying “be nice to your friends” insinuates that everyone they meet that day should qualify as a friend. Not only is this rarely ever going to be the case, it also gives your kids false expectations of the hellishly brutal social atmosphere that awaits them just inside the doors of their school. Your kids should be polite to everyone, but they shouldn’t be expected to show friendliness to the kid who tries to bully them in the lunch line, the jerk who makes a snide comment about them in homeroom, or any of the other horrible inhabitants of your child’s social landscape.

Exhibiting politeness to (almost) everyone will keep your child from becoming the bully, but there is no reason we can demand or should desire that our kids be friendly to everyone.

#2: Affection Is Voluntary

The entire next chapter is devoted to this concept, so I won’t go into it in too much detail, but ensure your kids know that they are never obligated to show affection. Affection is the top level of the polite-respectful-friendly-affectionate behavioral hierarchy and should only be demonstrated when it is 100% authentic and heartfelt. [PULL QUOTE 55]

Forced affection is not only disingenuous for the recipient but it is also a violation to ask someone to demonstrate a feeling they might not have. This top level of the hierarchy is completely voluntary, and your kid should know that no one can or should ever demand this if they aren’t feeling it.

What To Say Instead

As discussed above, your kids should know the difference between friends and acquaintances. This is important because, as they go through life, a vast majority of the people they meet will never proceed past “acquaintance” to “friend”. This is okay, normal, and good.

There is an overwhelming notion especially around small children that they should be friends with everyone. “Let’s all be friends!” is the rallying cry of preschoolers everywhere, yet it couldn’t be farther from the case. Any adult can tell you that a true friend is someone whose loyalty, common interests, and compatibility have been tested extensively and have held true over time. Having a real friend, who likes you for exactly who you are, isn’t afraid to tell you when you do something stupid or get an ugly haircut, and appreciates your bizarre sense of humor is both incredibly rare and immeasurably valuable. Most adults have at maximum a handful of people they consider to be true friends, and these cherished weirdos hold an irreplaceable role in our lives. [PULL QUOTE 56]

Given this incredibly high bar for the concept of friendship, it seems kind of silly to expect our kids to form this kind of bond with everyone in their classes. Heck, it’s a pretty high ask for them to be expected to find even one or two true friends by the time they finish high school. It’s totally fine for you to expect your child to be pleasant, polite, and respectful, but insinuating that they can or should be friends with everyone they encounter is just setting them (and you) up for disappointment.

Schemas for Dummies (and Your Child)

There is too much information in the world for your child (or you, or any human) to absorb and consider each fact individually. Our brains simply don’t have the processing power. We would be stuck so indefinitely trying to process all the information available to us that no decisions would ever get made, no actions taken. So, to help us make sense of this incredibly information-rich world, we use mental shortcuts to help us reach mostly accurate conclusions in much quicker ways.

Schemas, one such mental shortcut, are basically preconceived groupings of interconnected information.[5] For example, if something has four feet, fur, and barks, it’s probably a dog. We don’t have to assess its exact coloring, behavior, ear size, or other features to know that it’s probably a dog. We then activate our schema for “dog” and know exactly how we should treat that barking, four-footed, furry thing. Even if we’ve never met that particular dog before, our schema for the concept of “dog” helps us know how to act. Our brain can create a fairly accurate guess at how we should act while taking a very small amount of time processing information.

The reason schemas are relevant in this section on friendliness is that your child has schemas for everything. Information your child gathers about the people they meet, situations they experience, and types of encounters all get sorted based on their preexisting schemas.

Typical childhood schemas are for things like “friend,” “trusted adult,” or “bad guy”. Usually, this works to your children’s advantage. They can assess a new situation fairly quickly and, using their schemas to guide their behavior, know exactly how they should act at any given moment. Is this new kid a “friend”? Then I should probably be nice, share my toys, and wave goodbye to them before we leave the park.

However, where your kids can get into hot water is when they select the wrong schema for a given situation. For example, what if your child meets an adult at the park and instead of triggering the “stranger” schema, your kid activates the “trusted adult” set of behaviors? You can see how a mistake like this could have serious ramifications. After all, schemas are mental shortcuts, and shortcuts mean that you’re sacrificing some accuracy for a higher degree of expedience. There is a chance that, in not processing all the information, your child will come to the wrong conclusion and activate the wrong schema.

Quick Rant: This is another reason why Disney movies (and other made-for-children media) make me incredibly mad with their depictions of villains. By constantly presenting the villain as a fat, ugly, or old character who wears all black and is accompanied by creepy music, they are giving your kid the misperception that real life “bad guys” will always come with these schematic clues. In real life, bad guys look just like good guys and cannot be easily identified on sight. In real life, you have to devote some real time to getting to know someone before you can tell if they are a “bad guy” or a “good guy.” Stop making our kids think that they’re safe around someone as long as they don’t cackle, twirl their mustache, or carry a sinister-looking walking stick. End of rant.

So, what do schemas have to do with not telling your children to be nice to their friends? Simple. They need to know that, when they meet a stranger, they have to activate the “stranger”  schema even if the person looks nice, acts nice, or offers to give them free candy or show them a cute puppy. They should know that they should use the “acquaintance” schema for kids in their class until they earn the status of “friend.” Later on, when they begin dating, they need to know that it’s okay to downgrade someone from “potential romantic partner” or even "steady boyfriend" to “molesty jackass” the second they push them to do something they’re not comfortable doing.

Kids need to know what schematic categorizations exist for the people they’ll encounter, what behaviors they should show in each situation, and that people have to earn their titles as “friend” or “trusted adult” with long-term behavioral consistency.

The End Goal

The end goal is a child who is confident in many different types of situations, from meeting new peers or adults to correctly interacting with people they’ve known for years. Children should have appropriate schemas of what behavior is appropriate for what type of person, and they should be able to tell who falls in what category. Most important, they should know that, while politeness should be a universal constant, they are not obligated to show respect to those who do not demonstrate it in return. They should know that friendliness is reserved for people who have earned the title of friend, and they should feel confident in the fact that affection is a 100% voluntary way of expressing their feelings toward a trusted member of their tribe, blood-related or not.[6]

If your kid can internalize these categorizations and their corresponding sets of behavior, they will have a much easier, safer, more successful, and less painful time navigating their social surroundings.

Cheat Sheet

      Teach the behavioral hierarchy of politeness, respect, friendliness, and affection. Your kid should know that their behavior has to be different based on whom they’re interacting with at any given time. Teach that politeness should be a constant, but that respect, friendliness, and affection should be reciprocated and earned via good behavior (on the other party’s part) over time. They should also know that if someone does not treat them with the appropriate level of respect (or friendliness or affection) it is acceptable and expected to downgrade them without hesitation or guilt.

      Teach the difference between strangers, acquaintances, friends, and family. Strangers are people you’ve never met before, acquaintances are people whose names you know, and friends are people you have known for a long period of time and have earned your trust. Once kids get this categorization system, you can start helping them put their actions into perspective. They will know what is acceptable behavior for a friend versus an acquaintance and how to tell the difference.

      Teach reciprocity and a willingness to walk away from one-sided relationships. Your kid does not need to go above and beyond for people that would not do the same for them. There are 7.8 billion people in the world. Your child cannot be friends with all of them, so your children get to select which ones make the cut. If your child has someone who is not as invested as he or she is in the friendship, teach your kid that it is not mean and is actually perfectly acceptable to walk away. Politeness must still be shown (because almost all humans deserve politeness), but no one should ever feel the need to stay in a one-sided relationship.



[1] Bet you thought this was a woman, right? Check your gender norms, pal. Men can have ugly shoes, too.

[2] I don't know, but I'll let you know when my retinas heal.

[3] True story: my teenager saw an ant crawling up my toddler’s arm and attem



pted to blow it off for her. My toddler shielded the ant and screamed “Nooooo! He’s my best friend!” My teenager didn’t stop laughing for days.

[4] When I say I was friends with my teachers, I’m not kidding around. My sixth grade English teacher let me knit in her class. My second grade teacher is still considered to be a close friend of our family. My high school geometry teacher and I still email at least once a month, and she sends my kids stuffed animals from fun places when she and her husband go on vacation.

[5] Torney-Purta, J. (1991). Schema Theory and Cognitive Psychology: Implications for Social Studies. Theory and Research in Social Education, 19(2), 189-210.

[6] Some may have a different opinion on this, but it is my fervent belief that not all blood relatives are family and not all family is blood related. Family (or one’s tribe, if you like that term better) is the word for people you trust implicitly to put your best interests over their own. This is the highest schematic ranking a person can achieve (in my book), and the title should not be used loosely.


Clean Your Plate! was awarded the gold medal in the Literary Titan competition and placed as a finalist in the Readers' Favorite book award competition.


Currently, this book is on deep discount at Amazon: $7.80. But Amazon has only 16 books left at this price. Chances are the new inventory will approximate list price.



To read more posts about Liz and her books, click HERE.






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