Valuing Friendships Across The World
This is a day for everyone around the world to think about friendship and all the ways in which it can connect us, no matter our ethnicity, culture, or country of origin.
How Can I Celebrate?
- Spend time with your friends
- Get in touch with a friend you’ve not spoken to in a while
- Pop round to check on an elderly neighbour
- Make a friend a friendship bracelet
- Send a friend a thoughtful message or postcard
The Importance of Friendship
If the pandemic has taught us one thing, it’s how important friends are for us all, from toddlers to older adults. Friendships run the gamut from neighbours who check in on each other to bosom buddies who tell each other everything and have a shared history stretching back years.
Friends are especially important for children and teens – the teenage years are when children start to pull away from their parents and forge their own way in the world. They become less reliant on Mum and Dad and more reliant on the approval and support of their peers. This may be hard to take for parents who have spent the previous 12 years nurturing their child, but it’s perfectly natural.
A recent report by the UK Office of National Statistics (2020) came up with these interesting findings: ‘Good, close friendships, sometimes described as “like family”, were viewed as an important part of a happy childhood. Strong and secure friendships can help children through difficult times “because if you’re upset, then they’ll be there for you”. … Children also described how belonging to a peer group can provide feelings of inclusion and confidence and reduce loneliness.’
Loneliness
According to the Campaign to End Loneliness, there are nine million lonely people in the UK, four million of whom are older people. The charity recently commissioned a report, Loneliness Beyond Covid-19, which found that if you were lonely before the pandemic, Covid-19 made it worse. In future, we will need better ways to identify lonely people and more resources to help them. If your child is finding it hard to make friends, here are some great tips.
A previous blog post, which was about how to survive lockdown, included ideas for socialising and the names of organisations that can help. A future blog post will focus on making friends as an adult. Look out for it!
Building Friendships
Have you ever watched young children playing? One might run up to another and just start chatting, or take them by the hand and suggest they join in a game, even if they have just met. Friendship can be as simple as that. Even though many children find it easy to make friends, it’s important for parents to teach their children how to make friends, and how to behave with friends when things go wrong. There’s plenty of advice out there for parents to support their children when building friendships.
Different Kinds of Friendship
You don’t have to live next door to someone to be friends with them. If your child is shy but enjoys writing and would like to make new friends, then how about finding them a pen pal? Some charities promote contact between children. If you have an older child or a teen, their school may run student exchange programmes, where your child swaps homes and lives with a family in a different country for a few days or weeks.
‘Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity.’
– Khalil Gibran
The Benefits of Friendships
Friendships enhance our life. Friends make us laugh, lend us a shoulder to cry on, support us. But did you know that friendship has tangible health benefits too, from reducing our stress levels to improving cardiovascular health?
Problems With Friendships
One of the downsides of friendships is bullying. Almost every child will have some experience of this at some stage. Bullying normally happens because a child is perceived as ‘different’ in some way. Parents can help to stop their children being bullies by promoting inclusivity and being kind. We will cover bullying and peer pressure in a future blog.
Let’s end with an uplifting post about friendship:
‘Try to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud.’
– Maya Angelou