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| Tue, 12-27-2005 - 2:15pm |
Just wondering if anyone has gotten to the point of forbidding their kids from seeing certain "friends" who you feel are a negative influence on your child? We have decided DD 15 should not hang out with her best friend anymore and needless to say it is causing great controversy in our house. Just second guessing myself I suppose. Any thoughts are appreciated.

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I am also having this problem, and have posted on this issue in the past. The way I've handled it up to this point is to have dd see her friend at our home. I'm not sure this is enough, though, to curb the "bad influence" factor, as they do usually hang upstairs in dd's room. It also does not go over very well, as dd would prefer to get out of her house every now and again and I can't blame her. However, I can't even trust the other girl's parents so the issue is even more difficult.
What I've done is installed spyware on our computer to monitor their activities. I've found out some information in some ways I wish I didn't know. So buyer beware. I also keep the lines of communication open with the friend's parents. If you forbid the friendship entirely, you're probably turning them into even better friends. There is no easy answer.
I'm anxious to see what others have to say.
Haven't had to with ds13 yet; he's very pragmatic and sees through some kids. He flat out told his best friend that he HATES this one kid that his best friend has been hanging out with this year, as do other kids they hang out with, because the kid is truly mean (I've seen him in action).
But way back when, as for me, I was livid when my parents wanted me to stop seeing a boyfriend (I was 20, he was 18; we commuted to school from home) because his brother and buddy were known for doing drugs and drinking a lot They didn't even hang around my bf at the time, and neither I or bf drank or did drugs - in fact, the night in question we were going to dinner and a movie with a huge coed group from college, no drinking or anything else involved. So when my folks forbid me from seeing him that night telling me not to come back if I went, I did it anyway...(It got ugly after that for a bit...) I guess what I'm saying is be 100% sure what you're thinking this person is like is really them and not 'guilt by association' as it was for me.
Sue
I think strictly forbidding it sets them up to rebel but if you can find a middle ground...
She can see the girl at your home or at an agreed upon location that you will be happy to drive to/pick up from(Pam suggested this as well)
Or require that she spend x amount of days doing something else you can be reasonably sure this girl wont show up at
One thing I finally realized with my middle son was that we have found ourselves in this situation all the time(from 3rd grade on)
As much as I didnt want to admit it, it was clear that my guy was going to find the wrong crowd no matter what we did; it would just be a different member of the wrong crowd!!!!
With the current 'poor choice', we decided that at least this fellow has some redeeming characteristics and, if we totally lost him, perhaps DS would this time find someone with NO redeeming factors, KWIM?
Now, my youngest has NEVER fallen in with the wrong crowd so I would react differently if this were him.
I hope this makes sense.....just cautionning you to remember DD may be more of this than you would like to admit...or not!
We had the problem of the "bad influence" friends several times with dd. She was one of those kids that looked for the "wild child" and of course, they are everywhere. There have been a number of them as she has changed schools and crowds. She was kind of chameleon-like in that if she was with a good kid she was happy being good but when with bad kids she was happy to join in that too. Obviously she was no angel but to her credit she did chose some nice kids for friends. We also got her involved in a "wholesome" activity (dance) which occupied a lot of her afterschool and weekend time during her early teens and even when she found a wild girl there they were usually pretty well supervised.
Several times we made it difficult for her to spend time with the kid in question, and required that time together be at our house with me supervising. Often the kids would get tired of dd because she couldn't run wild and the friendships would fizzle out.
The closest we got to forbidding her to hang with certain kids was a grounding. She started hanging with a new group in 9th grade. At her 15th bday sleepover they drank alcohol and left the house in the middle of the night. We grounded her for 6 weeks meaning that she could not hang with these kids afterschool or talk on the phone but we knew that we could not prevent her from being with them at school. (She still saw her dance friends at the studio about 4 times a week so she was not completely denied a social life). By the end of the grounding the drinking kids were out of the picture and she had made friends with a really nice girl. Over the next few years she went on to have some pretty questionable friends at times but as she got older it was harder to manage who she spent time with.
I think that we got lucky in that she was not really good friends with the "drinking kids" so there was no great loss on either side. The girl that became her best friend from 10th grade on had a number of traits that I didn't care for but I could see that trying to separate them would drive dd closer to her. Her mother and I had very different views on how to handle the girls and their behavior so I was on my own.
Like others have suggested, I think the best approach is having the friend spend time at your house, be the parent that drives them places etc so you can supervise and monitor somewhat. Forbidding and grounding can often backfire and cause more problems than you started with so proceed carefully there.
P.S. Whether the friend does well in school is not really an indicator of good or bad kid-- my dd had a few friends that were top of the class, from very nice families etc and they were pretty wild, used drugs and alcohol, shoplifted etc. The parents seemed to think that since their dd's were such good students they must be "good" in general.
{Whether the friend does well in school is not really an indicator of good or bad kid--}
Yes, thank you for mentioning that. There does seem to be rather a "tunnel vision" with most parents on this issue. My ds is a horrible student, but a very good kid who so far has steered clear of drugs and alcohol....
Marie
I agree with those who suggested encouraging her to spend time at your house. Teens already think we don't understand them. By forbidding certain friendships, we'll only seem more out of touch and the friend (who truly understands them, in their eyes) will be all the more appealing. You might actually push them together this way.
Also, if you simply forbid undesriable frienships, your dd will not learn anything about making her own judgements. I am not saying there aren't situations where it is absolutely necessary to seperate kids ... I'm sure there are, but I think that should be an absolutely last resort.
Good luck to you.
JT
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