Child Proof
Don’t Be Friends With Your Teenage Kid
There’s an important difference between friendship and friendliness — and confusing the two can ruin a family dynamic
Michael Whitehead, a marriage and family therapist in Twin Falls, Idaho, has a short answer to the question of whether parents can be friends with their kids: “No.”
Friendship means that two people are “equal beings,” agrees Clark University psychology professor Wendy Grolnick, which is a dynamic fundamentally at odds with the parent-child relationship. For many parents, that’s already obvious. Still, it can be tempting to try to put kids or teenagers into a friend role as a way to keep them close.
Whitehead says there other reasons parents to try to turn their children into friends. They may be looking for approval, or they may seek intimacy from other members of their family when their marriage is struggling. In one 2002 study, researchers gave questionnaires to adolescent girls whose parents had recently divorced, as well as the girls’ mothers. They found that when mothers confided personal information to their daughters, such as financial details or negative thoughts about their ex-spouses, the daughters didn’t feel any closer to their moms — but they did feel psychological distress.
