Understanding Middle School Friendships

Think about how crushed young teens can feel when a formerly close friend becomes distant or the shame that can follow disclosure of sensitive information to a mere acquaintance. Knowing what studies show—for example, that humans tend to have frenemies and we often confide intimacies in people we aren’t that close to—can assuage adolescents’ fear of being abnormal. Frank discussions about middle school friendships like these are important to have at school, since parents of seventh and eighth graders have been shown to talk to their kids about peer interactions less than parents of elementary-age kids do. Knowing what’s normative can reduce the stress of peer interactions, leaving more bandwidth for learning. In fact, experts estimate that the quality of relationships with peers accounts for 33 to 40 percent of the variance in achievement in middle school.

Among adults, healthy friendships are “voluntary, personal, positive, and persistent,” Lydia Denworth writes in her 2020 book Friendship, “and they usually assume some measure of equality.” For middle school friendships, kids should know that they can decide whether to invest in a relationship or not, and there’s a mathematical formula for making that call: “the satisfaction and commitment we derive should be greater than the investment we make and the alternatives we forgo.” Miriam Romero, a public school teacher in San Francisco, puts it this way to her fifth-grade students: “It’s okay to walk away or take a break from relationships that aren’t supportive.”

Yet not all net-positive friendships look the same. Sociologist Sarah H. Matthews of Cleveland State University talks about three distinct styles of friendship: independent, discerning, and acquisitive. Independent people tend to be happy socializing casually with whoever’s around, while “discerning people are deeply tied to a few very close friends,” Denworth explains. The third sort, acquisitive people, “collect a variety of friends as they move through life. They are open to meeting new people, but keep up old relationships, too.”

Humans also “vary in their tendency to introduce their friends to one another,” she reports. Just because a friend wants to hangout with someone else doesn’t mean they don’t value you. Cliques, or “friend groups” as teenagers call them, differ as well. “They can be hierarchical, or they can be roughly egalitarian,” Denworth says. “They can be tightly knit or looser and more porous.” Media often showcases the discerning style of middle school friendships and close, exclusive groups, making kids long for besties like the ones in “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.” Informing teenagers that human friendship isn’t like that all the time can ease anxiety that their own ties are inferior.

For humans of all ages, says Brett Laursen, a child psychology professor at Florida Atlantic University, the research is unequivocal: “Concordance is the foundation of friendship.” Similarity predicts both friendship formation and friendship survival. (Conformity then can be seen as an attempt to both achieve and maintain similarity in order to win and keep friends, respectively.)

In studies, “friends who differed on peer acceptance, physical aggression, and school competence had relationships that ended sooner than friends who were similar on these attributes.” Notice what Laursen, who is also editor in chief of the International Journal of Behavioral Development, isn’t saying. It’s not that rejects, ruffians, and nerds are inherently unlikeable; spending time with them may just be more appealing to other rejects, ruffians, and nerds.

Another study extended this concept to “internalizing symptoms,” things like acting anxious, ruminating excessively, and self-consciousness. Those behaviors decreased the longevity of a friendship when only one friend displayed them, but the effect disappeared when both kids struggled. As Laursen put it, “a bad habit is not necessarily a turnoff as long as both friends share the same habit.” While similarity on undesirable traits shouldn’t be the primary goal in forming friendships—after all, humans of all ages get the most out of pairing with friends who share their positive traits—tweens should understand that doing friendship right is about finding someone who suits you best, not winning over objectively wonderful or high-status peers.

Additionally, if you’re lonely, you’re not the only one. Eighty percent of adolescents experience loneliness at school, and about 12 percent of 6,000 sixth-graders in one of Juvonen’s studies were not named as a friend by anyone. Students with no friends “receive lower grades and are less academically engaged,” she says. Research has also tied friendlessness and exclusion to truancy, inability to focus, deficits in working memory, and lack of classroom participation.

Teenagers should know the redemptive power of their friendship for these classmates. In one study, Juvonen found that a high quality friendship right at the time of transitioning to high school could protect rejected youth “from engaging in unsupportive behaviors within romantic relationships” down the line. In another one, she concluded that hanging out with a friend who had experienced victimization alleviated a bullied adolescent’s own victimization-related distress. Knowing the power of just one friendship to serve as a buffer that disrupts the connection between loneliness and negative outcomes, may encourage some teenagers to reach out more.

It’s a shame teachers like her have to improvise, Gest says, but when it comes to adolescents, schools tend to “become very focused on drug use prevention or sex ed, and don’t really focus on the positive dimensions of relating with peers that might actually support those prevention goals.” He sees it as a marketing issue: “If you focus on a middle school curriculum that would build emotional regulation and social relationships, no schools would buy it. If you repackage the exact same curriculum and call it something about drug prevention, it will sell.”

The experts’ bottom line when it comes to teaching about healthy friendship in middle schools? Just say yes.

Allison Green
Boston Tutoring Services