While mine is a little young, I found this WSJ article about the importance of best friends very interesting: http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-find-a-best-friend-1424213995.
How do you plan to help your LOs develop lasting friendships? Or to encourage personality traits that make a good friend?
hostess / wonderful persimmon / 25556 posts
The whole neighborhood thing really bothers me. Kids are never outside in our hood. It "snowed" Tuesday and we went out playing in it all morning. I had to drag one parent and her kids outside but no one else was out. And we have a lot of kids in our neighborhood. So weird.
I worry about this a lot because my kid won't have siblings to be friends with. And to be honest, I'm less worried about her as I am for her finding other kids to play with. Other kids don't come outside and are over scheduled. We don't plan on doing that. But I'm sure it will be hard when she finds a kid she likes and then never sees him or her because he/she is always busy. Scheduling play dates with older kids is going to be a nightmare.
bananas / 9973 posts
Very interesting! My LO is obviously still much younger than the examples in the article, but I hope to instill compassion and consideration traits that make for a good friend. I hope to lead by example, including everyone ("the more the merrier"), being friends with people from all different walks of life, and already recognize her extrovert personality. For now, she has quite a few friends, all children of our friends or mommy friends I have made. Once school starts, kids change schools, etc, I'm curious to see how things pan out. I am sure parental involvement will be necessary for long-lasting friendships. Especially since kids don't seem to walk to each other's houses or play outside (unsupervised) anymore!
pomegranate / 3706 posts
I don't have a single friend left from elementary school. I have plenty of friends, and some of my life-long friendships have been from my "over-scheduled" extracurriculars. My mom didn't foster any of them for me. Kids can and will figure it out. I think this article is a bit of unnecessary worrying.
apricot / 448 posts
@erinpye: totally get your viewpoint, just thought it was really interesting. I'd obviously thought about and noticed how kids don't play outside, and how schools break up cliques to avoid bullying, but never linked that to kids developing friendships differently.
@mediagirl: I hate that kids don't play outside like they used to, but have noticed that the houses on cul-de-sacs in our neighborhood seem to be a tad more social and we often see their kids running around when we're on bike rides/jogs. That makes me hopeful though we don't live on one 
apricot / 448 posts
@shopaholic: love the compassion and consideration traits you mentioned! Especially the more the merrier. Even at 20 months, my son already leans toward the shy side so I definitely hope my husband and I can work on modeling more extroverted behavior (within reason) as we both tend to be more introverted.
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