Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Keep parent friendships in their own lane
Friendship in its own lane
Cutting off a friend because her child, or even her husband, did something hurtful teaches a kid that people get dropped over what someone else did. If the friendship between the adults is real, it stays. Pushing it onto the kids is what to avoid: a barbecue where the excluded child is told to deal with the other kids just because the parents are friends.
The adult friendship moves into its own lane. The big family get-togethers may come back someday, and they may not.
Befriending kids' parents
Some parents avoid befriending their kids' friends' parents altogether until everyone graduates high school, and that works for people who are comfortable with it. Making those parents the only source of friends leans too hard on the kid and fails to show the child that a parent has a life outside their social circle. Even good arrangements change, especially in a group of eight kids.
How do kids learn from watching parents?
Psychologist Albert Bandura's 1961 Bobo doll experiment at Stanford showed children copying an adult's behavior toward an inflatable doll. Children who watched an adult hit the doll tended to hit it too, often in nearly the same ways. Bandura built on this work to develop social learning theory, which holds that people pick up behavior by watching others.
Why do parents end up befriending other parents?
In 1950, Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter, and Kurt Back studied friendships among residents of Westgate, an MIT housing complex. People were most likely to befriend neighbors who lived close to them, especially those next door. Chance meetings on stairs and paths drove much of it. Social psychologists call this the proximity effect.