In the immortal words of Winnie the Pooh, “A day without a friend is like a pot without a single drop of honey left inside.” Yet, friendships can be hard to make and harder to maintain especially for 2e kids.
In last summer’s
Variations2e, doctoral students at the University of South Carolina reported their research about the difficulty many 2e students have in making friends. We thought this merited further attention as the school year is now fully underway and anxieties about classwork may be getting manageable (hopefully). This is also a time when many parents ask, why doesn’t my child have friends? As with all questions regarding twice exceptionality, it’s complicated.
Making friends is never all that easy, and when the skill of reading body language and subtext is not well-developed, it can be stressful. According to Molly Bloom, Rachel Garrison, Michael Huesmann, Rebecca Smith-Hill, Jacqueline Viotto, and Thomas Hébert in their
Variations2e report, many 2e students suffer from social awkwardness and have difficulty communicating feelings. One child in the study lamented that he “was always saying the wrong things.” Making small talk is not something 2e kids do readily, yet that sort of conversation—“How’s it going? What’s new?” etc—leads to potential bonding. Again, these are universal issues, but for 2e kids, particularly those who feel “introverted” or “shy” or “socially awkward,” the uncomfortable can become a nightmare.
A separate recent study by Seon-Young Lee and Paula Olszewski-Kubilius in the
Journal for the Education of the Gifted, found that asynchronous development of the kind we often see in 2e kids can be a disadvantage because students are often “mismatched” with their environment and their peers. In addition, the learning challenges of the classroom extend beyond it. A slow-processing speed or dyslexia have real impacts on all social situations.
How To Make Friends
The good news is that 2e kids usually have overwhelming passions that serve as bridges for creating friendships. If a kid is obsessed with Dungeons and Dragons, he’s likely to attract others with the same obsession. “My friend group,” said one 2e student, tends to be “homogenous and based on a topic like hiking or CrossFit.”
This is where 2e friendships take on a deeper and more fulfilling texture than those of many other school relationships. Sharing a love for and an appreciation of a given hobby or activity allows for strong bonds to be created. Friendships might not happen in the classroom during school hours, but after school or during extracurricular activities outside of school.
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2e friendships can take on a deeper texture than other school relationships.[/perfectpullquote] These smaller groups, even if it’s just one other person, tend to be very “tight.” Sometimes, they can be too tight and can create a codependency which is dangerous if there’s a falling out, as there tends to be with kids. Perhaps one way around this is to form several distinct friend groups based on specific interests; video games, martial arts, chess, music, etc. It’s always advisable that if one friend group experiences a waning of affection, there would be another to pick up the slack.
The study found the most effective friendship-building strategies involved overcoming the social awkwardness in making a friend by finding common interests and nurturing a few, close relationships, rather than trying to be wide-net popular.
Online Friends
Many kids will feel more comfortable with online friendships, developed while they play video games, for example, and through social media. It can be wonderful to feel free to be yourself behind a screen. A recent Pew Research survey found that more than fifty percent of teenagers make friends online.
Every parent is now saying to themselves, how do I know the friend my child is making online is who they say they are? Exactly. You don’t. They don’t. Social media can be dangerous. That same Pew survey found that twenty percent of kids online will respond to contacts from complete strangers. Very few kids will tell an adult about any interaction on the Internet.
However, there’s no putting that genie back in the bottle, and the truth is many 2e kids greatly benefit from these online friendships. Parents should monitor those interactions, or at least discuss some guidelines with their child, and definitely make sure that their child does not put personal photos or give out personal information online. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have online friends.
The two main takeaways for parents trying to help their kids make friends:
- Enable kids to participate in interest-based groups.
- Make a safe space available for kids to get together for an activity.
Making friends and living a social life is an art and takes years to practice, and many of us adults are still practicing it. It’s important to remember that the process should be convivial, not conflicted, enjoyable, not stressful, and that friends are the people we choose to share our lives with. The value of friendship may have been best summed up by Calvin and Hobbes, “Friends pick us up when we fall down, and if they can’t pick us up, they lie down and listen for a while.”
