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Teen Friendships: Being Liked Back Is What Matters The Most.



Most of us have wondered at some point whether our teenager has enough friends, or the right ones. We usually go on surface stuff, who they mention, who they see at the weekend, whether they seem to be in the thick of things or a bit off to the side.

As parents it is really interesting to understand how researchers actually study this. They essentially go into schools and ask a whole year group to name their friends. Then they put all the answers together and look at the year as a whole. It gives them a kind of map of the social world of that year, showing who is in the middle of things, who is out at the edge, who is on their own, and how the different groups do or do not join up. The method is called social network analysis.

What the map shows is fascinating.  As parents we sometimes worry about whether our teenager is well liked or high up in the pecking order. But the thing that seems to matter for how a young person is doing is not status. It is whether they have a couple of real friendships. Not a big group, just one or two friendships that go both ways.  This is the bit that matters the most – both ways is when they both name each other in the research.   These young people tended to be doing better in their mid-twenties than those who were popular with a bigger crowd.

From the research we know that plenty of young people sit somewhere near the edge and are perfectly alright. Being on the edge and being on your own are not the same thing.  The thing we need to look out for is real isolation, a young person with no friendships that go both ways at all. That is different from being outside the popular group, and it is the thing more likely to make life harder.

The other thing the map shows is that friendships at this age are meant to move. They change a great deal, especially when classes get reshuffled and young people are split up from the people they sat with last year. In one study, about half of the friendships between separated pupils faded within the year. But interestingly what stayed steady was the number of friends a young person had, rather than which particular people those friends were. So, when a close friendship cools off and a new one takes its place, that does not usually mean something has gone wrong.

All of this research provides averages across a lot of young people, and our own teenager is one person, not an average. A map of a whole year group cannot tell us specifically how our own young person is doing.   But it can take some of the worry off the things we tend to fix on, the size of the group or the friendship that has run its course.  The thing that really matters is whether there is someone there who counts them as a friend back.

 

Narr, R. K., Allen, J. P., Tan, J. S., & Loeb, E. L. (2019). Close friendship strength and broader peer group desirability as differential predictors of adult mental health. Child Development, 90(1), 298–313.

Escribano, D., Lapuente, F. J., Cuesta, J. A., Dunbar, R. I. M., & Sánchez, A. (2023). Stability of the personal relationship networks in a longitudinal study of middle school students. Scientific Reports, 13, 14575.

Meter, D. J., & Card, N. A. (2016). Stability of children's and adolescents' friendships: A meta-analytic review. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 62(3), 257–283.


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