When I was 10, my best friend taught me how to make a flamethrower. We duct-taped a can of WD-40 to one end of a two-by-four, melted a candle onto the other, and prepared for imaginary enemy marauders. We never lit it, thankfully.
If my parents had known, I wonder whether they would have forbidden the friendship—though if they had, it might not have mattered. My pal and I still saw each other daily at school, where our recess schemes, such as building a roulette wheel from a broken turntable and getting classmates to gamble with the desserts from their lunches, mirrored our weekend mischief. The friendship died a natural death after sixth grade, when we went to different schools.
Now I’m an educator tasked with keeping an eye on creative, devious kids. And I know that as another school year begins, many parents are bracing for new friendships—some welcome, some less so. Last spring, the distressed mother of a middle schooler sat in my office. “I feel like I’ve lost my daughter,” she said. “Ever since she started hanging out with those girls, she’s become a different person.” She told me how her daughter had become obsessed with her appearance, was constantly on her phone, and had lied about doing her schoolwork. “I want to tell her she can’t see them,” the mother said, “but I’m afraid that will only make things worse.”
This conversation captures one of parenting’s most agonizing predicaments: What do you do when you don’t like your child’s friends? The stakes can feel enormous. Peer influence is real and powerful, and it shifts dramatically during the teenage years. When children are young, they spend most of their time in smaller, more supervised worlds—at home with family and at school with teachers who keep a close eye on them. But as kids move into adolescence and gain more independence, friends start mattering more, filling the space previously held by parents and teachers. This shift isn’t a sign of parental failure; it’s a normal part of adolescent development, as young people begin to separate from their family and form their own identity.
Of course, knowing this doesn’t make it any easier when your teen’s friends seem to embody everything you’ve tried to teach them to avoid.
Parents unhappy with their kids’ friends typically contemplate two approaches: prohibition or passive resignation. Both are suboptimal. On the one hand, mandating separation from certain friends can backfire. “Reactance theory” posits that when people believe that their freedom is threatened, they frequently grow more motivated to pursue the forbidden activity or relationship. Tell a teenager that they can’t see certain friends, and those relationships tend to become more appealing and influential than they would have been otherwise. I learned this lesson early in my career as a new dean of students: I told two 11th graders who were engaged in an intense and, to my eyes, unhealthy relationship that I thought they should break it off. My well-intentioned meddling turned what had been a casual teenage romance into an epic love story in their minds, with probably more drama than would have occurred had I simply butted out.
On the other hand, standing idly by while a kid makes concerning choices can feel like an abdication of parental responsibility. When a child adopts troubling behaviors, values, or attitudes, the typical instinct for caregivers is to intervene. How can we just watch kids make what we believe are poor decisions? The answer lies in understanding how influence actually works—and playing a longer game than the one teenagers and their friends are playing.
I have seen the subtle, enduring power of parental influence up close. Consider a moment familiar to most educators: After months of a school struggling to support a student, the parents are called in for a meeting. As the meeting wraps, the educators look at one another and say simply, “Oh.” Behind that “oh” is the realization that, whether the parents are aware of it or not, their child has adopted habits that mirror the parents’ own. A third-grade boy has a hard time paying attention in class; in the meeting, his father skips from topic to topic, chasing thoughts like fireflies on a summer evening. A seventh-grade girl has iced out several of her former friends from a lunch table, leaving behind a trail of weeping, rattled classmates; in the meeting, her mom speaks witheringly about the other girls’ mothers.
In certain respects, this might take parents aback; probably no one likes to think they’re having a negative influence on their child. But looked at another way—say, in the context of what to do if you don’t like your kid’s friends—the fact that children unconsciously absorb so much from their parents should give many parents heart. Research from the developmental psychologist Laurence Steinberg indicates that although peers have enormous influence over adolescents’ day-to-day choices—what to wear, what music to listen to, how to spend free time—parents can retain significant influence over their children’s core values and major life decisions, including whom they choose to spend time with. But parents need to remember that they can’t teach their values in a PowerPoint presentation. Instead, those values are taught in thousands of smaller moments: when they gossip at the dinner table about another family, or give up their seat on the metro for an older passenger. Kids learn how to be in the world, and how to make choices, by watching their parents, not necessarily by listening to them.
Take a mother I know whose 15-year-old son started spending time with a group that seemed to prioritize displays of material wealth—new North Face jackets, spring-break trips to fancy resorts—in a way that made her uncomfortable. Rather than forbidding the friendships, she doubled down on family practices that reflect her values. She continued their tradition of volunteering together at a local food bank once a month. She made sure they still had device-free dinners where they talked about their day. She shared stories from her work as a pediatrician, not as lectures but as natural parts of conversation. Just as crucial, she avoided making negative comments about her son’s friends, which would have forced him to defend them and potentially identify more strongly with their values. Eventually, her son parted ways with some of the new friends, but he also kept others—who, to the mother’s delight, started spending more time with her family, where they were exposed to values that she was living authentically and visibly.
One of the most effective strategies for parents troubled by peer influence is to strengthen the gravitational pull of home. This doesn’t mean vying with friends for your teenager’s attention. Instead, it means making home a place where your kid and their friends genuinely want to be. In our household, we keep a cabinet drawer stocked with snacks: Fruit Roll-Ups, Pringles, Pop-Tarts, an ever-present box of Lucky Charms. We consciously choose to sacrifice nutrition for a sense of welcome. Although the snack drawer is just one factor, we’ve had a steady stream of teenagers in our house over the past decade. Our goal has never been to be our kids’ best friends or to compete with peer relationships. Rather, it is to remain a steady, positive presence in their life while they navigate the complicated work of figuring out who they are and whom they want to become.
Yes, at times, peer influence crosses the line from bothersome to dangerous. If a child’s friends are involved in illegal activities, substance abuse, or other behaviors dangerous to their health, more direct intervention may be necessary. But even in these situations, outright prohibition is generally less effective than addressing the underlying problems making these relationships appealing. Sometimes, teenagers gravitate toward risky peer groups because they’re seeking excitement, belonging, or an escape from their own struggles. In these cases, helping a child find healthier ways to meet those needs—whether through sports, arts, community service, or other activities—can be more effective than simply trying to remove the bad influences.
Perhaps most important, parents need to trust the foundation they’ve built with their children. The teenage years test almost everything—children’s judgment, parental authority, family relationships. When a parent doesn’t like their kid’s friends, it can feel like a referendum on their parenting and a preview of their future. But more often than not, these friendships are part of the messy, complicated process of adolescents figuring out what they believe and care about. A child’s earlier, formative relationships and the sense of self they’ve developed over the years don’t disappear the moment they start spending time with kids you don’t like.
A parent’s job isn’t to control, but to remain a loving caregiver who ultimately trusts their child’s capacity to make good choices. Sometimes that means watching them learn lessons the hard way. But it also means being there when they need a parent most—which is typically long after the friends who worried us so much have faded from the picture.
