The Outsize Influence of Your Middle-School Friends

Early in 2010, the year we moved to Hong Kong, our three boys were 11, eight, and six. When we sat them down to tell them we’d be moving there for a few years, we tried to sell it as a challenging adventure. Their responses were mixed. Jake was anxious. Alex, our baby, was excited. But Matthew, our middle son, was inconsolable. He was having none of it.

“What about my friends!” he cried.

We tried to reassure him.

“You’ll be back … you’ll have your family … you’ll make new friends.”

Matthew looked at us with anguish and said, “And then I’ll have to leave them, too.”

It went on like that for weeks.

Matthew has always been the outgoing one. He seemed to recognize at a very early age the sustenance he got from other people. As a toddler he waved and grinned at strangers from his stroller. His second-grade teacher once told me he might have been the funniest child she ever taught. Another mother once marveled at his “profound social skills.”

Such gregariousness generally gives him confidence. And it wasn’t the prospect of making new friends that worried him. It was the wrench of separation from the ones he had. Matthew’s friends felt like his whole world.

In this, he was acting like many of his peers. The ability to make and keep even one close friend has been seen as vital to children’s well-being for more than half a century. What has changed is that we now understand at a biological and even evolutionary level why that is so. And we are beginning to appreciate that the intensity of feelings generated by friendship—or loneliness—in childhood and adolescence is by design. The complexity of human brain development takes time. Much of that time is spent honing a new, more advanced set of social skills.

“Middle school is about lunch.”

I turned and looked at Mary, the woman who had spoken. We were sitting on a beach watching our kids swim. It was August, and though we were still on vacation, our thoughts had turned to the coming school year. That September, Jake would be starting middle school—which