Before we can be friends

This blog post is a transcript of Episode 102 of my podcast/YouTube series. Because of that, it is not written to be grammatically/syntactically correct.

You can listen here and watch here.

Once upon a time, there were autistic, ADHD, and anxious students who didn't know that there are stages or levels between strangers and friends. 

Sometimes these students treat people they kind of knew like they were strangers, not acknowledging them when they saw them. 

Sometimes they didn't know how to engage in small talk with people they kind of knew, so interactions were pretty awkward. 

And some students thought everyone they knew was their friend, which meant they were often too friendly or too personal with people they only kind of knew. And the reality is that most people in our lives are people we only kind of know. 

I created the lesson I'm sharing on this week's podcast for all of these students. 

In this lesson, I teach students that an acquaintance is someone we recognize from somewhere or something. We usually know their name, but not always. This can include students in our class or our group, neighbors, teachers, and friends of our parents. We also talk about what the social expectations are when we are around acquaintances, like small talk and introductions to other people. 

This episode is about the lesson that is week two in module four. That means it's the last module of the program, the second week out of eight. If we look at the checklist for this module, this module is all about relationships. This specific lesson covers things like: A student who doesn't greet or acknowledge people they know. A student who thinks everyone they know, or everyone in their class, is their friend. A student who shares information that is considered too much or too personal based on the relationship. Those are all things that are covered in this lesson all about acquaintances.

This word is usually a word that students either don't know, they've never heard the word 'acquaintance', or it's a word that they've heard, but they don't really know what it means. I start this lesson by talking about the word acquaintance. We talked about it at the very end of the lesson that comes before this one, which is the first lesson in module four. I end that lesson by introducing the concept of an acquaintance. This lesson helps us get much more in depth into that topic and that conversation.

An acquaintance is somebody that we kind of know, and it always triggers that Gotye song in my head, 'Someone That I Used to Know'. I always sing that to myself every time we talk about the concept of an acquaintance. It's somebody that we kind of know. I tell the students that usually we know this person's name, but not all of our students know people's names. Some of our students, especially triangle students, don't always know anybody's name. They might not know their teachers' names. They might not know the names of other students in their class. They might not know the names of more distant family members or kids in their neighborhood that they regularly interact with. For a lot of triangle students, it's just not something that's that important to them, and so it's not something that they hold on to.

Square students and circle students often know people's names. They often pay attention to people's names because they find them to be important, so they often remember other people's names. But just like everything else, nothing in the social world is black and white. You may have a triangle student who knows everybody's name, just like you may have a circle student who doesn't know anybody's name. There's nothing black and white around here.

So when it comes to acquaintances, usually we know their name. They usually also know our name. And we know them from something or somewhere. Maybe they are our neighbor, so we know them from our neighborhood. Maybe it was our second grade teacher, so we know them from elementary school. Maybe it is the friends of our parents, and so we know them because we've seen them at certain events or they've been over to our house.

The group of people that are our acquaintances is very large, and so I will ask students to list three people in their lives that are an acquaintance to them. At first, most students really struggle with this, because other people are kind of out of sight, out of mind. I have to give a lot of examples before students are able to recognize all the people in their life who are an acquaintance to them. I mentioned teachers, I mentioned neighbors, I mentioned other students. Doctors, dentists, veterinarians, the person who works at a place that you frequent, really anybody, especially if your student is in elementary school, pretty much anybody in that elementary school, because we all kind of tend to know everybody. It's anybody that your student kind of knows. Their coach on their sports team, other students on their sports team. If they are in therapies, their therapists. Other students who may be there at the same time that they are. It's just people that we kind of know, and when we stop to think about it, it's actually a lot of people. That's how we start this lesson is really getting a sense of what is an acquaintance and understanding that they are everywhere.

The first poll question for this week (for students who are in person, I designate a certain part of the room as the answer, and for students who are on Zoom, I can create polls on zoom so everybody gets to jump in and share their thoughts), the first poll question is: If you saw... and then I insert a celebrity name. I usually use Mr. Beast. Sometimes I'll use Taylor Swift, but some of us have a strong reaction to certain celebrities. Mr. Beast, at least everybody knows who that person is. If you're an adult like me, you may have no idea who that person is. I only know because of the students. Mr. Beast is the most famous Youtuber, so almost every student knows who Mr. Beast is, but sometimes I'll use the name of another celebrity. The poll question is: If you saw Mr. Beast visiting your school or your neighborhood tomorrow, would we consider him to be our acquaintance? The answer choices are yes, no, and I am not sure. I always include I'm not sure because I want to reinforce that it is okay to not know something.

I normally get mixed responses on this. I will often ask students, once they choose, if anybody wants to explain why they chose what they chose. It's always optional, but I really like to hear students talk about their thought process. That's way more interesting to me than the answer they came up with. What were you thinking when you chose that answer?

He would not be considered our acquaintance because he doesn't know us. We are strangers to him. This is the case with probably almost any famous person. I don't think I personally know anybody who's famous, so for me, any famous person, I would be a stranger to them. That's what I want students to understand about people who are famous: Just because we know them, we know who they are, we know their name, it's not reciprocal. They do not know us. They do not know who we are. In order for someone to be an acquaintance, that awareness of each other, that knowledge of each other, has to be mutual and reciprocal. Otherwise we're strangers.

There's actually a term for this. A parasocial relationship is a one-sided relationship that's typically with somebody famous, like an influencer or a celebrity, where we may follow them on social media, and they may interact and engage with their followers, and it causes their followers to feel like there's a relationship. But they have no idea who we are. Parasocial relationships have actually been proven to be really strong relationships with some people reporting that they feel more connected to people they have a parasocial relationship with (reminder that means we don't actually know that person) than feeling connected to people they actually know. So it's a pretty important, powerful thing to be aware of.

That's the distinction with acquaintances. It's so many people in our lives! They're not strangers to us. We know them. We recognize them. We usually know their name. But the really important part about an acquaintance is that an acquaintance is not a friend. I usually add the word 'yet' to the end of that, because I'm not trying to say they're not our friends, period, end of story. But the reality is that most people who are our acquaintances will always stay our acquaintances. Our doctor will probably never become our friend. Our neighbor's mom will probably never become our friend. Our fourth grade teacher is not our friend. Even in an elementary school classroom, if you figure there's 23 students, most of them are not our friends. They are our acquaintances. So I try to make sure students understand that.

I'm not saying they can't be your friend. That's just not how friends work. We typically have a handful of people who are our friends and everybody else is our acquaintance. For those of us who are adults on social media, most of the people we're connected to on social media are not actually our friends. They are our acquaintances. And I know I previously covered what I teach in the lesson about friends so if you want to go back and check out that one to have a more in-depth understanding of what I consider a friend, that might be helpful if you missed that episode. There's a big distinction between an acquaintance and a friend, and the importance of that will come up throughout this episode. You'll be able to see why that distinction is so important.

We talk about how there are social expectations when it comes to being acquaintances with somebody. There are certain things that we are socially expected to say and do around people that we know, because an acquaintance is somebody that we know. The first thing we talk about is that we are expected to say hello to our acquaintances, to greet them, to acknowledge them. If you're in the grocery store with your student and you see one of their teachers or one of their classmates or their pediatrician, it is socially expected that we greet and acknowledge that person. And that goes for us as well as our student. It is socially expected that our student greets and acknowledges them.

There's a concept called cognitive dissonance. It's basically when what you thought or believed, you have now received evidence to the contrary, and your brain has a hard time separating what you thought or believed from what you now realize is the reality. The example that was given when I learned that term, I have never been able to forget it. And it was that when you're a child, if you see one of your teachers in the grocery store, how unsettling that is, because you've only ever seen your teachers at school, and now you see one of them in the grocery store, and it's usually kind of weird for kids the first time it happens.

Some kids are really excited to see their teacher in the grocery store, and some kids are really thrown by that. It just doesn't quite make sense to them. We don't think about our acquaintances as having lives outside of where we know them from. Kids don't think about their teachers as having lives outside of school. So that's a great example of how sometimes kids get thrown by seeing their acquaintances in other places.

As adults, one thing that's common for us is that we will see somebody that we know we know, but we can't figure out who they are or where we know them from. That's a very common experience that adults find themselves in, because this person is out of context. Again, if we see them at the grocery store, we don't know them from the grocery store, and so sometimes we have a hard time placing where we do know this person. It's kind of like, "That guy who's in that movie with the dog, and they go on that trip and to that place..." If we see an actor or an actress in something else, we know we know them from something, but we just can't remember what it's from. An acquaintance is somebody that there's definitely a sense of familiarity, but we can't always figure out where we know this person from. Sometimes we can't even remember their name because we can't place them. We don't know the context. Usually as adults, we still at least greet and acknowledge them.

So that's the social expectation for people we know, is that we greet and acknowledge them. And I teach the students that if we don't do that, if we pretend that we didn't see somebody that we know, or if we ignore them or don't say hello to them, it makes us seem like we're rude or unfriendly. That's hardly ever the case, but that's what it seems like when we don't greet or acknowledge someone that we know. And really, all you have to do is say hello. That's it. You can wave if you want to. You can smile. Really, we just have to say hello. Bare minimum, and we check that box.

The second thing that is socially expected with acquaintances is that we engage in small talk. I ask the students if they know what small talk is. Mostly the older students do. They at least know the term. And the younger students typically don't, because they haven't been expected to do this thing yet.

Small talk is just chatting. It is superficial conversations where we're just chatting. I tell the students, it's usually one or two questions, and then we say goodbye and we go on our way. It's just chatting. The only purpose of small talk is to be polite. That is the only purpose that it serves. I have a term called 'social nicety', and small talk definitely fits in the box of social niceties. Same as saying "Bless you" when somebody sneezes, saying please and thank you. It's something we do to be polite. Smiling at other people, holding the door open. The biggest example of small talk is, "How are you?" It's the biggest example of small talk. Other examples are saying things like, "It's good to see you." Just generic, general, chatty things like that are all part of small talk.

I do tell the students that engaging in small talk with an acquaintance is optional, but it definitely gives us a great reputation when we do engage in small talk with our acquaintances. We don't want to turn it into a full blown conversation. Usually that's a little bit awkward because we don't know this person well, so we don't want to turn it into a full blown conversation. So like I said, one or two exchanges, and then we say goodbye.

There is a catch when we engage in small talk with acquaintances. I'm going to save the gritty details of this for the students that are in the program with me, but just know that there is a difference between what our small talk chats should sound like with an acquaintance versus a stranger. Also, there should be a difference between what our chats sound like with an acquaintance versus a friend. There should be a very noticeable difference in small talk.

I see this a lot in Facebook groups I'm in for adults that are neurodivergent, that a lot of adults have not learned or understood this concept. It can really damage relationships if we are engaging in small talk with acquaintances either the way that we would with strangers or the way that we would with friends, because an acquaintance is neither of those. They are an in between. It is really important for everybody to understand the parameters around what is expected when this person is an acquaintance versus a stranger or a friend. So that's another thing that we dive into in the groups is we talk about all the nuances when it comes to small talk with an acquaintance. It includes how we respond to, 'How are you?" There should be a big difference between how we respond to that when an acquaintance asks us, versus when a friend asks us. And like I said, that's probably one of the bigger challenges I see, even with adults, is that they've never learned that difference, and it can really get in the way of their social success.

We then talk about little, short things that we can say if we see an acquaintance somewhere. You can say, "How are you?" You can say, "I's good to see you." Those are probably the two most common little things you can just throw out to say to an acquaintance, and they check the box. They check the small talk box.
The next concept in this lesson, I reinforce, reiterate, the fact that acquaintances are not our friends YET.

It doesn't mean they won't become our friends, but if they're an acquaintance, they're not a friend. Those are two separate things. If people are a friend, they're not an acquaintance, they're a friend. And if they're an acquaintance, they're not a friend, they're an acquaintance. And while some people may think it's just semantics, it is so much more involved than just semantics. It should affect our entire interaction with this person, whether they're an acquaintance or a friend.

One of the things that I share that can make this confusing is that, for students who are older, they may have phone numbers of people who are acquaintances. For example, if they're working on a class project together, they may have exchanged phone numbers so they can chat about the project. Adults may have exchanged phone numbers with neighbors, for example, to check on their house if they're going out of town. We may have phone numbers for people that are our acquaintances and that can make the lines blurry. You may have students, if this is the case for them, where they're trying to text and chat and engage in conversations with people because they have their phone number and they've blurred the line between an acquaintance and a friend. That can be pretty challenging, even for adults. This isn't just a kid kind of thing. Even for adults that line can be blurry, and so the expectations around it can be blurry.

While acquaintances aren't our friends yet, they are the people in the best position to become our friends because we already know them. We already have some sort of relationship with them. But again, it also depends on the context we know them in. For a kiddo, their friend's dad is not going to be their friend. That's not a friend dynamic. The same with teachers, their teacher is not their friend. That's not a friend dynamic.

Most of the people that kids know outside of school are adults. So what we're talking about when we talk about their acquaintances who may become friends are people who are in, for example, their group at Starfish Social Club. People who are in their classes at school. People who are in extracurricular activities with them. These are people who are their acquaintances and would be great considerations for friends because they already know each other. It's a great place to start.

In order for people to move from being an acquaintance to a friend, we need to have some things in common. It's not necessary. It's not required. But it is difficult to build a relationship with someone if we can't think of things that we have in common. It will be difficult to figure out things that we can do together. It will be difficult to figure out things we can talk about. It just becomes difficult to spend time together with people that we don't have things in common with, and so that's one of the things that we talk about when we work on moving from being an acquaintance to being a friend is first, we've got to find some things we have in common. That's what's going to help this relationship move to the next stage.

The next stage after an acquaintance is a friend. That's what would come next. I joke with the kids that when we're little, sometimes you'll run around on the playground say, "Will you be my friend? Will you be my friend?" Or even, "I'm not your friend anymore!" Or, "I'm not going to be your friend if you don't swing with me!" And as we get older, that's not how friends work. Nobody is our friend because we ask them to be our friend. Sometimes we don't even realize we've become friends with somebody until it has just organically happened. And nobody is not our friend because we didn't swing on the swings with them, for example. So just helping our students recognize that, as we get older, friendships are things that naturally, organically develop with time and effort and intentionality on our part. It doesn't mean nothing happens and three months later, we're friends. It definitely requires time and intentionality on on our part and their part. But my point being, acquaintances are people who are in the best position to become our friends, but it's vitally important that our students know what an acquaintance is and recognize the people in their lives who are acquaintances, because it comes with social expectations. There are social expectations that come with being an acquaintance with somebody that are vitally important for all of us to recognize and respect. Even as adults, most of our coworkers our entire lives will not be friends of ours. They will be our acquaintances.

Side note: One of my pet peeves is when people use the word 'friend' as a term of endearment or as a way to try to connect with people, because it's confusing for people who struggle with that distinction. There's a podcast host, one of the biggest podcast hosts in the world, and she calls everybody her friend. That's how she talks about her audience, her fan base. And I really dislike that. Number one, it's not genuine. We are not friends. And so for someone to say that is very disingenuous, which really bothers me, that it's not genuine. But number two, it's confusing, especially to people who already struggle with boundaries around things like that, and with awareness around things like that. We aren't friends. That's actually a great example of a parasocial relationship. We know who this person is, but they do not know who we are. So by definition, they are not our friend. And so for her to say that... Every time she says that, I cringe. I think it's very superficial.

Kindergarten teachers are another group of people who use this word often and out of context. Kindergarten teachers will often use the word 'friends' in place of 'everybody' or 'group', using the word friends in place of another term for a group of people, classmates, peers. Everybody in a kindergarten class is not friends. That's just the reality of the situation. And so even in a context like that where people are using it to try to build community and to try to build cohesiveness, it's confusing, especially to kids who are five, that's very confusing. I feel like it really sets kids up to have a misperception about what a friend is. And like I said, a lot of our circle kids think everybody's their friend. Well, when they're in kindergarten and that's what they're being told, why wouldn't they think that? So yeah, a whole classroom full kids is not our friends. That's just not the way that works.

That's our lesson about acquaintances. Who acquaintances are, why it's so important that we understand that, and how our interactions should be different when we're talking to an acquaintance versus a friend.

Checking in with our random number generator. It has 19. Nineteen would be module three, which is our module all about conversations and communication, and it would be lesson three. So module three, lesson three, that is about changing the topic. So that's what we'll talk about on our next episode is how I teach students how to change the topic in the course of a conversation. I'll see you then.