Friend, or just friend-shaped?

This blog post is a transcript of Episode 92 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 students who struggled to understand friendship. They struggled with concepts like: What is a friend? What isn't a friend? And what is expected when we're friends with someone?

Sometimes, these students thought everyone was their friend, including people they had just met. Sometimes they didn't know how to determine who was a good friend and who wasn't, so they ended up spending time with people that we wish they wouldn't. And some students struggled to recognize what the expectations are in a friendship, which gets in the way of them being a good friend. This week's lesson was created for these students.

In this lesson, we talk about how friends are people that we choose to spend time with outside of the context where we know them. That's my definition of a friend. This could mean going to each other's houses, organized activities in the community, even talking or texting on the phone or playing online games together, means that we are choosing to spend time together. In this lesson, students practice and role play asking someone to do something, making plans with someone, since most students don't know how to do that. It's a big barrier when it comes to students evolving into friendship with each other is knowing how to take that next step. We also talk about how a friend is someone who makes us feel good. We discuss different scenarios and whether they are a sign of a good friend or a not-so-good friend.

We start this week with the concept of friendship. This is lesson five in our module about relationships. So while most students who come into the program at Starfish Social Club are here to focus on friendships, this lesson isn't until lesson five in the module. Just like everything else in the program, there are lots of prerequisite concepts and skills that come before the main idea, if you will. This is also module four. So this is lesson 29 out of 32. Even though most students come into the program because they're struggling to make and maintain friendships, there's so much groundwork that needs to be laid before we get to the point of actually talking about friendships. So this lesson is almost at the end of the entire program. By module four, we've talked a whole lot already about reputation, about social awareness, about conversation skills. Now we're getting to relationships.

One of the things that comes in the preceding lessons in this module is that it's much easier to build a friendship with someone that we have things in common with. That was discussed in a previous lesson. That's why people that we are already naturally around are a good place to start when we're looking for people to be friends with. It could be people in our class at school, people that we participate in an activity with, people in our neighborhood. If we are already naturally around them, they are a better candidate for a friend than someone that we are not naturally around.

My definition of a friend is someone we choose to spend time with outside of where we know them. If you are in school with somebody and you eat with them every day in the cafeteria, in my opinion that's not a friend yet, because we're not choosing to spend time with them outside of where we know them. Most of the time, in those situations, when school is on a break for holidays, for summer, our students don't see or talk to the people they were hanging out with in the cafeteria all school year long. So 180-ish days of spending time in the cafeteria at lunchtime together, but then when school isn't happening, there's zero communication. That's why it's important to me that I focus on building relationships outside of where students know people that they're interested in being friends with.

Spending time together is kind of a broad concept. It can look a lot of different ways. It can mean that we are visiting each other's houses. It can mean we're making plans out in the community, going to the movies, going bowling, going to a theme park, lots of different things that we can do together in the community. It can even be talking or texting on the phone, especially if we don't live in the same place. Maybe we used to, and now we don't anymore. And I even add online games in there, mainly if two people are choosing a time to play a game together. Not so much if it's random, but if two people are setting aside a specific time to play a game together, to me, that's a friendship. They are choosing to spend their time together.

That's the introduction to the lesson, and at this point, we have a poll. So I'll ask those of you who are reading, here's the poll question that I asked the students next: Just because we have a lot in common with someone, does that automatically mean they are someone we should try to be friends with?

What's interesting about a lot of the questions I use as polls is that, if I didn't use it as a poll, I think a lot of students wouldn't give it a lot of thought. They would generate an automatic response. The automatic response to this question is typically 'yes', because we've been focusing on things we have in common with people. So when I ask, "Should we try to be friends with someone we have things in common with," often the automatic response is yes. But students have learned that when I ask a poll question, it typically means it's something to think about. There's maybe more to it than just the question. A lot of students will pick up on the fact that I'm using terms like 'just because' and 'automatically'. I often will have one or two students in a group who recognize the real meaning behind this question, which is: Just because we have something in common with someone doesn't even mean we get along. Even as a personal example, there's someone in my life that I have tons in common with, and I don't get along with that person. So having things in common is an amazing place to start looking for people to be friends with, but it is not the end all, be all of becoming friends.

One of the most important things to consider is how we feel when we're around this person. So your kiddo, your student, may be in a class (maybe if they're in secondary, five classes with this one person), but maybe they don't get along. The same thing happens at Starfish. Sometimes there are students who have a lot in common, but their personalities just don't match. So while it is really important to think about what we have in common with people when we're looking at building a friendship, it's more important to think about our personalities. Do you guys actually get along? Would you like to spend two hours at the movies with this person, or would that make you a little bit nuts?

I ask my students to think about if there's someone that they wanted to be friends with, but maybe they realized after getting to know them a little bit better ,that they weren't a great match. It could be that this other person makes choices that they don't really want to be around. It could be that this other person says and does things that are unfriendly or unkind. There are lots of things that we may pick up on that help us realize this kid may be cool, they may have a lot in common with me, but I don't actually want to spend time with them.

This isn't even just a kid thing, this is a person in the world thing. Some people get in situations where they feel so lonely and they are lacking relationships so deeply that they are willing to be in relationships with people even though they know it is not in their best interest to do. I've been in that situation in my life. I think most people can relate to that. This is really common with Triangle students. Triangle students tend to crave that social connection, and often they are willing to get it from anywhere they can, even if it comes from people who are inconsistent, even if it comes from people who are constantly not showing good friendship skills. In the book Social Skills is Canceled, I illustrate this when I talk about the cafeteria with Triangle. There's a group of students that he sometimes sits with, and sometimes they allow him to sit with them, and sometimes they don't. And in this scenario in the book, they don't and they're disrespectful to him. But it's hard for him to move on from that, because he just wants connection so badly.

It's usually not as much of a struggle for circle students and square students. Circle students don't usually have to be picky because they're so well-liked. They don't typically have to pick and choose who to be friends with. However, when we get to the part in the lesson about good friends versus not so good friends, circle students don't always understand that concept.

Square students tend to be pretty hypervigilant about other people, and so they tend to do a really good job of noticing if there are things going on with someone that would cause them to not be a good friend. Square students don't typically get caught up in being friends with people who aren't great friends, or wanting to be friends with people who aren't great friends.

I remember several years ago, I was talking about this concept with two adult students who were the same age but had very different personalities. One's a triangle and one's a square. The triangle student, true to triangle form, was talking about all the times that he had wanted to be friends with someone, and then later it just didn't work out. Times where his feelings had been hurt, times where maybe there had been some negative peer pressure. The square student just couldn't understand that concept. He could not wrap his head around someone wanting to have friends so badly that they're willing to be friends with people who aren't good friends. That was just not something that he could understand. So it's important to see, in every lesson, the three types of students will have different levels of awareness, different levels of understanding and comprehension, because they're coming at it from a different perspective. So what we talk about is applicable to everybody, but they're all coming at it with a different perspective, a different level of awareness, a different understanding.

An important point of friendship is that we get to choose who we are friends with. Friendship is a choice. That also means that people get to choose whether they want to be friends with us. It's a choice that goes both ways. This is really important for students to understand the 'both wayness' of it, the reciprocity of it. We get to choose who we want to be friends with. We don't have to be friends with anybody. But other people also get to choose if they want to be friends with us.

That brings me to the next poll, which is a really crucial point in this lesson, but also in the overall program. It's a really crucial point, and it plays into the book as well in part two, where all three students are really working toward building relationships with other people.

This is a four-part poll. The first question in the poll is: Is it important to you to have a reputation for being smart? So again, when my students are in person, I designate a certain part of the room for them to go to. This is just a yes/no. I also always add an 'I'm not sure', because I always want students to know it's okay to not know the answer and it's okay to not be sure about something. So: yes, no, I'm not sure. Is it important to you to have a reputation for being smart?

Often for this question, pretty predictably, circle students don't really care. It's not that important to them. Triangle students and square students, it is typically important to them. I can usually see the divide down the three social types. Second poll question: Is it important to you to have a reputation for being friendly?

Almost everybody says yes to this question. Very rarely do I have anybody that says no or I'm not sure. The third poll question: Is it important to you that your friends have a reputation for being smart?

This is where it starts to get interesting. The majority of students will choose no. Some students will choose 'it depends'. And some students will choose yes. But the majority of people always say no. Is it important to you that your friends have a reputation for being smart? And then the fourth question: Is it important to you that your friends have a reputation for being friendly?

This question is always 100% yes. So we talk about what this means. Why did I ask these questions? What we talk about is that a lot of my students want to have a reputation for being smart. Sometimes that's the most important reputation to them, is a reputation for being smart. This poll helps them recognize that their peers (other kids, other teenagers, other young adults) don't care that much if they're smart. It's not that important to them. But what's important to everybody is that their friends have a reputation for being friendly. This is usually a really eye-opening conversation for a lot of students, especially the triangle students and the square students. It's not so important to their peers that they're smart, it's most important that they are friendly.

Students share examples of someone who has a reputation for being mean or rude or bossy. Everybody can think of someone. We talk about whether those people have friends. If the answer is yes, their friends are typically also mean and rude and bossy, and do you want to be friends with that person? So it's taking what we're talking about and applying it to real world situations and people and scenarios.

One of the really important parts of this lesson is helping students understand that the way we feel when we are around other people affects our mental health, and so if we're choosing to spend time with people who don't make us feel good about ourselves, we are just going to feel crummy. I don't talk about this in the lesson, but just an add-on to this conversation: there's a concept called 'energy vampire'. An Energy Vampire is someone who sucks your energy, and when you're done spending time with them, you feel exhausted. And the next time they ask to hang out or to come over or to go somewhere, you question whether you even want to do that. The other side of that is an energy giver, somebody that you really enjoy being around. You have good conversations. Maybe you just enjoy being around this other person. When you guys leave, you feel happy that you had that experience with them. The next time you talk about making plans together, you're excited to do so. And obviously there's a middle ground. It's not just one or the other. But if we think about this, it helps us think about our students and who they choose to spend time around. We all want to spend time around people who are energy givers, and that means that we also need to focus on being an energy giver if we want people to want to spend time around us as well.

The flip side is that if we want to be around people who are energy givers, people want the same from us. They want to feel good when they spend time with us as well. And so that's a responsibility that we have when we're working on building friendships, is being someone that other people also want to be around.

We then do a related activity. I typically use the terminology of red flags and green flags, and I explain to the students what that means. Some of them know, some of them don't. We also do thumbs up, thumbs down. I haven't really settled on the terminology that I think is my favorite for this, but basically I share a lot of different scenarios, and students decide whether it's a thumbs up or a thumbs down in terms of a friendship scenario. After I share all of my examples, they get to come up with their examples. I typically will divide them into two groups, and each group gets to come up with their own set of both thumbs up and thumbs down friendship behaviors, and then they swap their list with the other group to see if everybody agrees on what's a thumbs up and what's a thumbs down. The point of the activity is really to make things that might be less obvious, more obvious. Some of the things in the scenarios we talk about, some students don't always recognize or don't always think about, and so by us verbalizing them and talking about them out loud, now the students can build some awareness around it. And this is a lesson where students will share all kinds of personal examples. Things that have happened to them, things people have said to them, done to them. It's a very bonding lesson, because there's this sense of, we've all had difficult things happen to us when it comes to friendships. It builds some empathy. It builds some community.

We talk about the words reciprocal and mutual. The majority of my students don't know what those words mean. We talk about what they mean, and we talk about why they're important in a friendship. And, just like everything else in this lesson, if it's important for us to have that quality in a friend, that's probably something that they also feel like is important for us to have as well. So reciprocal and mutual.

We talk about how we can be friends with as many people as we choose to. Circle students tend to think everybody is their friend, which is something that we've been talking about in the lessons leading up to this friendship lesson, so by this point, there's an awareness and an understanding that that is not the case. Actually most people aren't our friends. Not in a negative way, just in a realistic way. Most people in our lives are not our friends. They are other things, which we have covered in the preceding lessons. So by the time we get to this lesson on friendship, we're pretty clear about what a friend is and who a friend is.

We can be friends with as many people as we choose to. We can have one or two friends. We can have five or six friends. Typically more than that, and they're not friends. They fall into the other categories that we talk about. But the important part about this concept is, just like everything else in this lesson, the same is true about our friends. They can also be friends with five or six other people. The reason that this is important and that I bring it up in this lesson is because triangle kids sometimes will be so caught up in having a friend, that they can be possessive over their friends. Especially if this is their only friend, they can be possessive. Unfortunately this causes that friend to distance themselves, and over time, they will stop being friends. So I'm trying to avoid that as much as possible.

Also, square kids sometimes struggle with this concept because they typically only have one or two friends, and it can be difficult for them when their friends are also friends with five or six other kids. If they're in the cafeteria and their friend is talking to other people, it can make square kids feel really awkward. So reinforcing the fact that we can be friends with as many people as we choose to, but the same applies to our friends. They can be friends with as many people as they choose to, and we don't get to hold on to them. We don't get to keep them all to ourselves, because otherwise they will probably choose to stop being friends with us. I have a poll question about that: What do you think happens if we do that when we have a friend? We talk about how we need to let people have space. We need to let people spend their time the way that they choose to.

The last part of this lesson is the realistic concept that sometimes we stop being friends with someone. A lot of times it's not because anything negative happened. It could be that someone moves. It could be that we're in a new school year and we're not in the same class anymore. It could be that we don't have the same lunch period anymore, and so we don't see them at lunch. It could be that our interests change, and so we are no longer in that club or doing that thing. There's lots of reasons that friendships end that don't have anything to do with something negative happening. This is across the entire lifespan.

Even for me personally, if you know my history, I moved out of Texas in 2023, and moved back at the beginning of 2025. Most of my friends are from a hobby that I had for 10 years. I was really into this hobby for 10 years, and so most of my friends are from that world. When I moved away, not related to me moving, but I just stopped participating in that hobby. It just wasn't really something I wanted to keep doing anymore, especially after 10 years. I just moved on and started doing different things. When I moved back to San Antonio, I knew coming back that I might need to make some new friends. Not because anything negative had happened, but because I no longer do this thing that connected me to most of my friends. It's interesting because I'm still very strongly connected to most of them. I still see them from time to time. When I do see them, we still have a really strong connection. But I'm no longer going to the events and the activities and participating in the things that we all used to do together, so I can see and I can feel the separation and the distance. Again, nothing negative happened at all. I'm just not doing the things that we used to do, and because we don't have that common interest, it just separates our friendship a bit.

It's really important for students to understand that this is the natural cycle of friendships. Most people will not be friends at 27 with people they were friends with when they were 13. When we move from elementary to middle school to high school to leaving school, that's just the natural progression. Even in the adult world. The final poll is: What happens when we're no longer friends with someone? If they're not our friend, what are they now?

And the answer is: They go back to being what we talk about in the lesson prior to this. I'm curious if you know what the answer to that is. They're not strangers. Once we know somebody, we always know them. But once they're not our friend anymore, what do they go back to being? That's what we covered in the lesson prior to this, which I haven't shared on this show yet, so I'm just curious if you know the answer to that already.

That is the end of our lesson on friendships. So let me look at our random number generator and see what we're going to talk about next time. Eight. Eight would be the last lesson in module one, which is all about reputation. This lesson is about receiving social feedback. That's what our next episode will be about: How I teach my students to receive social feedback.