We all have a certain circle of friends - such relationships are an integral part of our social life. However, conflict situations may well arise between us, or communication is hampered by a banal lack of time. Finding a good friend is not so easy, but maintaining interaction and strengthening this connection is even more difficult. But, believe me, there is nothing impossible in this either. Strong friendships are built on little things. For example, such as these ten simple tips that will help you strengthen your friendships.
#2 Become pen pals
You may not understand all the benefits of texting at first, but just give it a try. Your friend is very far away, and you physically cannot spend time together as you used to.
Therefore, you should make the most of all the ways to stay connected.
It has been observed that when writing letters by hand, you are willing to share much deeper things than what you write about in short text messages.
Moreover, this is a wonderful way to preserve memories of your friendship in the form of paper letters.
Pros and cons of friendships
Any type of relationship has its advantages and disadvantages, and friendship is no exception to this rule. Interaction between people is generally a very unstable phenomenon that cannot be predicted with certainty.
However, if you try to understand the “light and dark” side of friendly relations, the following picture will emerge.
Advantages
The advantages of friendship, without a doubt, include:
- Quenching the thirst for communication. You can’t always keep everything to yourself, because various events in life actually push a person to discuss them. And who better than a friend can listen patiently and give practical advice?
- Feeling needed. Any representative of society is afraid of possible loneliness. No matter how hard you try to be strong and self-sufficient, if there is no like-minded person nearby, self-doubt will quickly begin to accumulate. True friendship makes you feel needed.
- Common interests in friendship are a huge plus. There will always be someone with whom to visit the exhibition of your favorite artist or start going to the gym. You can go shopping or discuss a new film.
- Support at any time of the day. Life is full of various challenges and sometimes the help of a true friend can be invaluable. If something bad happens, you can always call him and ask for support in a difficult moment.
Flaws
Friendship is wonderful, but even such a desired relationship has its downsides:
- Obligations. If you consider your friendship to be real, then be ready to help and support your close friend at any time, even if you don’t really want it.
- Compliance with the rules. No matter how close your relationship is, there are a number of certain rules that you have unspokenly set and now you will have to adhere to them, regardless of your desire.
How to teach children to be friends with their peers
Category: Articles
Tags: education, Children, psychology, parents
Advice from psychologists
Children need to be taught to make friends - yes, yes, such seemingly natural relationships do not appear out of nowhere. The ability for friendship is not absorbed with mother’s milk; children need to be explained the rules of interaction in a team and their significance. To teach a child to be friends with other children, as practice shows, you need to make a lot of effort. Children's friendship is a real success, because a child who has a friend is more protected, his level of psychological comfort is much higher than that of a loner.
What is friendship?
This is interaction with the people around you. If previously a child had enough communication with his mother and other family members, then from the age of three he gradually begins to be interested in his peers. How to interact with them? In many ways, the success or failure of a relationship depends on what communication skills the child has mastered when interacting with his parents. Relationships with peers are a turbulent life on the border of one’s own self. How to teach a child friendship, to make sure that he is not an outcast in the children's group? The problem of children's friendship in psychology: movement inward and outward
Friendship is an important aspect in a child’s life, because it is on the border of one’s own “I” that the most interesting things happen: the child invites something or someone and lets them in, and tries to protect himself from something or someone. And this is important for both psychological and physical health. If we talk about the physical level, our body needs the intake of air, food, water and the removal of carbon dioxide, sweat, urine, etc. At the psychological level, such movement in and out is carried out by our needs.
The needs associated with movement outward are the so-called aggressive needs. These include both the need to protect one’s own territory and actions related to expanding one’s own boundaries and capabilities (enrolling in a university, declaring one’s love, etc.). The fulfillment of these needs is important and useful, but only in an acceptable form.
For example, if your husband makes you angry, you don't hit him in the face with a shovel like a little girl in the sandbox, but you express your feelings with your voice, gestures, and I-messages.
Another example: if you are in love, then you do not attack a person with kisses, but present your feelings differently, for example, like Tatyana Onegin. A person’s inability to express his needs associated with movement beyond his own inner world leads to the accumulation of internal energy, which can manifest itself in uncontrollable outbursts of anger and rage. It’s good if anger and rage, as they say, serve simply to “let off steam.” It’s worse if the accumulated internal energy finds a way out not in anger and rage, but in chronic illnesses or in a feeling of dissatisfaction with oneself and one’s life.
The needs associated with movement inward are designed to provide our body and our personality with something new, pleasant, and useful. If we talk about love in the context of this type of need, then in order to love and be loved, you need to be able not only to defend yourself, attack, conquer and master, but also to accept, let in, listen. That is, to be able to accept gifts, including the gift of love.
In a healthy psychological process, the needs associated with movement inward and the needs associated with movement outward continuously replace one another.
As for the psychology of children's friendship, in this case the child must be able to make acquaintances, accept love, recognition and stand up for himself in a team. So friendship between children is a phenomenon of constant compromises.
Each person himself regulates the mode of opening and closing his borders, gradually learning to let in what is useful and reject what is harmful to his inner world. The development of this mechanism is inextricably linked with the awareness of one’s feelings, needs and ways of constructively presenting them to the world.
It would be a mistake to think that the problem of children's friendship will resolve itself as soon as the baby begins to go out into the yard, at the age of three or four years. Of course, the child begins to communicate with peers with already developed skills of fusion, pressure or cooperation. Nurturing Friendship
Among the most common problems in children's groups are fights, that is, the inability to talk constructively about one's anger; isolation - fear of presenting yourself, your feelings and desires; the desire to dominate - the realization of the need for love through intimidation; as well as the manifestation of hysterical methods of interaction, clinginess, long-term grievances, the desire to impose one’s desires on others.
The psychology of children's friendship is not selfish; everything has its source. The stormy rivers of children's problems carry within them the waters of parental attitudes, feelings, fears, restrictions and difficulties. But before moving on to the advice of psychologists that can help children in their difficulties, you need to plunge into parental difficulties.
To make a child’s life on the playground and in the company of peers happy, to help the child make friends, as practice shows, two things are enough: - adhere to the rules of showing emotions and presenting needs; - and be sure to be just as attentive to your desires and feelings.
The ability of parents to correctly present and fulfill their needs helps the child develop the skill of cooperation with both adults and peers. Paying attention not only to the child’s needs, but also to your own, as well as finding constructive ways to meet them, will help you discover and delineate the boundary between you and your son or daughter, especially as the baby grows, becomes an adult and learns to listen to the world around him. In the process of nurturing friendship, remember that for children you are the very first, most natural and accessible trainer in terms of communication and interaction with the world. Only you can teach your child to defend himself when needed and to ask for help and attention when needed.
Of course, parents have to sacrifice a lot of their needs with the birth of a child. Sometimes, for example, even the time when mom or dad takes a shower is determined by the baby. Parenthood, in addition to tenderness, joy, pride, tenderness and love, imposes on us the need for enormous daily work. That is why parents become parents not at five or twelve years old, but at that age when a person is able to temporarily sacrifice his needs for the sake of another small creature. The key word here is “for a while.” For both children and parents, the laws of fulfilling needs work the same way. The fulfillment of needs can be postponed for a while, the frequency and form of their satisfaction can be changed, but it is impossible to completely get rid of the desire to improve, learn new things, or simply relax! True children's friendship in a team
For long-term friendly relationships in a team, it is important to be able to show not only friendliness and goodwill, but also to be able to defend one’s interests without destroying friendly relations.
Being friendly and kind is a wonderful attitude or attitude to start a relationship, but unfortunately, this is not enough for a long friendship. It is impossible to enjoy each other endlessly. It is impossible to have the same desires, the same aspirations, the same opinions about all events, phenomena and objects and, thanks to this, remain in an idyllic state of fusion. A difference in views will certainly give rise to a dispute, a difference in needs will lead to the need to identify and defend them. On the one hand, this is a simple truth, on the other hand, it is an insurmountable barrier for many relationships, and not only children’s ones.
The most difficult stage in the development of any unions (love, friendship, child-parent) is the realization that your partner, although similar to you in many ways, is a different being from you, and much in his vision does not coincide with your point of view. Accepting this difference makes relationships deeper and more interesting - one where there is room not only for friendly head nodding, but also for contradictions and arguments. At this stage, two different worlds come into contact, understanding and accepting their differences. As practice shows, it is impossible to teach a child to be friends without understanding and recognizing the differences between people, without respect for other people’s needs. Without this, only an unhealthy merger can become the basis of the relationship. And this, in turn, inevitably leads to resentment - we were deceived! - or feeling guilty because we did not live up to the expectations of another.
How to teach a child to be friends with peers, to always be a welcome member of the children's team? Help in getting through this difficult stage in a relationship will be the ability to respect the feelings and desires of the other, as well as the skills to establish and defend your priorities. Moreover, it will not work to defend, having only compliments and friendly smiles in your arsenal. So you need to give your child additional behavior patterns that will help maintain both friendship and his own individuality. Strong friendship at school
If you noticed, children do not like those who boss them around all the time, but they also do not respect those who cannot stand up for themselves. A new fairy tale will help your child learn to communicate his needs to others and listen to other people's desires. As you probably already understood, the main training ground will again be your relationship with him.
Strong friendship between children at school is impossible without the ability to express one’s desire and respect the desires of another - this is the main skill of productive communication. This is exactly what you can successfully practice in your relationship with your child. Pay attention: how often do you neglect your child’s wishes or your own? What motivates you to act this way?
If we take natural tendencies in the formation of communication skills with peers, then interest in other children arises in children aged four to five years. When playing, kids of this age mainly reproduce the actions and actions of people well known to them: moms and dads. From the age of five, children's play becomes more complex.
On the one hand, children want to remain “like everyone else,” to have similar toys and notebooks. On the other hand, children who can offer something extraordinary are popular. It is important to help your child find a balance between the desire to be like others and the desire to be special. Such duality of aspirations is inherent in man in general and clearly manifests itself during each of the age-related crises, which can also be observed in our first-graders who are overcoming the crisis of six or seven years.
To teach your child to be friends with classmates as closely as possible, help your child come up with interesting, original ideas. Treat your child's desire to be like others with respect and understanding. This can be a real help in making friends and helping to comfortably join the school community. The child develops his main arsenal of communication skills with peers when communicating with his parents. By not skimping on messages of love towards the child, parents help the first-grader to be friendly, and by demonstrating by example the ability to stand up for oneself and listen to the desires of others, they will give the right direction on the path to building long and respectful relationships. It is important to help your child find a balance between the desire to be like others and the desire to be special.
Source: vkapuste.ru
Why are friends important?
As people age, they lose friends or have trouble making new ones. This makes them devalue friendship: they say it is given too much importance. But in fact, friendly communication is extremely important for a person, not only psychologically, but also physiologically. Research says friendship helps people maintain physical and mental health, helps maintain normal blood pressure, reduces the risk of dementia and strengthens the immune system. Scientists have also found that emotional closeness with peers helps to gain self-confidence and reduces the risk of developing depression. Loneliness, on the contrary, leads to sad consequences - diseases of the cardiovascular system, early development of Alzheimer's disease, insomnia.
Give advice only as a last resort and with reservations 5
If you are still determined to give advice, then you should first make sure that the person is really interested in it. It is also worth stipulating in advance that you are not responsible for the consequences, but are only providing your vision of the situation. And the person has the right to make his own decision - follow this advice, or develop his own strategy. “Tell your boyfriend or girlfriend that you are not in their position after all. And you can’t fully understand his feelings,” recommends psychologist Marie Land.
“And finally, don’t try to turn yourself into a priest or a free therapist. Approach the discussion with curiosity, not as an expert. After all, it’s unlikely that you yourself would want your friend to strive to manage your personal life, would you? Therefore, the best thing you can do for a friend is to listen more and advise less.”
How to be a friend to your husband, man, boyfriend?
You can be a friend to a man, your husband, your beloved, your boyfriend in the same way - based on the basic principles outlined above. They are suitable to be a good friend to anyone. Plus, there are small nuances. We will look at them now.
What is a good, ideal friend for a man? This is a friend who is ready to share your hobbies, your activities and entertainment with you. This is, first of all, since a man is a more active creature, in contrast to a woman, who is a more feeling creature.
Whatever your husband, boyfriend, lover does - cars, racing, books, science, fishing, nature... He will consider you his best friend if you, like him, are passionate about his interests.
“Don’t get hung up on your relationship with him, it’s better to party to the fullest.”
Every conflict must be resolved at the moment it arises. And if you are worried about this and try to meet with your significant other to discuss it, then this is completely normal.
Of course, many friends will try to drag you somewhere to take your mind off all these thoughts. However, it is better not to do this. Even if you get drunk, you will not get rid of the problem.
Once I sober up, it will be very difficult again. If an unpleasant situation arises and you feel you need to apologize, then do so. Trust only your heart.
How to be a friend to a girl, wife, woman?
To become the best friend of a girl or wife, you need to remember that girls differ from men psychologically very much. What should friends do? Consider the individuality of others.
John Gray (world-famous author of “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”) provides interesting research data. According to them, the set of genes of a male gorilla, also a male chimpanzee Bonobo and a male human (male) differs by only 1%-1.2%. And the difference between the set of genes between a male and a female human (male and female) is 5%!
That is, a man differs from a woman five times more than from a male gorilla.
However, despite such differences, there is a calming moment, the understanding of which will greatly help a man become a true friend for a girl. This is the understanding that if a man is an active being, then a woman is a feeling one.
Based on this thesis, if for a man the best friend is the one with whom they DO something together, then for a girl the best friend is the one with whom they FEEL something together. Just like that.
It seems clear and simple, but how to apply this in practice? Useful tips for a male friend
In practice, this comes down to such actions on the part of a man as:
1.Understanding and acceptance of a woman’s feelings. The same John Gray advises men to LEARN the magic phrase and say it to a woman: “I UNDERSTAND. Continue".
2. Let her speak out, pour out her complaints, gossip (if they seem like that to you), “stupid reasoning.” At the same time, without interrupting or giving advice until she directly asks!!! Why does this work? The fact is that we all need to relieve stress and organize thoughts in our heads. But, if a man most often needs privacy for this, think it over. So, a woman needs to SPEAK OUT. Just talk it out. And then, peace, tranquility and a solution to the problem reign in her head. And you become the best, ideal, irreplaceable friend for her!
3. Share with her feelings, emotions, experiences on any occasion - nature, film, event. To share means to make it clear that you have heard, accepted and are not going to criticize her experiences. No matter how “stupid” they may seem to you.
Violence in relationships: when you can’t remain silent 2
But, like any rule, there are exceptions. This is the case if your friend is suffering from physical or emotional abuse. In this case, you should immediately voice your concerns. “Always be available to help your friend or acquaintance if necessary,” advises Gerst.
How can you find out that a loved one is in trouble? First of all, your friend’s unavailability should be alarming. For example, she used to be constantly in touch, loved to have fun at parties or go shopping. Now you can’t get her out of the house - as if her circle of contacts was limited to one single person.
“This situation in itself is unhealthy. However, it is also a common practice, often used by rapists. This is how they try to gain more control over their victims,” says Gerst. “If you have any suspicions, it’s best to do it directly. Don't be afraid to embarrass your friend or make yourself look like a fool in her eyes. It’s better to play it safe and find out all the necessary information, because violence is much more common than we used to think.”
How to become a good friend to yourself
How to be your own ideal friend? Sometimes troubles happen in life. And then you really want to lean on someone close. Who will support, give advice, sympathize, wipe away a tear if necessary.
And it turns out that becoming a friend to yourself means learning to support yourself in difficult circumstances. Don’t wait, like a little child, for someone to come and decide for you. And rely on yourself.
This may seem unusual at first. But after doing this trick a couple of times, we begin to understand what’s what and how it works.
Strong friendship
Respect what makes you different from each other
There is no doubt that the best relationships are built on mutual interest. However, being a good friend means respecting the line where your mutual interests end. To maintain friendly relations, you need to learn to recognize this boundary in time.
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In fact, the strongest relationships are between those people who are slightly different from each other in terms of certain interests. It is worth respecting these differences (even radical ones), as they help friends develop and complement each other.
Don't take friendship for granted
It doesn't matter how long you've been friends. It also doesn't matter how strong you think your friendship is. You should never take such relationships for granted, something you got for absolutely nothing.
History knows a huge number of cases when the strongest friendships fell apart for the most insignificant reasons.
. Do not allow yourself to underestimate friendship, because it is a real value and your wealth that should be protected.
Don't judge
When people start judging each other, that's when true friendship ends. Of course, as was said earlier, true friends are free (indeed, even must) to tell the truth to each other, it cannot be otherwise.
However, do not confuse sincerity with the desire to condemn your friend
for some action or spoken word. Also avoid comparisons - and especially God forbid you express yourself in such a way that someone is a better friend! Be wiser.
At what age do we lose friends?
It is believed that a person's social connections peak between the ages of 20 and 30. Then they begin to decrease, and here the emergence of a family plays a big role: the partner and children seem to take on the functions of friendship. It also affects the fact that free time is becoming significantly less. As a result, by the age of 65, 25% of people are left without friends at all, which affects their standard of living. At the same time, it is in old age, when work and family no longer take so much energy, that a person experiences a special need for communication. But it just doesn’t exist - or it exists, but not enough. Thus, the social activity of an elderly person decreases, and this has a bad effect on physical and psychological health.
