Friendship has changed a lot since I was in school. the pool of potential friends was limited to your circle. The circle was limited to your block, your school, and your church. We didn’t have many opportunities to make friends outside of these areas.

Now we can make “friends” through “friends” on social media. Everyone seems to be involved in extra activities. A simple like can be assumed as so much more than a like.

So it’s easy to say that the more the girls grow, the more opportunities they have to engage in making and maintaining friendships.

Making friends is hard enough. Finding common interests whether a classmate, a teammate, or whatever it was, something brought you two together to be friends. The girls have many opportunities to welcome new classmates and the process isn’t always smooth. Sometimes it works and other times bitterness and hatred are formed.

I moved schools every two years during elementary school and part of middle school. This gave me first hand skills on how to fit in. I did it by playing a sport. Once you are on a team you automatically have something to talk about.

However maintaining these friendships can be even more difficult.

Learning to give good advise in this new era is different than what we lived through. So different and sometimes hard for us to comprehend completely. Sure, it’s easy to say they will get over it just like I did but their life seems to move by a lot faster than ours ever did.

Some things I have learned are:

• Do not be fast to pass judgement on a friend.
•  Do not tell them to stop talking to someone. This will feel better but may hurt the future well being.
• Do not tell them exactly what to do. Remember our job is to give advise, not dictate how the type of friend they will be.
• Do not let them spend too much time with any of their friends until you get to know that friend better.
• Remind them to always forgive. Hopefully they can remember some of what happened to help them next time.
• Remind them to be just as good a friend as they want everyone to be to them.
• Remember to keep your mouth shut as much as possible.

Many times, we voice our opinions and they are often too lousy and we do it too often. We alienate ourselves from their lives by doing this. They form friendships and develop them. They trust their friends. If we have only spoken bad of that friend we could now be considered the enemy.

Our job is to help them to make better friends and be better friends. No matter what.

So to help them we will continually bite our tongue and shut up.

But please remember I am clueless.