Parents should give themselves
permission to have fun

By Jeffrey D. Murrah

When the topic of friends arises, parents often concern themselves with who their children associate with. This focus on friends often involves a great deal of time and emotion. As parents who focus often about who associates with their children, they often neglect spending time and attention on their own friends.

Friendships bring support, encouragement and assistance in ways never imagined. Much as children need time playing with their friends, parents need the same. Some guidelines to help parents with this are:

• Give yourself permission to have fun.
• Friendships require time. Spend time with your friends. One way children learn how to treat friends is by watching their parents.
• Be open to new experiences. Having friends involves sharing new experiences. These new experiences may be new foods, hobbies, pastimes or cultural events. Being closed to experiences limits the universes open to you.
• Learn to laugh. Being in a joyful mood is contagious. Joy also attracts other to you. Humor helps any relationship when it is healthy humor. If someone is made the butt of jokes and made fun of, the humor is unhealthy.
• Surround yourself with encouraging friends. At times, friendships are maintained out of guilt or duty. Such friendships often drain us of emotional energy. Even when good friends complain excessively, it can drain the life out of a friendship. By surrounding oneself with encouraging friends, one improves their outlook. Raising children can be challenging enough, without having a 'friend' drain it out of you. Having a positive, encouraging outlook can improve parenting.
• Be willing to stretch. Very few people have the blessing of sailing smoothly through life. As you or your friends experience turbulence, be willing to stretch out of your comfort zone. Stretching may involve helping them with a project at an inconvenient time or hour. Stretching also helps us grow emotionally.
• Express gratitude to your friends. Gratitude attracts others to us. It is important that the gratitude be genuine and not attempts at manipulating people through buying them off with flattery and home baked cookies. People resent being manipulated. Friends will tolerate it for a while, but will soon tire of such antics. Genuine gratitude can be expressed through calls, notes or kind words.
• Respect your friends boundaries. Relationships grow where there is mutual respect. When your friend expresses a boundary, it is important to respect that request. Through giving respect to their boundary (whether they are physical, emotional, relational or spiritual), trust is allowed to develop.

These guidelines will help you in developing and improving friendships with other adults. Just as your children's friends are important and influential, so are yours. Adult friendships can make the difference between sinking or swimming when storms arise.

Jeffrey D. Murrah is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with offices in Pasadena and La Porte. He can be reached at 713-944-4335 or through his website at www.restorethefamily.com. 

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