Friendship is hard: finding new friends, maintaining  relationships, and navigating conflict are all difficult tasks. There’s no way around this fact.

​Especially as a 20-something, making friends seems harder and harder as responsibilities grow and free time shrinks. But another thing is undeniably true: friendship is worth the struggle. We are made for connection. 

I think the quality of our friendships can often be traced to the quality of the time we spend together. As we get older, friendship can sometimes be crammed into the space of lunch breaks or evening dinner plans. While there’s nothing wrong with these things, they don’t really build the kind of memories that lead to rich connections.

As kids, we inherently knew this. We rode bikes with our friends, became mini entrepreneurs with thriving lemonade stands, and went on long adventures in our neighborhoods. As adults, our relationships center more around good conversation than the activities we do together. We need people we can discuss ideas with and people that can join us on active adventures. The richest friendships contain both ingredients.

Here are some ideas to bring creativity to your friendships:

TOUR YOUR OWN CITY
Instead of going to your favorite lunch spot, look up popular activities in your town. No matter where you live, chances are there is a tourist attraction within a day’s drive that you (or your friend) may have never visited.

VOLUNTEER TOGETHER
When friends share fundamental values, they share a common bond that’s deeper than gossip or mutual friends. Google nonprofits in your town and choose one whose mission resonates with you.

FIND AN EVENT OR CLASS TO DO TOGETHER
Maybe you want to learn how to cook, have been dying to try goat yoga, or have been thinking of renting a plot in your local community garden. Learning a new skill or laughing your way through a yoga class might be the ticket to forging a lasting relationship.

PLAN A TRIP SOMEWHERE NEW 
A friend of mine says that the best way to fast-track a friendship is to travel together. Travel not only forms beautiful memories, but it brings together the good and the bad: being stuck in a car together, learning who is a morning person and who is not, and trying not to get lost on the way to your Airbnb. Trips don’t have to be extravagant to be wonderful.

Even in friendship, we can get stuck in a rut and start to feel the relationship become mundane. Rich connections are formed when we build them on adventure, on shared values, and on vulnerability. Have the courage to try something new with a friend. Even if you find that it’s not your cup of tea, at the end of the day, you’ll have a great story to tell.

First love is an unparalleled phenomenon. Nothing can match it in terms of excitement, energy, and positive feelings. Romantic relationships expand adolescents’ social lives as they now spend more time with their boyfriend’s or girlfriends’s social group as well as their own.  They gain an intimate best friend, which needs their increasing friendship and intimacy demands. Teenagers now have someone they are open with and who is reciprocally open with them. They are deeply concerned with one another‘s well-being, which simultaneously feels good and somewhat cracks through their necessarily egocentric world. Trust and compassion are built up through their relationship.

As a parent, you hope that your child feels cared for, listened to, and respected as they navigate their romantic and sexual experiences.  It can be very difficult for parents to talk with their teenagers about this new uncharted territory.  In an ideal world, the road to sex is paved with lots of information and conversation about its mechanical and emotional aspects. Parents play important roles in many of the conversations. If you are too shy or embarrassed to talk about it yourself, you still need to make sure these conversations are taking place.

With this in mind, here are two podcasts that might help to open up the dialogue and increase your comfort level.

Mindshift: The Puberty Lady

Mindshift: Questions Boys Ask About Puberty

The most important thing is to start having these conversations with your children and to keep the dialogue open.
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When one child in a family has difficulties that consume a lot of the family's attention, restrict family activities, or generate great concern, other children in the family may not get the attention that they deserve.  Siblings in families with special needs may feel a myriad of emotions such as sadness, disappointment, anger, or stress. Some siblings take care of themselves so that they are less of a burden to their family.

Here are some articles on ways to help support a sibling in a special needs family.  

1.  5 Ways to Support Siblings in Special Needs Families

2.  12 Ways to Support Siblings of Children with Disabilities

3.  10 Great Books if You Have Sibling with Special Needs

4. Supporting the Siblings of Special Needs Kids

So many of us ponder how we can be closer with those very important people in our lives; our VIP's. This might be a sibling, parent, boss, friend, spouse, or our own children. 

Here are some great TED talks on different ways to build meaningful connections with your VIP's.  The TED talks are about 15-20 minutes each so feel free to enjoy them all at once or sneak them in over a day or two.  Either way, they will help you to bridge some of those gaps in your VIP relationships and feel more connected.

We have all see and heard of the helicopter parent.  The parent who hovers and makes most all decisions for their child.  This article sheds light on why helicopter parenting is detrimental to your child and what you can actually do to foster independence and responsibility.

         Can you remember who your best friend was in seventh grade? If you are having difficulty, it could be because relationships at that age are often short-lived. Half of them do not last a year. The friendships that do last can be predicted based on demographic and behavioral similarities.

     There is a lot of change during middle school, and that change makes it hard to maintain friendships.  As kids move from one academic track to another, join or leave sports teams, or take up new extracurricular hobbies, the opportunities to interact with friends wax and wane. Middle school is also a time when growing personal autonomy first allows children the chance to pick their friends and invest—or not—in those relationships.

     A study conducted at Florida Atlantic University tracked 573 seventh-grade dyadic friendships until they ended or until 12th grade. Popularity, aggression and academic success emerged as important behavioral traits of friendships.  The more similar two friends were in these traits, the longer a relationship lasted. 
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     This quick turnover in middle school friendships is nothing to be worried about unless a child has trouble making friends.  Adults who want to help those children might emphasize that finding peers who are similar in personality and academic interests are central to creating lasting relationships.  

     Happy New Year!  Over the holidays, I came across a New York Times article that explored whether intimacy between two strangers can be advanced by having them ask each other a series of specific personal questions.  The 36 questions in the study are broken up into 3 sets, with each set intended to be more probing than the previous set. The idea is that mutual vulnerability leads to greater intimacy. Read the original article here.

Set I

1. Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?

2. Would you like to be famous? In what way?

3. Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?

4. What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?

5. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?

6. If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?

7. Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?

8. Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common.

9. For what in your life do you feel most grateful?

10. If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?

11. Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible.

12. If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?

Set II

13. If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future or anything else, what would you want to know?

14. Is there something that you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?

15. What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?

16. What do you value most in a friendship?

17. What is your most treasured memory?

18. What is your most terrible memory?

19. If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why?

20. What does friendship mean to you?

21. What roles do love and affection play in your life?

22. Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner. Share a total of five items.

23. How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people’s?

24. How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?

Set III

25. Make three true “we” statements each. For instance, “We are both in this room feeling ... “

26. Complete this sentence: “I wish I had someone with whom I could share ... “

27. If you were going to become a close friend with your partner, please share what would be important for him or her to know.

28. Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things that you might not say to someone you’ve just met.

29. Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life.

30. When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?

31. Tell your partner something that you like about them already.

32. What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?

33. If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet?

34. Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why?

35. Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Why?
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36. Share a personal problem and ask your partner’s advice on how he or she might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.

Here's to a new year and deeping our current relationships and opening ourselves up to new relationships and experiences.  

          Most of us believe that we are good listeners. As a psychologist, I spend my days listening to people and trying to help them.  But we all have times when the people we care about feel that they are not being heard or listened to.  Here is some advice on how to be a better listener.

1.  Check your assumptions.  
          If you are already certain that you know what is going on in someone's head, your brain is primed to accept only information that agrees with your preconceived notions.  Yet, if you can cultivate a sense of genuine interest about where the other person is coming from and what he or she might say, you create an environment in which whoever you are talking to feels heard and you can actually hear.  While we are hardwired to make assumptions, it is possible to check your assumptions out loud with the person you are listening to.  Try asking "so you mean..." or "so you're thinking that..." and let the person confirm or correct. 

2.  Get curious.
          The amazing thing about being genuinely curious is that it keeps you from being defensive.  A good way to exercise curiosity is to ask open-ended questions such as "Can you say more about how that makes you feel/bothers you/to help me understand?"

3.  Suspend judgment.
          Sometimes we become so entrenched in our own beliefs  and opinions that we close down and don't want to hear anything else, even from those closest to us.  But if we close down, we are going to miss important messages.  The first thing to do is to suspend your judgment.  Try really hard to let the other person talk.  Take in the entire message, no interruptions allowed, and just listen.  When you do that, you will often find that even if you do disagree there is at least some shared ground or goals, which makes it easier to put yourself in the other person's shoes.  This is what empathy is all about.  

4.  Know when to tap out.
           Genuine listening requires humility and curiosity, and neither humility nor curiosity can be faked successfully.  If you are not feeling well, if you are hurried, stressed, or overwhelmed, you are not going to be able to be truly present  and curious during a conversation, especially a tough or difficult conversation.  In those moments, there is nothing wrong with saying, " I can hear that this is really important to you, and I want to give you my full, undivided attention.  Can we wait for a bit?  I need some time."