Who your children spend time with matter! In this video, Matt Rice talks about why it’s important that your sons & daughters learn how to be a good friend by following your example and how you guide them to choosing friends good for them.

Welcome back to Beyond the Pew. My name is Matt Rice, and today I’m gonna continue the video series on back to school. I’m gonna be talking about one of those things that parents really stress about the most.

Would You Jump Too?

I’ve got a 13 year old son, and who he’s friends with really matters to me. The young men that he’s learning to be a man alongside and growing with is really important to me, just like it was important to our parents. And we’ve all heard parents saying, “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump off too?” And so we want our kids to be around people that wouldn’t do that. They wouldn’t be doing stupid stuff.

So as I think about this and I think about giving parents tools to equip them to help their kids make good friends, I want to challenge you to evaluate your own friendships, your own friends. So when you bring your friends over to your house, what do your kids see in you? Do they see you become a better person, or do they see you maybe take a step back from who you should be in front of them?

Who Are Your Friends?

And that may be one of those things where everybody’s listening to this going, “Oh man. I’m not perfect.” And we’re not. We’re gonna have friends, I have friends that I’ve had since high school & college, and when I get around them I do get a little stupid. I just need to pay attention to that, and think about what it is about that and if I need to continue that friendship or if I need to continue that behavior.

Your kids aren’t going to be able to know how to do that unless you share with them how you did that.

One of the things that we need to do as parents is model for our kids what we want them to do. So if we want them to have friends that help them increase in virtue, we need to have friends that help us increase in virtue.

Lead By Example

The other thing is we need to be able to example it and show our kids what it’s like to move a friend out of your life. So there may be people that you were friends with in the past that you’re not friends with anymore because of the way they behave. And your kids aren’t going to be able to know how to do that unless you share with them how you did that.

So if you meet with your kids or if you talk with your kids and say, “Hey, you know I know that making friends is hard. And I know that you like ‘so-and-so,’ but I want to tell you a story about a friend of mine that I had in high school and how I had to kind of cut them out of my life.”

Help them. Equip them on how to cut those people out of their lives if they need to. Or if they need to be a good influence in their life, help them be that person in that kid’s life.

It’s a New Year

The other thought I had on this is, this is a new year. It’s a brand new school year. It’s a time to create new friendships. It’s a time for young people to recreate themselves, who they are, when they start the year. This is a perfect time for them to evaluate their friendships and decide who they’re gonna spend time with.

So as you navigate this treacherous road of helping your kids build up friends, Godly friends, and be a Godly friend themselves, know that we at Beyond the Pew are praying for you. We’ll see you next week