Written by Megan Rouse, Communications Associate, UCLA Center for the Developing Adolescent
This blog post was written using information and quotes from the UCLA Center for the Developing Adolescents’ annual Love in Adolescence webinar on The Importance of Peer Relationships and Platonic Love. Watch a recording of the event here.
Our adolescent years are a window of opportunity for us to discover our values, identity, and where we belong in the world. One way we do this is through our friendships.
Friends have a new importance to us as we enter adolescence. During adolescence, we may be gaining new agency in choosing who we spend time with, and, at the same time, hormonal changes at the onset of puberty cue changes in our brains. We become more sensitive to positive feelings from belonging, acceptance, and mattering to others. We also develop new capacities to understand the wants, needs, and perspectives of other people, which helps us build deeper connections with friends.
Because of these changes, friendships, platonic love, and loss can feel especially powerful and intense. Research shows that healthy friendships made during adolescence can predict successful relationships in adulthood and even future mental wellbeing.
It is important for all young people to learn how to build meaningful connections with other people, which can help them develop the necessary skills they need to create healthy relationships throughout their lives. Providing opportunities for young people to form healthy connections and building scaffolding for young people to reflect on lost connections should be a priority of parents, schools, and policies.
Early Adolescence: A Failing Friendship is Not A Failure
Phyllis Fagell is a clinical professional counselor who has dedicated her career to helping young people navigate relationships in early adolescence. She is also the author of Middle School Matters and Middle School Superpowers.
Fagell explained that peer relationships during early adolescence, roughly the middle school years, can be volatile, citing that only one percent of friendships last from seventh grade to twelfth grade.
But, this isn’t a bad thing. Gaining and then losing friends is a normal and natural part of early adolescence. These short-lived relationships help young people learn how to be a friend, how to choose a friend, and what they value in a friendship.
Mitch Prinstein, the Chief of Psychology at the American Psychological Association, studies how friendships impact development in his Peer Relationships Lab, and he agrees that gaining and losing friends is a necessary part of development during early adolescence.
“No one wants to see their child heartbroken by a friendship that didn’t last,” says Prinstein. “But the truth is, it’s a really good learning experience,”.
Supporting young people when friendships fail by validating intense emotion, normalizing failed friendships by sharing data like encouraging reflection on past relationships, and watching for ongoing signs of distress, can help young people learn from these sometimes heartbreaking experiences.
“If we try to rescue kids from the downside of all of those relationships…we strip them of the sense that they are the expert in their lives,” says Fagell. “We want them to learn to trust themselves so that when they are older they can walk away from a relationship that’s not working for them or from a job that has a supervisor that isn’t treating them right.”
Young people should also know they are not alone in losing a friend.
“These relationships are so intense and matter so deeply to kids,” says Fagell. “What I am trying to prove to them through numbers is that there is nothing inherently wrong with them.”
Friendships will come and go through early adolescence, providing crucial opportunities to form the skills necessary for deeper friendships and relationships later in life, fostering social skills, conflict resolution skills, and the ability to self-reflect and regulate.
“I also experienced really intense relationships during this period of time,” said Stephany Cartney, a student and UCLA and member of the Youth Scientific Council on Adolescence. “And as a result, it helped me learn how to manage conflict better,”.
Late Adolescence: Developing Values And Finding Belonging in Friendships
The friendships we form in early adolescence set a foundation for deeper, longer-lasting relationships later in life.
During late adolescence, relationships become more complex and more likely to be based on values, mutual respect, and communication rather than the basic companionship and shared interests that may be enough for a friendship during early adolescence. We have learned from early friendships to recognize what friends we want in our lives and what type of friend we want to be for others.
“We start to see more of the qualities [in friendships] of intimate disclosure, trust, support,” says Prinstein.
Our friendships offer ways to contribute to others, learn new perspectives, and feel like we matter in the world. They also help us as we build a more stable sense of our identity during adolescence, helping us understand what we value and what (and who) we care about.
“As I grew up…[friendships] became more value-based and more of ‘Oh, do I see this person as a representation of who I am?’,” says Cartney.
The friends that helped fortify our identity can seem especially significant, which may be why some friendships made during late adolescence are more likely to last a lifetime than friends made during any other developmental period.
“Friendships are not just for fun,” says Prinstein, “they are a very important training ground for many skills kids will have for the rest of their lives.”
Key takeaways
Friendships are not just for fun. They are meaningful connections that can inform our sense of identity and belonging, and influence our future relationships and wellbeing.
Our peer relationships offer ways to contribute to others, learn new perspectives, and gain respect and social standing. As we grow, we also develop a more stable sense of our identity, which can be influenced by the friends around us.
Gaining and then losing friends is a normal and natural part of early adolescence. These short-lived relationships can help young people learn how to be a friend, how to choose a friend, and what they value in a friendship.
Supporting young people when friendships fail is a more effective way to build relationship skills than shielding kids from heartbreak. This support can include validating intense emotion, encouraging reflection on past relationships, and watching for ongoing signs of distress.
Find additional resources about peer relationships during adolescence:
Digital technology, and specifically social media, is a tool that many young people use in their daily lives to form connections, acquire knowledge, and navigate complex systems. There are clear benefits to social media use during adolescence but there are also clear risks. Hear from experts and young people as they discuss how to mitigate the risks of these online spaces and promote the benefits. This post is based on the recent Adaptivity podcast episode, “Social Media and Adolescents.”
In the last discussion of our 2024 Adolescent Brain Development Symposium, Joanna Williams, Senior Director of Research at Search Institute, took the stage with Le’Yondo Dunn, CEO of YouthBuild Philadelphia Charter School, and Haafizah Carter, an alumnus of the school, to talk about the impact of civic engagement on purpose.
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