Middle School Problems (Friendship)
Thirteen years ago I tried to explain what happens to friendship when kids enter middle school. After another thirteen years of working with teenagers, I think I got some things right. I think I got something important wrong too.
Middle school doesn't just change where kids go to school. It changes the social world they are trying to survive.
The Middle School Awakening
Do you remember middle school?
At the time I originally wrote this, I was spending my days running a before-and-after-school program with elementary students while also having spent seven years working in youth ministry.
That gave me a front-row seat to something I couldn't stop noticing.
Something changes between elementary school and middle school.
I called it the middle school awakening.
Kids begin becoming much more aware of the social consequences of what they say, what they wear, who they sit with, who likes them, who doesn't, and where they fit.
Friendship can suddenly become more complicated.
Teenagers begin discovering that putting someone else down can sometimes raise their own social standing. Friends who once felt permanent can become competitors. Being accepted by one group can mean distancing yourself from another.
Middle school is often where kids begin realizing that friendship has social consequences.
Jonathan showed me another kind of friendship.
When I originally wrote this article, our middle school Sunday school class was studying David and Jonathan in 1 Samuel 19.
Saul wanted David dead.
Jonathan was Saul's son. David was becoming a threat to everything Jonathan could have expected to inherit.
Yet Jonathan warned David and then spoke to his father on David's behalf.
Jonathan had something to lose by being David's friend.
That's what struck me then, and it still does.
What kind of friend am I when friendship costs me something?
That's a very different picture from a friendship built primarily around popularity, convenience, shared interests, or what another person can do for me.
Good friendship requires something of us.
Loyalty. Honesty. Grace. Courage. The willingness to celebrate someone else's success without seeing it as our failure.
And sometimes the willingness to stand beside somebody when doing so isn't socially convenient.
There's something I would tell parents differently now.
In the original article, I told parents not to let their teenagers withdraw from a friendship when someone had hurt them.
I understood what I was trying to protect.
I didn't want teenagers learning that loving people means loving only the people who are easy to love.
I still believe that.
But after thirteen more years of sitting with teenagers through broken friendships, betrayal, bullying, exclusion, manipulation, reconciliation, forgiveness and heartbreak, I wouldn't give that advice the same way today.
Forgiveness does not require unlimited access.
We can teach teenagers to forgive someone without teaching them that they must continue giving that person the same access to hurt them.
We can teach grace and boundaries at the same time.
We can teach a student to pray for someone while also helping them recognize that a relationship has become unhealthy.
We can teach them that reconciliation is beautiful when it is possible, but reconciliation requires more than one person.
And we should never confuse enduring repeated harm with Christian maturity.
But I still think teenagers need help staying soft.
The opposite danger is teaching kids that every hurt feeling means a friendship should end.
Friendship involves disappointment.
Friends misunderstand each other. They say stupid things. They get jealous. They fail to show up. They occasionally need forgiveness.
Teenagers need adults who can help them learn the difference between a relationship that needs grace and a relationship that needs distance.
Grace says: People can hurt me and still be worthy of love and forgiveness.
Boundaries say: Loving someone does not mean giving them endless opportunities to hurt me.
Parents don't have to solve every friendship problem.
One thing I still agree with from the original article is that our teenagers need a safe place to work through these things.
Sometimes our instinct as parents and pastors is to immediately fix the problem.
Call the other parent. Tell them exactly who they should stop talking to. Explain why their friend is terrible. Make the pain disappear.
There are absolutely situations where adults need to intervene, especially when there is bullying, abuse, threats, coercion or safety concerns.
But many times our teenagers don't need us to manage every relationship for them.
They need somewhere safe to land while they learn how relationships work.
What happened?
How did that make you feel?
Is this a mistake your friend made, or is this becoming a pattern?
What would forgiveness look like here?
What would a healthy boundary look like?
Middle school friendship is practice for something bigger.
Thirteen years later, I still believe friendship is one of the most important classrooms teenagers will ever enter.
They're learning how to trust.
How to apologize.
How to forgive.
How to recognize when someone else needs them.
How to survive rejection without becoming cruel.
How to establish boundaries without learning to hate.
And maybe most importantly, they're learning what kind of friend they are going to become.
Our goal isn't simply to help teenagers find good friends. It's to help them become one.
JON ALLEN · UPDATED SEPTEMBER 2026