Asking the right questions in advance is one of the most important ways to protect your child before they start hanging around new friends who could put them in danger or who might be bad influences. In this article, we’ll give you some tips on what to look for, what questions you should be asking your child about their new friend, as well as, what to ask the parents of your child’s new friends.
You want to encourage your child to make new friends, so when you talk to your child about their friend, it’s important to help them feel that you are happy about them having a new friend. Show that you are excited for them and are interested in their friend, too. This will help your child open up more. After all, your goal is simply to protect your child – not to keep them from making friends or choose their friends for them. You want them to understand what a good friend is, while hopefully also helping them understand the type of people that don’t make good friends.
You can learn a lot about your child’s new friend with just the following three simple questions. Try to encourage your child to open up and go into detail about their friend. In their doing so, they are likely to reveal some information that allows you to put together a picture of their new friend’s mindset.
With just these three questions you could extract a great deal of information about their new friend and went through your child toward them. Their interests can help you envision a picture of what future activities they are likely to engage in. You can also get a peek into the mindset and personality of your child’s new friend. For example, whether there new friend is shy or a bit of a daredevil, whether they are smart-alecky or have a propensity toward doing mean things.
Common things that happen when your child meets a new friend is a request for a play date or a sleepover at their house. Before agreeing to let your child do these things, it’s important to ask the other child’s parents some questions first.
If you think the amount of questions below is excessive, a quick online scouting expedition will return a slew of stories of children that were killed, snatched or injured during a visit or sleepover at the home of a friend.
It’s important that the parents of your child’s friend know that you have certain rules for your child that are important to you and that you are uncomfortable with your child being in an environment outside of those rules. What the other parents might think is not important. Protecting your child and feeling comfortable with putting your child’s safety in the hands of someone else is what is paramount.
