Article in times today: teachers discouraging best friends

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Some UK primary/elementary schools are introducing a "no best friends policy". Teachers are encouraging children to play in large groups rather than pair off as best buddies.

Teachers are discouraging kids from making best friends to spare them the pain of breakups and fights. The school psychologist who respond to the article wasn't very supportive saying that it's important for kids to learn friendship skills and how to handle the break- ups.

It's a print article, so I can't reproduce it entirely here. Seems fascinating though.

Does this help or hinder aspies? I have a few thoughts..

+larger groups discourage bullying
-larger groups make it harder to connect
-aspies find it hard to maintain many relationships
+larger groups and teacher intervention should be more inclusive

Any thoughts?

Jason

I personally don't think that teachers should try to influence who children play with. I think a lot more could be done to stop and prevent bullying but I think that children should make their own friends and learn about friendship naturally rather than being placed into social situations. I take your point about many people being difficult to cope with because I find that and I prefer to have a close friendship with one other person than casual friendships with several people. I think that children should make their own friends and that the prevention of bullying be focused on. Also children placed into groups may lead to a "clique" mentality where they don't accept anyone outside their group and may even bully or look down upon children who are not in a group. Just my thoughts.

This is an interesting one, but I think I agree with:

And what happens when they get in the real world and have no idea about much more then acquaintances?
It would inadvertently mean that when a big 'breakup' or loss happens the person has no idea what to do and has nobody for support at older ages.

Sounds like another instance of schools trying to make it easy for themselves and not caring about the future outside of school... Schools really need to start caring more about the future, after all that's why we go to school isn't it?

At my school you weren't allowed to hold hands. Holding hands is so nice.

Meddling with as much nature as possible is a modern disease.

I don't think large groups prevent bullying because bullying is a group activity. Groups exclude people, not individuals. Friendship is not the enemy.

It's odd that they think this would help to prevent bullying.

I think tolerance should be the main focus. Accepting others and treating them in a humane way instead of making everything one big group. It sounds a bit one-dimensional to me. "Groups" is not one concept, but several. A group can mean that everyone gets along despite friendships between individuals. Or it means that the group is everything. I don't like group mentality. I also believe it is damaging because it means you can never be yourself.

Not trying to be mean, but I can totally see what kind of teachers want to encourage this...

For me this would have meant having no friends at all. When I did have friends in school it was only one best friend and that was it. I did poorly in groups, frequently wouldn't talk in a group, and was bullied by groups.

That's exactly my point.

And that's why a "policy" like that would be dangerous. It would alienate people even more. To me it looks as if they were trying to separate those who fit into groups from those who don't - on an official level. So they can indirectly say, "If you don't fit into the group, there is something wrong. Something is wrong about you". I got that message in my school days often enough already.

It must be rather nice to be a teacher in a British school. Because where I live, we're just trying to make sure the kids don't kill each other.

And I'm talking about some boy bringing a gun to school to shoot someone he had beef with, not a couple of kids getting all dramatic over hurt feelings.

Isolating children who socialize best (or only!) one-on-one will be one of the negative consequences of this idiotic policy. Hopefully it will be dropped quickly before it can do damage.

Chameleon (and the quoted psychologist) brought up another negative consequence of depriving children of needed experience in how to form a friendship and how to cope when the friendship ends.

This policy has the potential to make a generation of emotional cripples. That's hyperbole because I think it will fade away as yet another silly fad and not get entrenched. If it actually did get entrenched, it would be damaging.

I'm someone who seems to prefer to have a couple of high quality relationships over a high volume of low quality relationships. I tend to float on the edges of tribes and herds and connect strongly to one or two people here and there.

Some materials I've read would suggest that this is a factor of introversion. Who knows. Perhaps this is more evidence of the bias towards extroversion in our societies that some people talk about.

School did not cater to my learning style, and if I was to go under this regime, would not cater for my relational style.

School and people weren't working for me anyway, but I had a few people I could hang out in relative safety with at school. This would seem to remove that choice of refuge.

One size education does not fit all. One size socialisation does not fit all.

Maybe they will start medicating kids who can't adapt.

At High School I was very shy, and the teachers knew that. Then when I got friendly with another girl in my Art classes who was also very shy, the teacher used to split us up if we talked, and we were made to sit with people who we didn't know and they didn't want to know us. It wasn't fair.

But I remember once when the art teacher was absent and we had another teacher, everybody was talking and didn't do their work, but me and my friend sat together and talked all the way through to eachother too, but got all our work done aswell.

Where have you been? They've been forcing pills on kids who don't conform for decades.

I was never medicated but I've been out of school for 20 years.

The one time I briefly had a cleaning job in a school in the nurses office I saw a cabinet with loads of bottles of adhd medication.

I was referring to the new standard they are imposing here.