Mean Friends: How to Help Your Child Set Biblical Boundaries

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Your child has a friend who whines, stirs up drama, and never seems to get disciplined at home. Do you let them keep playing together? And how do you help your child learn what a good friend even is?

That was the question one parent sent in: how do you deal with mean friends at ages six through eight? If a child is a difficult friend, has non-Christian parents, is never disciplined, and always causes drama, do you allow your child to play with them? Where is the boundary?

This is an important question, because friendships matter. We want our children to have them. We also want real influence over who those friends are. At the same time, our children need to be given some freedom, and that freedom needs to grow as the years go by. So what does it look like at these younger ages, when our kids are drawn to children we would not necessarily have chosen for them? What are good guidelines, and where are the boundaries?

Start With the Goal of Friendship

There is definitely a time for limiting or restricting contact. But before we get there, the better starting place is to train our children to think biblically about friendship. If we can teach them to think biblically about it now, we will have to do far less monitoring as they grow.

I recommend starting with a question: what is the goal of friendship? What is our goal in every friendship? Then take your child straight to Matthew 22:35-40.

And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. "Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?" And he said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets."

So you can ask, according to what Jesus said here, what are the two greatest commandments? To love God, and to love others. If those are the two greatest commandments, then our goal in friendship is to love God by loving that other person. We honor God and love God by loving the person in front of us.

Two Kinds of Friendships

From there you can get into the specifics with your child. Start by talking about the friendships that help them better love God and love others. Point to the children in your child's life who genuinely point them toward God. Usually those are Christian friends, or friends from a Christian home. Explain that these are the kind of friendships that should be their closest ones, where both children are pointing each other toward God and helping each other love God and love others.

Then ask your child a second question: are there any friendships that pull you away from loving God and loving others? Talk through the friendship in question. These are the ones where the other child is not pointing your child toward God. Here you can explain something important: in this friendship, your child is the one helping point the other person toward God, helping them see who Jesus is. But most of their time should not be spent there.

This is a balance all of us need to learn. We cannot shut out people who do not point us toward Jesus, but most of our time should be spent with people who do. So teach your child to notice which friendships should be their close ones, and which are the friendships where they are mainly seeking to influence the other person. At ages six to eight especially, help them spend more of their time in the friendships that are mutually pointing them toward God, and prepare them to handle wisely the friendships that pull the other way, with a focus on pointing that friend toward Jesus.

Now to the practical question: what do we actually do when a child has a friendship that is pulling them in the wrong direction, and they are the one who needs to be helping the other child make good choices and pointing them toward Jesus?

When the Friend Is a Classmate

Let's say the difficult friend is a classmate. If they are in the same class for eight hours a day, your child is naturally going to interact with them.

So encourage your child to still be kind, to still be a friend, but to include other friends as well, so your child is not isolated with only that one child. Be kind, keep pointing that child toward Jesus, and widen the circle. I would also not schedule play dates. This is not the friendship you want to intentionally grow. Encourage kindness, but do not go out of your way to deepen it.

When the Friend Is a Teammate

Now say the child is on your child's basketball or soccer team, or in the same ballet class. Your child will naturally see them at practices, rehearsals, games, and recitals.

The same principles apply. Remind your child to be kind and to be a good friend, and to keep pointing that person toward Jesus. Encourage them to include others: if it is a girl in ballet, include the other girls in class; if it is a boy on the soccer team, include the other boys. And again, in general you are probably not going to schedule play dates.

There may be an exception. Maybe you are trying to build a relationship with the child's parents in order to share the gospel. Then there might be a time to invite the family over. But as a rule, you do not want your child spending the majority of their time with this friend.

When the Friend Is a Neighbor

This is probably the trickiest situation of all. A neighbor is right next door or across the street. They are not just someone your child sees during the school day or at practice. This child knows every time you are home, every time you are out in the front yard, every time you are in the back.

My recommendation is to be intentional about when your child gets to play with this neighbor and when they do not. It is okay to be the gatekeeper, especially at younger ages. Unless the child is genuinely harming your child, you do not want to completely cut off the relationship, because that is not what Jesus has called us to do. We are called to be salt and light. So you do not cut the neighbor out of your life, but you do get to manage the door.

If this child comes over every single afternoon, knocking as soon as you get home from school or finish your homeschool day, wanting to play with your daughter (let's call her Kayla), it is okay to answer the door and say, "You know what, Kayla can't come out to play right now. It will have to be another day." You can even set a standing rule: "I'm sorry, but Kayla can't play during school days. We have a lot we need to get done." It is okay to set those boundaries.

Or maybe you would rather have the child over, but there is a repeated behavior problem. It is okay to address that directly. Say everyone is playing in the front yard and the neighbor is there, and this child whines and throws a tantrum every time they do not get their way. You can say kindly, "We really like having you over. But if you choose to whine every time you don't get your own way, you're going to need to go home, because we don't allow that in our house." Then if they break the rule again: "We already talked about the whining, so for today you'll need to head home. We'd love to have you over another day, when you're ready not to whine." It is okay to be the gatekeeper like that.

My own mom did this well. I grew up with two siblings, we all went to public school in the city, and most of our classmates lived within walking distance. My parents kept our home open to others, but they had clear rules. I remember when my brother was in middle school and I was in high school, he had a friend who would just open the door and walk in. That was a no-no in our house. So my mom addressed him directly: "David, you do not walk into other people's houses without knocking." He said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." She said, "No, I mean it. Go back outside, knock on our door, and I will let you in." And she had him do exactly that. When children are in your home, you are the gatekeeper of when they are over and when they are not, and you can redirect them as needed.

In today's more involved, helicopter-parenting culture, might that cause friction with the other child's parent? Yes, it might. But that is something you may simply have to be okay with if you want to be intentional about helping your child build healthy friendships.

When Your Child Is Drawn to the Difficult Friend

Here is another situation: your child may be strongly drawn to the child with poor behavior whose parents never discipline. If that is the case, I recommend being honest with your child. Not speaking negatively about the other child for its own sake, but naming your concern: "I'm really concerned that every time you have Brittany over, afterward you have a bad attitude, and it seems like you're picking that up from her. Do you see that too?"

My mom did this with me. In second grade there was a girl in my class named Natalie. As a second grader I did not see it, but she was sneaky, wise to the ways of the world beyond her years in a way that was not good, and she always wanted to talk about things that were not appropriate. We lived only a few blocks apart, so we would walk to and from school. Every time Natalie came over after school, she wanted to hang back about half a block behind my mom and my two siblings so she could talk to me privately. My mom addressed it directly: "I really don't like that whenever Natalie is over, she wants to talk to you without the rest of us. In second grade you shouldn't have a need for private conversations like that." That was helpful, because I had not even realized there was anything wrong. If a second-grade friend wants a conversation she does not want your mom to hear, something is probably off. And there was.

Now, I was an eager-to-please child, so after that I stopped lagging behind, and I think Natalie came over less and less. You might have a child who is more strong-willed or less eager to please, and then you have to be even more intentional.

I saw this as a teacher, too. There were times I had to talk with parents because their child was naturally drawn to another child who was influencing them negatively. One year I had a girl in my class with a wonderful mom who loved the Lord and wanted her daughter to love him too. But this little girl kept gravitating toward the girls who were prideful, stuck up, secretive, and looked down on others. At our parent-teacher conference I told her mom, "Deep down your daughter has a heart that's soft toward the Lord. But she's drawn to these two other girls in third grade who are not good news for her. They're dragging her down, teaching her to look down on others, filling her with pride. I've talked with her about it. Can you talk with her too? Can you help her brainstorm some girls who might be better to build friendships with?"

So there are times we have to be honest with our children. We are not tearing other kids down for the sake of it. But we can tell our kids the truth: yes, we are called to be kind, to love them, to point them toward Jesus, and also, these are qualities in this friend that I do not want you to pick up, and I may already see you picking some of them up.

Applying This to Your Situation

In all of this I have tried to give biblical boundaries. The goal of friendship is to love God and love others. If a friend is pulling us away from that, we work to point that friend toward Jesus, but we do not spend so much time with them that they start influencing us instead.

Your specific situation has factors I cannot see from here. So take these general guidelines, pray through them, and talk them through with your spouse (or, if you do not have a spouse, with someone at your church). Then think through how these wise boundaries apply to you. There may be times you need to restrict things more than I have described here, and times you need to loosen them. Every situation is different, so spend time praying and talking it through with people who know you and know the Lord.

Want practical, biblically grounded help like this in your inbox? Sign up for the Foundation Worldview newsletter so you never miss an episode. And for a deeper dive into guiding your kids through friendship, sexuality, and gender, look for Helping Your Kids Know God's Good Design.