Column: Notes from Home

Several years ago I was at one of the required “parents-of-athletes” meetings at the high school when I overheard two moms talking about how their sons, who were members of sports teams at school, the Y and other organizations, were losing contact with some of their oldest friends from elementary school.

Both women were telling the same story: how former best friends no longer hung out with each other. They’d been friends starting before preschool, but once they’d gotten to middle school, activities had separated them. The sons of the two moms sitting in front of me were in sports while their former friends were involved in music or nothing at all.

Part of what I heard in that discussion was about the inflated importance some families place on organized sports. Sports take precedence over every other activity, even including spending time with family and attending church. There was judgment in that long-ago conversation, and the kids who weren’t involved in sports were being judged by their choices. The implication — an unfair assessment — is that kids (or adults) who aren’t enthusiastic about (or least involved in) organized, team sports aren’t normal.

This imbalance in priorities hurts the kids. It really does, especially in the hypercompetitive “professionalized” atmosphere that kids learn to live with once they reach high school. Many sports are year-round now for boys and girls. When do they have time to read books or magazines (or webzines)? When do they have time to play board games? Eat meals together with their family? These kids have very little “free” time to hang out with anybody, family or friends, amid their scheduled workouts, practices and competitions (and homework, if they pay any attention to school).

That was only part of what was going on in that conversation. What caught my attention more, and what has held that overheard conversation in my memory, went beyond just an obsession with sports.

What I noticed is that the moms had taken a passive role throughout this process of estrangement. They talked about how these kind of separations were inevitable, possibly even a positive change for their sons. They’d made no effort to bring their sons and the other boys together. One mom even made it sound as if the broken friendship was 100 percent the fault of the one who didn’t join the team.

These moms had missed an important opportunity to make a difference in their sons’ lives. The message they sent with their passivity was that it’s OK — perhaps even preferable — to only have friends who are the same as we are. The lesson they taught was that people who are different can’t be friends with each other.

I won’t pretend that I’ve had much success helping my kids maintain old friendships as they’ve grown up, but I’ve wracked my brain to see if I can remember having spoken like those two moms, or even had those kinds of thoughts. I can’t remember ever having encouraged them to jettison those old friends. I certainly haven’t tried to blame those other friends for making some bad choice that our children needed to avoid.

I don’t know whether the main lesson learned by those two boys involved only choosing friends that were the same as they were. Perhaps they found a way to break that mindset when they left high school and went off to college, although it is a difficult one to break — look at all the adults who think they can only be friends with people who believe the same things they do, from religion to politics.

Given the way so many Americans never bother to listen to anybody who disagrees with them, I wonder if that moment — that justification for a broken friendship — is where it began for most of us. Is the breakup of friendships when we are children the point in time where an unwillingness to engage with each other — both listen and speak — starts? Surely adults who are different, who read different books, enjoy different movies and get their news from different sources can still talk to each other. We can still learn from each other, right?

Is that just too idealistic?

Albert Lea resident David Rask Behling teaches at Waldorf College in Forest City, Iowa, and lives with his wife and children in Albert Lea. His column appears every other Tuesday.