Big Brother Bans BFF

As if the educationistas weren’t interfering in our lives enough these days, now they’re trying to push the notion that school kids shouldn’t have “best friends.” They’re even getting involved in students’ relationships with their peers, and offering advice where it has not been solicited.

Is it because, as John Ray suggests on his website pcblogspot.com, the “Leftists behind this have been too egocentric to have good friends themselves, so are determined that nobody else will have good friends either?”

Perhaps. In any event, while children prefer “to pair up and have that one best friend, . . . as adults—teachers and counselors—we try to encourage them not to do that,” said Christine Laycob, who heads up counseling facilities at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School in St. Louis. She explains that “we try to talk to kids and work with them to get them to have big groups of friends and not be so possessive about friends.”

Not surprisingly, this move contradicts the feelings of most parents—and of 90 percent of children and young adults who have stated in recent opinion polls that they like having a close or “best” friend.

Deborah Lambert writes the Squeaky Chalk column for Accuracy in Academia.