I Don't Know How to Help My Child Through Friendship Drama

But today's episode is titled "I Don't Know How to Help My Child Through Friendship Drama," okay? Speaking of you and I being friends, okay, and you knowing about all my dental problems.

So I am really excited about this episode because I think one of the hardest things about being a human being on this Earth is dealing with relational conflict, okay? And so of course, when you have children and you're a mom and you love these little people that you're raising way more than yourself, it is, like, even harder to watch them go through relational conflict and not be able to swoop in and save the day and fix it all the time, right? Like, of course, when they're really little, you can kind of manage their whole lives, but as they get older, it's our job as their moms to teach them how to walk with grace, how to follow Jesus, not just personally, not just like, "Okay, I'm gonna read my Bible and pray every day," but like, "How am I gonna interact with other people in the world when they hurt me? How am I going to forgive? How am I going to address this?" Like, it's our job to teach our kids how to do that, so that means it's not only our job to tell them what Jesus says about it in His Word, which we are gonna talk about today, but it's also our job to live it out in front of them, and that's so hard, right? So I'm excited about this topic because I think it's really important, and, and I brought on my friend Vanessa.

You'll see her later, or you'll hear from her later during our messy mom moment.

Vanessa's one of my nearest and dearest, and she has two kids out in the world, young adults, and one who is a senior this coming fall.

So she's got lots of wisdom she's gonna share with you guys on this.

Today, we're talking about something that can absolutely break our hearts, watching our children get hurt by a friend.

So maybe they weren't invited to something.

Maybe they're being excluded.

Maybe there's legitimate drama in their friend group.

Maybe they had a friendship that suddenly changed.

Maybe they're sitting at lunch alone.

There's a lot of situations, and as moms, we might ask ourselves, like, "How can I help my child through this? Should I step in? Should I stay out of it? How do I teach them to handle conflict in a godly way?" So the main tension here is we want to protect our children from pain.

It, uh, is our job to protect our children in a sense, but God often uses relational pain to shape their character and to deepen their dependence on Him.

Doesn't He do the same for us, you guys? Doesn't He sometimes allow achy, awful, stressful conflict in our lives to make us more like Him and to help our, our hearts learn how to obey Him and depend on Him and get to see restoration, right? Okay, so the mess.

Why does friendship drama feel so personal to me? I wanted to share, uh, just two brief stories.

I'm not gonna go super into detail.

These are not stories from my childhood.

These are stories from my young adult life because when I think about helping my own kids through friendship drama, I think a big part of that is letting them into your own walk with Jesus and what it's looked like for you.

And as I've talked to my older girls about friendship drama, and, you know, if they are either facing something and asking me for advice, you know, I draw from my own experiences.

And I can think of two times when I was in my early 20s, and I was new to the workforce, and I had some conflict with some other adults in my life.

And I was determined at that point in my life, I was taking the Bible super seriously.

The Lord had just changed my life in a really big way.

I-- He had gotten me out of a sin that I was stuck in that I felt like I would always be stuck in.

And so in my early 20s, I just was, like, reading the Bible, on fire about telling people about Him, and I was like, "If God's Word says it, I really wanna do it." So I just remember these two situations, me reading Matthew 18, where Jesus tells the disciples how to handle conflict and tells us as His followers, like, this is how we should handle conflict, and so I did it.

And in the first situation, it went beautifully, and there was restoration.