This Conversation Is the Best Valentine to Give Your Kids

When I observe the romances portrayed in the books that my kids read and the movies they watch, I notice a lot of grand gestures. There are dramatic proposals on airplanes happening just in the nick of time, and love that blossoms in the face of terminal illness, and seemingly impossible relationships thriving against all odds. But while I enjoy a good love story as much as the next mom, my work as a pediatric emergency medicine physician informs my perspective on the myriad ways romantic relationships have the potential to cause young people harm. Talking to your kids about healthy relationships early shapes their perspective and can help keep them safe.

Source: Gemini/Google/AI-generated

Speaking to our kids about potentially sensitive topics establishes conversational scaffolding, which is a term I use frequently. This matters because discussing healthy relationships in the context of early friendships then establishes a structure for future conversations about healthy dating dynamics.

Without question, the building blocks for positive romantic relationships are learned through navigating childhood friendships. Engaging with our kids about the dynamics of friendship and how we should actively choose our friends is important. Parents most commonly get involved in talking to kids about friendship when things are going poorly. All children go through periods of worrying that they don’t fit in or feeling excluded. But if we start talking to our kids about their experiences when friendships are going well, that becomes useful context for when they are struggling socially.

So, when children make new friends or start spending more time with another child, it can be helpful to ask them what they like about their new friend, what qualities they appreciate, and what they enjoy about spending time together. While reflecting on the positive attributes of the friends they prefer is valuable, it’s even more important to discuss how the friends your kids are spending time with make them feel. Healthy friendships should make us feel happy, confident, appreciated, and secure. Noticing and naming these feelings when things are going well for your child socially creates a meaningful contrast to ground conversations for when things are going less well.

Many kids (and adults!) experience “friendships” that make them feel less-than. At some point, most of us have had a friend who has made us feel insecure or inadequate. Those friends stand in contrast to our true friends, who build us up, cheer us on, and celebrate our successes.

Another troublesome type of friend is the controlling friend. Controlling behavior almost always stems from insecurity in the person who is trying to exert control. So perhaps a controlling friend really values your child’s friendship but feels insecure in their relationship and therefore threatened by your child having friendships with other kids.

This scenario is simultaneously completely understandable and highly problematic because controlling behaviors are also a hallmark of abusive romantic relationships and often a warning sign of intimate partner violence. Thus, it is extremely important to teach your kids that while someone caring about you enough to be jealous of other relationships might seem flattering at first or even sweet, controlling behaviors are not a sign of love. If anything, they’re an indication of a problem that needs to be addressed. True friends do not try to isolate you or control your relationships with other people.

It is easiest to introduce these concepts of relationship dynamics with your kids while they are in grade school because the stakes feel lower for them. But it still establishes critical groundwork for similar conversations as they get older and may start dating, and their relationships have the potential to become more emotionally charged. By speaking to our children about how friends should make them feel, we set the standards for what they should ultimately be looking for and expecting from future intimate partners.

As adolescents begin entering romantic relationships, they become vulnerable to new risks. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey in 2021 indicated that among high school students who reported dating in the prior year, 13.6 percent experienced physical and/or sexual dating violence (Clayton et al., 2023). Not surprisingly, girls are at higher risk for experiencing dating violence than boys, but plenty of boys certainly become involved in unhealthy romantic relationships as well. The broader associated risks for young people who become involved in unhealthy romantic relationships are sobering. Kids who experience dating violence have higher rates of anxiety and depression, suicidality, substance use and abuse, unhealthy weight control behaviors, and risky sexual behaviors (Silverman et al., 2001; Roberts et al., 2003).

But laying the groundwork with our kids by talking to them about how different friends and friendships make them feel throughout childhood helps them learn what they’re looking for in relationships generally, and it naturally leads into conversations about how romantic partners make them feel and what healthy behaviors within romantic relationships look like as they get older. If you have concerns about a new boyfriend or girlfriend making your child feel insecure or exhibiting controlling or physically harmful behaviors when they’re in high school, it will come across as less threatening and be much easier to address if you’ve already established conversational scaffolding for these topics through prior discussions about friendships.