Remember when the only major fights that were fought were the ones over the silver marker in kindergarten?
These simple and silly fights, though very serious at the time, were made possible by childhood innocence. Childhood friendship and innocence is something that most people take for granted. Meaning that when you’re younger you don’t realize how good you have it. Our parents do everything from making lunches, to making plans to helping decide who are friends are when we are little. As a child, we assume that it’s our parent's job to do those things for us.
However, as we get older responsibilities that were once on our parents are put on us. When we begin to decide for ourselves who our friends are, it is on us if we get hurt. We chose that friend and decided for ourself, that they were a good person. A childhood friendship is usually created by the kid's parents. As a child, parents want their kids to only hang out with the “good” kids. “Good” meaning the kids who are polite, nice and seem smart enough to make good choices as they get older. However, these friendships are only created by our parents when we are very little. In third grade, I met a girl named...let’s call her...Margo. She and I became THE BEST of friends anyone could possibly be at that age. We drew pictures and sent them to each other because we thought it was fun and we had play dates almost every other day. We could not be separated. We had those necklaces with the broken heart, one-half saying “best” and the other “friends”, which at that age meant that we had to be best friends forever! The best part about our friendship was that it was so simple.
Nothing mattered other than the fact that we had a mutual liking for each other. No drama was caused because there was nothing to be dramatic about. However once middle school hit and I went to a different one than she did we instantly grew apart. We tried staying in touch all through sixth grade. Finally, we just stopped talking altogether. I wish we could’ve stayed friends, but it just wasn’t going to happen. When we were reunited in high school we didn’t even say hi to each other in the halls. We had completely different friend groups and completely different interests. This was not necessarily a bad thing, just very different.
What all this says about childhood friendships is that no matter how much we wish we could hold onto the innocence of them and the ease they brought, we all have to grow up at some point. Most of the time all this is for the better. Change is always hard, and friendships are some of the hardest changes we go through in life.
