The Latest Thievery: Best Friends

Removing best friends from childhood is a barbarous and inhumane act.

by Jonah Goldberg

There’s a great moment in the 1993 movie Searching for Bobby Fischer. Ben Kingsley plays a coach for a seven-year-old chess prodigy named Josh. Kingsley wants the boy to stop playing chess in the park and devote himself completely to Kingsley’s tutelage. Josh’s mother doesn’t like the idea, because she’s a jealous guardian of her son’s childhood. “Not playing in the park would kill him. He loves it.”

Kingsley complains that her decision “just makes my job harder.”

“Then your job’s harder,” she responds.

As the father of a seven-year-old myself, I think of that scene all the time — most recently, when I read a profoundly depressing story in the New York Times about how “some educators and other professionals who work with children” don’t think kids should have best friends.

“I think it is kids’ preference 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, director of counseling at a St. Louis day school. “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.”

“Parents sometimes say Johnny needs that one special friend,” she continued. “We say he doesn’t need a best friend.”

As a result of this thinking, best friends are broken up. Buddies are put on separate teams, assigned to different classes, etc. It’s not quite the sort of thing cult leaders and North Korean prison guards do, but in principle it’s not too far off either... Read the whole article.