“How do you find friends for your kids on the road?”

As a parent we want the best for our kids. We want them to be healthy, self confident, happy, and for some of us, we want them to have a lot of friends….. And that’s where things start getting complicated. As a social butterfly myself I just naturally assume my kids are supposed to have a lot of friends, like I always had. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Living a life without school, or even a neighborhood for that matter, my kids have become each other’s best friends, but for a while (ok, and somewhat still to this day) I sought out other kids for them to play with. Only it didn’t take me long to realize I wasn’t doing it for them….I was doing it for ME.

If you ask my kids, they are perfectly content with their social life. If you ask them if they’d like to have more friends, they just shrug their shoulders, ehhh. It’s not even something that crosses their minds. My kids have taught me that “friends” come in all shapes and sizes…..and species. They don’t have to be of the two legged variety for them to be considered their friends.

While we were with our friends in Colorado, Jewel woke up in a running sprint every morning to play with our friends goat and llama’s. Even the feral cats couldn’t resist her charms. While Jewel chose the stinky friends, the boys enjoyed every minute they could with our fifty-something-year-young host, Dennis. They played Battlefield Bad Company 2 on the Xbox together and just couldn’t get enough of his funny, quirky spirit. There was a mutual respect between those three, and I seriously think when they were together, there was no age difference. They were just….friends.

Still to this day if you ask Jewel who her best friend is, she’ll say, Lisa. Lisa is my forty something friend that we met in a campground about three or four years ago. We still keep in touch, and see each other whenever we can, which isn’t often, but as much as Lisa is my friend, she is also, truly, Jewel’s friend. 

When the boys were younger their cousins were always great friends for them to play with, but now that they’re getting older and the age gap seems to be somehow increasing, the relationships have completely changed. Luckily though, my brother and his wife had an “oops” baby while I was pregnant with Jewel and I have now come to believe that she was put here just for Jewel. Jewel counts down the days on the calendar when we’re in town until the weekend comes, just so she can have Lillie over.

We’ve been to a couple unschooling conferences which we went to under the guise of “it’s for the kids” but none of them led to lasting friendships for them. They were too busy playing with each other.

I have learned there’s no need to try and find them friends, they do just fine on their own.

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