Colman Noctor: Help your child establish boundaries with friends

Co-dependency between a child and their friends is a parental concern that often presents in my therapy sessions. On numerous occasions, they have described their teenager insisting on having their phone in their rooms overnight in case their friend ‘needs them’. I have spoken to many young people on both sides of this dynamic, whether it be the teenager who has significant emotional needs and is using a close friend as a source of emotional support or the young person who feels trapped in an intense emotional relationship with a strong sense of obligation to be available around the clock.

I have also recognised patterns where young people find themselves in these relationships time and time again. One teenage girl described herself as ‘the schoolyard social worker’ because she kept befriending people with mental health needs and adopting the role of emotional supporter.

Most adults will have experienced some degree of compassion fatigue, where one friend may be in a difficult place in their life and for a period of time, they rely heavily on you for support and guidance. While this is done willingly and lovingly to begin with, even the most altruistic of people can reach a point where they have nothing left to give and the relationship places a drain on their emotional resources.

In this instance, they must find a way of stepping back from that person to preserve their wellbeing. This shift away is difficult for an adult to negotiate but consider the greater challenge for a teen who is desperately impressionable and does not know how to support their friend in a different way.

A young person can end up providing a 24-hour hotline for their friends which results in them carrying huge responsibility for their wellbeing. The absence of support services may also be a contributing factor because as young people languish on waiting lists for mental health support, their friends and family, by default, end up becoming their support system.

Emotional boundaries

Most young people will struggle to institute emotional boundaries and can become overwhelmed. US family therapist Elizabeth Earnshaw describes emotional boundaries as an awareness of how much emotional energy you can take in and limiting emotional sharing with people who overload you with emotional detail. Strong emotional boundaries mean you are acutely aware of your emotional limit and become adept at not becoming overloaded. When the emotional dependency of another person is too much, it can become overwhelming and directly influence our mental state.

As a psychotherapist, I have undergone years of training to learn the dynamics of emotional boundaries. Some of the stories I hear are heart-wrenching and managing my emotions so I do not get overcome is a difficult skill to master. But even with my experience, I find myself allowing the emotional states of others to sometimes impact me negatively. If I struggle to manage that in the controlled environment of one-hour fortnightly sessions in the therapy room, how can a 14-year-old do so on a 24/7 basis?

The reality is that they cannot and need our help. It is challenging to pull back support from a friend. But this is even harder in the intense arena of teenage relationships. The nature of best friends, besties, and BFFs means there are few boundaries in place. This is why these relationships can become overwhelming. Sometimes the teenager makes a promise like, ‘I will always be here if you need me,’ which is taken literally and soon becomes overwhelming. Even when parents notice this dynamic and comment on it, the stressed teenager will more than likely deny it is a problem and do their best to continue to provide support.

Stepping in to support them is exponentially difficult in the current technological landscape. Not only do we have 24/7 smartphone communication but the way we can now track our communications to the point of knowing whether a message has been opened or read or not adds to the stress. I have had multiple discussions with teens who are distressed by having sent instant messages to peers they know have been opened but not replied to or being left unread. The tyranny of the two blue ticks, which tells us our text has been received, adds more anxiety to our lives than takes away.

Parental boundaries

In the past, the demands of a needy friend were curtailed by the limitations of the landline house phone. If such calls were made, a parent could usually be heard in the background giving orders to the teenager to ‘get off the phone’, providing them with an excuse and explanation for why they had to go. In this instance, the teenager was annoyed with their parents for prohibiting them from supporting their friend, but on reflection, thankful to their parents for putting up a much-needed boundary.

The inability of parents to intervene and regulate problematic teen communication is an ongoing issue. While affording young people privacy has merit, there are instances where a parent may need to save the teenager from themselves. The child will want to continue to be there for their friend and may not be aware of how close they are to breaking.

I tell my young patients that their friends won’t thank them for running themselves into the ground while trying to support them. I often discuss how friendships need to add to your life more than they take away from it. Stepping back from intense friendships is a tricky manoeuvre requiring subtlety and firmness.

Parents need to encourage their children to share the weight of their difficulties with peers and other supports. The distress of someone with significant mental health difficulties is often too much to manage for one person, which is why we have HSE mental health teams. It may be worthwhile contacting the parents of the child who is in a difficult place to see if they can access professional support, or at least parents should inform their teachers, who can be aware of what is going on and can look out for signs of a child coming under this emotional pressure.

Boundaries are necessary for us to navigate our lives and relationships correctly. Sometimes we all can believe that there should be no end to our availability or empathy for another person, but of course, there is. We all need to be able to mind ourselves, and our friends need to understand that.

Given the disruptions to children and young people’s social and emotional development during the pandemic, a case could be made for the conversation to return to the fundamentals of a healthy friendship, a relationship based on give and take, not take and take.

• Dr Colman Noctor is a child psychotherapist