Teenage friendships have been on my mind lately, especially how differently two people can see the same situation. One girl feels left out, while the girl who left her out thinks she’s choosing who to spend time with. When a friendship ends, one person feels betrayed and the other believes she was honest and did the best she could. Both may be hurting, and that still doesn’t prove either one set out to do wrong. Once feelings get involved, that’s easy to forget.

How we make sense of what happens to us

When something painful happens, we look for a reason, and usually for someone to blame. Sometimes that’s fair. People can be cruel and some relationships are unhealthy, so not every situation deserves the benefit of the doubt. A friend might leave us out because she’s being unkind, though, or she might simply feel closer to someone else right now. Someone might pull away because they’re being dishonest, or because they have feelings they can’t explain. Often we don’t know the whole story, and we may never get to know it. Trouble starts when we’re so sure of our version that we stop considering any other.

When someone keeps clashing with one person after another, I think it’s fair to ask whether there’s a pattern. Maybe they really have met a lot of difficult people. The way they read and respond to conflict might also be part of it. Asking doesn’t blame anyone for being mistreated; it leaves room for the bigger picture, our own part included. If every disagreement proves people are mean and every falling out is a betrayal, moving on gets very hard. We bring that same reading into the next friendship, and it tends to repeat itself there. So I ask whether the pattern is in other people’s behavior or in our own, and the honest answer is sometimes a bit of both.

When looking out for a friend goes too far

Concern for a friend can slide into trying to run her life. Say your friend keeps choosing to spend time with a group of people you don’t trust, so you tell her what worries you. Once she has heard you out and decided to keep spending time with them, pressing her again or getting a whole group of friends involved rarely helps. She ends up defending her choice when she could have been thinking it over.

Friendships work the same way. Being close to someone doesn’t mean you get to know everything she knows. If a friend tells someone else a thing she hasn’t told you, it may sting, and it may still have nothing to do with you. Sometimes it simply isn’t your story to tell. Caring about someone includes letting her make her own decisions, even ones you disagree with.

Parents struggle with this too. We want to protect our children from people who might hurt them and to step in when something seems unfair. Helping a child work through a hard situation is different from managing it for her. Sooner or later our kids have to make their own judgments and live with the choices they make.

The part we play as parents

I keep wondering how much our own reactions shape the way our kids understand these moments. When a child comes home upset because a friend left her out or stopped talking to her, our instinct is to comfort her and make sure she knows we’re on her side. It’s tempting to tell her the other person is awful and she should never speak to them again. Sometimes that is the right response.

I’d also like to leave room for a different conversation. We can understand why something hurt without signing on to every conclusion our children have drawn from it, and take their disappointment seriously without calling the other person a liar or a bully. We can ask what happened, what they think the other person meant, and whether they might have handled something differently. That doesn’t make them responsible for someone else’s bad behavior; it gives them practice thinking things through while they’re still upset. Kids need to know their parents will back them, but also that we won’t say they’re right just because they’re ours. Most of the time, the best thing is to listen first, let the feelings settle, and help them sort it out.

Somewhere between naive and cynical

I don’t want my children to believe everyone means well. Some people are unkind, and sometimes people lie or betray our trust, and walking away is the right call. I also don’t want them assuming people are selfish or that being hurt means someone has to be the villain. The middle ground is what I’d call discernment. To me it means you can see someone’s flaws without deciding they’re nothing but their flaws, and you can forgive someone without pretending what they did was okay.

It also means accepting that a person can be good and still not be right for us. A friend can care about us and still drift toward other people, and we can be disappointed in that without concluding the whole friendship was a lie. Sometimes people hurt us because they’re selfish or careless. Other times they make a choice that’s right for them and painful for us, and sometimes we just don’t know enough to understand why they did it. We don’t have to turn every painful experience into a verdict on someone’s character.

Living with a little uncertainty

The older I get, the more of life seems to happen in that uncomfortable space where we don’t have all the answers. We hear one person’s side of a story and see a small piece of a relationship. We know how someone made us feel, but not what they were thinking or what else was going on in their life. It’s tempting to fill those gaps with a story that makes sense to us, and once we’ve told it to ourselves enough times, it starts to feel like the truth. However sincere it is, it’s still only our side.

Second guessing ourselves forever wouldn’t help, and neither would making excuses for people who treat us badly. Sometimes the evidence is clear and we need to act on it. I’d just like to be a little slower to judge and a little more curious about what I might be missing.

What I most want my children to learn is that they can be kind to others and still respect themselves. They can try to understand how someone else feels while keeping their own boundaries, and own their mistakes without taking on everyone else’s emotions. When a friend pulls away or a friendship falls apart, I hope they’ll worry less about who the bad person is and more about what happened, what they can learn, and how they want to move forward.

We can’t protect our children from every disappointment, and I’m not sure we should try. People with good intentions still make poor decisions, and sometimes we’re the ones who get it wrong. I hope my kids can tell when someone has treated them badly without expecting everyone to, and stand up for themselves without letting it harden them.