Signs Your Child May Have a Toxic Friend—and What to Do About It

It’s normal if you don’t love all of your child’s friends. Your kids are allowed to have friends that aren’t exactly your cup of tea, and it’s important to let your child explore different kinds of friendships. But sometimes your child has a friend who goes beyond unlikable. Sometimes your child has a friend who you’d describe as toxic or who exhibits toxic behavior.

If your child has a toxic friend, you might not know what to do exactly. Should you intervene, and how? We connected with experts to help us understand toxic friends, including signs your child’s friendship is toxic, how to talk to them about it, when to seek help, and more.

How Experts Define a Toxic Friend

You might be wondering what a toxic friend is, exactly. Emily Zeller, LMFT, a licensed marriage and family therapist and founder at Zeller & Co. Therapy, describes a toxic friend as someone who “consistently behaves in ways that drain, manipulate, or harm your child—emotionally, socially, or even physically.”

Additionally, toxic friendships involve specific patterns of unhealthy behavior, according to Zeller. These may include:

• Constant negativity, including putting your child down, mocking them in some way, or making them feel bad about themselves.
• Control or possessiveness, such as dictating who they can talk to, or getting irrationally angry when they spend time with others.
• Drama and manipulation, which may involve guilt-tripping, spreading rumors, or coming up with "tests" to prove loyalty.
• One-sidedness, like always taking but never giving support in return.
• Peer pressure, including encouraging risky behaviors (substance use, skipping school, or bullying others).

Signs Your Child Has a Toxic Friendship

It’s not always obvious when your child is in a toxic friendship. Often, kids don’t have the vocabulary or awareness to fully grasp what they’re experiencing.

“Kids don’t always have the words for ‘this relationship feels off,’ but their behavior and mood will tell you everything,” explains Cheryl Groskopf, LMFT, LPCC, an anxiety, trauma, and attachment therapist based in Los Angeles.

So what are some signs that your child may be in a toxic friendship? According to Groskopf, if your kid starts acting differently than usual—such as quieter, more “on edge,” or if they seem to be pulling away from people they previously trusted—it’s a sign that something may be wrong.

It can also be helpful to observe them after they’ve spent time with a friend you think might be toxic. “Watch how they are after they hang out with this friend,” Groskopf recommends. “Are they drained? Irritable? Sad? Those emotional shifts are data.”

How to Talk to Your Child About Their Toxic Friend

Just as it can be challenging for your child to identify a toxic friendship, it can be hard for them to talk about what is going on. When that’s the case, Groskopf recommends against conveying your feelings too strongly. “As tempting as it is, this is where you don’t go full parent mode and start badmouthing the friend,” she advises. “That’ll just push your kid closer to them.”

Instead, Groskopf recommends that you “get curious.” She suggests asking questions like: “Do you feel safe being totally yourself around them?” or “What happens if you disagree—can you speak up?”

You can also ask them about how it feels in their body when they are around the person. “The goal isn’t to label the friend—it’s to help your kid listen to their own inner alarm system,” Groskopf describes.

What If Your Child Doesn't View Their Friendship As Toxic?

It might very well happen that despite some gentle nudging, your child just doesn’t see how toxic their friendship is. What should you do in that situation?

Zeller says that instead of labeling their friend as “bad,” you can try these approaches with your child:

• Ask open-ended questions, such as: “How do you feel when you’re around them?”
• Encourage self-reflection and help them notice patterns; you can say something like: “I’ve noticed you seem really down after hanging out with them. Have you felt that way too?”
• Model healthy relationships, which might look like pointing out what respect, trust, and mutual care look like in friendships
• Support your child’s autonomy—instead of demanding they cut ties with their toxic friend, guide them toward setting healthy boundaries
• Resist the urge to outright ban the friendship; this typically only backfires and makes them defensive

When to Reach Out for Help

Sometimes, despite our best efforts, we can’t fully support our child in this situation on our own. This is where enlisting some professional help can make a world of difference.

How to know if it’s time to get help from a licensed mental health professional or school counselor? Here are some signs, according to Zeller:

• Your child’s mood or behavior has significantly changed for the worse
• Bullying, substance use, or unsafe behavior is involved
• Your child is engaging in self-harm or expressing thoughts of hopelessness
• Your child is unable to set boundaries or leave the toxic friendship on their own
• Your efforts at home aren’t making a difference

Groskopf recommends a proactive approach here. In other words, don’t wait for the issue to grow bigger and bigger. Reach out to a pediatrician, health care specialist, or therapist at the first sign that your child’s toxic friendship is impacting their mental health.

“A therapist can help your kid figure out what’s happening in the friendship, how to speak up for themselves, and how to build boundaries without going full shutdown,” Groskopf emphasizes. Together, you and a mental health professional can figure out the best route for your child.

 

 

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Scrutinizing the effects of digital technology on mental health

• There is an ongoing debate about whether social media and the use of digital devices are detrimental to mental health.
• Adolescents tend to be heavy users of these devices, and especially of social media.
• Rates of teenage depression began to rise around 2012, when adolescent use of social media became common (Fig. 1).
• Some evidence indicates that frequent users of social media have higher rates of depression and anxiety than do light users.
• But perhaps digital devices could provide a way of gathering data about mental health in a systematic way, and make interventions more timely.

A sudden increase in the rates of depression, anxiety and self-harm was seen in adolescents — particularly girls — in the United States and the United Kingdom around 2012 or 2013 (see go.nature.com/2up38hw). Only one suspect was in the right place at the right time to account for this sudden change: social media. Its use by teenagers increased most quickly between 2009 and 2011, by which point two-thirds of 15–17-year-olds were using it on a daily basis1. Some researchers defend social media, arguing that there is only circumstantial evidence for its role in mental-health problems2,3. And, indeed, several studies2,3 show that there is only a small correlation between time spent on screens and bad mental-health outcomes. However, I present three arguments against this defence.

First, the papers that report small or null effects usually focus on ‘screen time’, but it is not films or video chats with friends that damage mental health. When research papers allow us to zoom in on social media, rather than looking at screen time as a whole, the correlations with depression are larger, and they are larger still when we look specifically at girls (go.nature.com/2u74der). The sex difference is robust, and there are several likely causes for it. Girls use social media much more than do boys (who, in turn, spend more of their time gaming). And, for girls more than boys, social life and status tend to revolve around intimacy and inclusion versus exclusion4, making them more vulnerable to both the ‘fear of missing out’ and the relational aggression that social media facilitates.

Second, although correlational studies can provide only circumstantial evidence, most of the experiments published in recent years have found evidence of causation (go.nature.com/2u74der). In these studies, people are randomly assigned to groups that are asked to continue using social media or to reduce their use substantially. After a few weeks, people who reduce their use generally report an improvement in mood or a reduction in loneliness or symptoms of depression.

Third, many researchers seem to be thinking about social media as if it were sugar: safe in small to moderate quantities, and harmful only if teenagers consume large quantities. But, unlike sugar, social media does not act just on those who consume it. It has radically transformed the nature of peer relationships, family relationships and daily activities5. When most of the 11-year-olds in a class are on Instagram (as was the case in my son’s school), there can be pervasive effects on everyone. 

Children who opt out can find themselves isolated. A simple dose–response model cannot capture the full effects of social media, yet nearly all of the debate among researchers so far has been over the size of the dose–response effect. To cite just one suggestive finding of what lies beyond that model: network effects for depression and anxiety are large, and bad mental health spreads more contagiously between women than between men.

In conclusion, digital media in general undoubtedly has many beneficial uses, including the treatment of mental illness. But if you focus on social media, you’ll find stronger evidence of harm, and less exculpatory evidence, especially for its millions of under-age users.

What should we do while researchers hash out the meaning of these conflicting findings? I would urge a focus on middle schools (roughly 11–13-year-olds in the United States), both for researchers and policymakers. Any US state could quickly conduct an informative experiment beginning this September: randomly assign a portion of school districts to ban smartphone access for students in middle school, while strongly encouraging parents to prevent their children from opening social-media accounts until they begin high school (at around 14). Within 2 years, we would know whether the policy reversed the otherwise steady rise of mental-health problems among middle-school students, and whether it also improved classroom dynamics (as rated by teachers) and test scores. Such system-wide and cross-school interventions would be an excellent way to study the emergent effects of social media on the social lives and mental health of today’s adolescents.
NICK ALLEN: Use digital technology to our advantage

It is appealing to condemn social media out of hand on the basis of the — generally rather poor-quality and inconsistent — evidence suggesting that its use is associated with mental-health problems7. But focusing only on its potential harmful effects is comparable to proposing that the only question to ask about cars is whether people can die driving them. The harmful effects might be real, but they don’t tell the full story. The task of research should be to understand what patterns of digital-device and social-media use can lead to beneficial versus harmful effects7, and to inform evidence-based approaches to policy, education and regulation.

Long-standing problems have hampered our efforts to improve access to, and the quality of, mental-health services and support. Digital technology has the potential to address some of these challenges. For instance, consider the challenges associated with collecting data on human behaviour. 

Assessment in mental-health care and research relies almost exclusively on self-reporting, but the resulting data are subjective and burdensome to collect. As a result, assessments are conducted so infrequently that they do not provide insights into the temporal dynamics of symptoms, which can be crucial for both diagnosis and treatment planning.

By contrast, mobile phones and other Internet-connected devices provide an opportunity to continuously collect objective information on behaviour in the context of people’s real lives, generating a rich data set that can provide insight into the extent and timing of mental-health needs in individuals8,9. By building apps that can track our digital exhaust (the data generated by our everyday digital lives, including our social-media use), we can gain insights into aspects of behaviour that are well-established building blocks of mental health and illness, such as mood, social communication, sleep and physical activity.

These data can, in turn, be used to empower individuals, by giving them actionable insights into patterns of behaviour that might otherwise have remained unseen. For example, subtle shifts in patterns of sleep or social communication can provide early warning signs of deteriorating mental health. Data on these patterns can be used to alert people to the need for self-management before the patterns — and the associated symptoms — become more severe. Individuals can also choose to share these data with health professionals or researchers. For instance, in the Our Data Helps initiative, individuals who have experienced a suicidal crisis, or the relatives of those who have died by suicide, can donate their digital data to research into suicide risk.

Because mobile devices are ever-present in people’s lives, they offer an opportunity to provide interventions that are timely, personalized and scalable. Currently, mental-health services are mainly provided through a century-old model in which they are made available at times chosen by the mental-health practitioner, rather than at the person’s time of greatest need. But Internet-connected devices are facilitating the development of a wave of ‘just-in-time’ interventions10 for mental-health care and support.

A compelling example of these interventions involves short-term risk for suicide9,11 — for which early detection could save many lives. Most of the effective approaches to suicide prevention work by interrupting suicidal actions and supporting alternative methods of coping at the moment of greatest risk. If these moments can be detected in an individual’s digital exhaust, a wide range of intervention options become available, from providing information about coping skills and social support, to the initiation of crisis responses. So far, just-in-time approaches have been applied mainly to behaviours such as eating or substance abuse8. But with the development of an appropriate research base, these approaches have the potential to provide a major advance in our ability to respond to, and prevent, mental-health crises.

These advantages are particularly relevant to teenagers. Because of their extensive use of digital devices, adolescents are especially vulnerable to the devices’ risks and burdens. And, given the increases in mental-health problems in this age group, teens would also benefit most from improvements in mental-health prevention and treatment. If we use the social and data-gathering functions of Internet-connected devices in the right ways, we might achieve breakthroughs in our ability to improve mental health and well-being.

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People with autism risk more likely to report self harm

People with a higher genetic likelihood of autism are more likely to report higher childhood maltreatment, self-harm and suicidal thoughts, according to a new study.

The study, shows that the findings hold true even for those with a higher genetic likelihood of autism rather than a formal diagnosis.
Previous studies from the University of Cambridge established that autistic individuals experience higher levels of self-harm, including suicidal thoughts and feelings, and higher rates of childhood maltreatment.
"This new study extends our earlier work by showing that individuals who carry more of the genes associated with autism have higher risks for maltreatment and self-harm," said a study researcher.

"Our work highlighting unacceptably higher rates of suicide in autistic people was published 5 years ago, yet almost no new support has been provided," he added.
For the study, the research team calculated the genetic likelihood for autism in 100,000 individuals from the UK Biobank Study who had their DNA analysed and had also provided self-reported information about childhood maltreatment, suicidal ideation and self-harm.
Those with the highest genetic predisposition to autism on an average have 28 per cent increase in childhood maltreatment and a 33 per cent increase in self-harm and suicidal ideation compared to those with the lowest genetic predisposition to autism.
"While we have found an association between a genetic likelihood for autism and adverse life events, we cannot conclude the former causes the latter," said study lead author.

"We suspect this association reflects that genes partly influence how many autistic traits you have, and some autistic traits such as difficulties in social understanding may lead to a person to be vulnerable to maltreatment, he added.
This research highlights the risks of such adverse outcomes for those with a high number of autistic traits, if adequate safeguarding and support aren't provided.

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