Helping Families Train Kids for Biblical Friendship

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

As a pastor, I’ve had many families come to me about conflicts or challenges involving their child’s friendships. These often come with their concerns about a friend who may be a bad influence. Rarely, however, do parents seek guidance on how to proactively lead their children in this area. Parents can take a hands-off approach to their children’s selection of friends and hope everything works out. Few are the parents who engage in the active discipleship and training regarding this important arena.

Most don’t recognize the need until a problem arises. By teaching parents how to guide, oversee, and disciple their children’s friendships, we can better equip them to lead in this area and help prevent some of the difficulties they might otherwise face.

So, what makes for a good friend?

Solomon gave his sons wise advice to guide them in the choosing of their friends. Consider these biblical friendship principles from proverbs:

• “The righteous choose their friends carefully, but the way of the wicked leads them astray.” (Proverbs 12:26 NIV)
• “Make no friendship with a man given to anger, nor go with a wrathful man, lest you learn his ways and entangle yourself in a snare.” (Proverbs 22:24–25)
• “Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm.” (Proverbs 13:20)

Sadly, Solomon’s son, Rehoboam did not embrace his father’s counsel and divided the nation in one generation. It is worth rereading the story to be reminded of his downfall. He chose the foolish counsel of his childhood friends over the elders of Israel.

“Then King Rehoboam took counsel with the old men, who had stood before Solomon his father while he was yet alive, saying, “How do you advise me to answer this people?” And they said to him, “If you will be a servant to this people today and serve them, and speak good words to them when you answer them, then they will be your servants forever.” But he abandoned the counsel that the old men gave him and took counsel with the young men who had grown up with him and stood before him. And he said to them, “What do you advise that we answer this people who have said to me, ‘Lighten the yoke that your father put on us’?” And the young men who had grown up with him said to him, “Thus shall you speak to this people who said to you, ‘Your father made our yoke heavy, but you lighten it for us,’ thus shall you say to them, ‘My little finger is thicker than my father’s thighs. And now, whereas my father laid on you a heavy yoke, I will add to your
yoke. My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions.’”” (1 Kings 12:6–11)

God gave us these stories, the apostle Paul tells us, to equip us and help us learn from past mistakes (Romans 15:4). Had Rehoboam build friendships with some of the Elders of Israel in addition to his less experienced childhood friends he may have trusted the wiser advice of those with more experience. Here are a few principles to help you guide
your families to a better outcome.

Five principles for biblical friendship

Here are five principles to equip your parents to lead in the area of biblical friendships:

1. Emphasize how influential friendship is

Impress upon parents the shaping influence friendships will have on their children. In the above scriptures from Proverbs, we see that friends play an influencing force upon our lives. The apostle Paul shared, “Do not be deceived: ‘Bad company ruins good morals.’ Wake up from your drunken stupor, as is right, and do not go on sinning. For some have no knowledge of God.” (1 Corinthians 15:33–34). So clearly our children’s choice of friends matters.

Encourage your parents to involve themselves in the selection of their children’s friends and the monitoring of those friendships. Teachers in the classroom become quickly aware of kids who shouldn’t sit together because they are a poor influence on each other. A wise relocation of a few seats can make all the difference. Parents have an important say in the choice of their children’s friends and can monitor the fruit of their sons or daughters friendships.

Once chosen, biblical friendships are not plug and play. They take work. Thankfully, we don’t parent in a vacuum, we parent in community. When parents work together to monitor friendships, speak wisdom into them, and direct those friendships everyone benefits.

It is important to help our families recognize that friendships can be an influence for benefit or harm and their oversight of friendships can make the difference.

2. Teach the importance of godly friends

Equip Parents to teach their children the importance of cultivating biblical friendships.

Here are a few keys to pass along:

• Pursue friendships with those who fear the Lord “I am a companion of all who fear you, of those who keep your precepts.” (Psalm 119:63)
• Choose loyal, caring and loving friends “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.” (Proverbs 17:17)
• Friendships shape who you become. Here again is the scripture from Proverbs: “Make no friendship with a man given to anger, nor go with a wrathful man, lest you learn his ways and entangle yourself in a snare.” (Proverbs 22:24–25)
• Enter a friendship more aware of what you can give than what you will get. “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13)

3. Encourage involvement

Encourage parents to be actively involved in choosing their children’s friends.

While it may go against the norms of modern culture, which often views friendship as a personal decision, parents should be encouraged to take an active role in helping their children form wise, healthy friendships, especially when they are young.

When my two oldest daughters were in first and second grade, I noticed they were enamored by the outward beauty of one of the girls in their class. At the same time, I also noticed one of the other girls was mostly ignored. She and her sister had thick framed glasses and a quiet disposition, but I knew their parents to share our values. So, my wife and orchestrated opportunities to get our girls together. The four of them became fast friends and still cherish their friendships today.

• Consider inviting a parent and child from another family that you think would make a good friend to join you for a book or Bible study.
• Rather than hosting a birthday party every year with a dozen peers, ask your son or daughter to invite a family of one of their friends over for dinner. Take an active role in helping your son or daughter pick a family that shares your values.
• Invite them to stick around after the meal and just hang out. Events like these will help foster helpful, godly friendships.
• It is ok to push the pause button on a friendship that is not serving to help your son or daughter’s maturity in life and in the faith. One of my sons, was as much a bad influence on a group of boys as they were a bad influence on him. So, I explained to the dads that I thought we should put their hanging out on together unsupervised on hold and instead began a discipleship group with one of the dads so that we were present to help shape the way our sons related. We learned providing a few slices of pizza at a local pizza restaurant was all the incentive needed to get buy in from our boys.

4. Embrace intergenerational friendship

Help parents in your church embrace the value of cross-generational friendships. Our current educational system groups our children almost exclusively with their same age peers. Parents fall into line with this system and assume all their children’s friends should come out of this pool. That was Rehoboam’s downfall. He trusted the counsel of his childhood friends over the wisdom of the elders of Israel and exploded his nation.

The problem with same age peer relationships is you have the blind leading the blind. Children need discipleship and mentoring relationships in addition to same age peer friendships.

When selecting a piano teacher for one of your kids, would you choose someone who picked up piano a few years ago and arguably never taught anyone piano before? No, you want someone with years of experience so that your son or daughter is properly trained.

Yet, when it comes to friendship, most parents surround their children exclusively with same age peers and miss the opportunity to help their children build biblical friendships across generations.

Here are a few tips to pass on to parents to encourage intergenerational friendships:

• Train your older children to wisely lead their younger siblings. Help older children realize the impact of their choices on their younger siblings. Schedule activities where the strengths of older siblings can be leveraged to help their younger brothers and sisters.
• Deploy aunts and uncles. Some of my best friends growing up were my uncles who took me fishing and passed along their wisdom. When my daughters reached middle school, I asked their aunt (my younger sister), who was a master of organization if she would disciple our two older daughters. Not only did they learn some of her organizational prowess, my sister also passed on her strong faith in the Lord.
• Establish mentorships for your children. When our Jr. High children are struggling in math, we look for a tutor gifted in math to instruct them. The same principle applies to social skills and faith development. Assigning a mentor with solid biblical character to help our children mature can be a key step for their development.

5. Help parents with struggling children

As our children pass into the teen years some of them will struggle as a prodigals, rejecting their parent’s faith. Families in your church who are actively guiding their children’s friendships can treat these struggling teens as outcasts.

• Encourage families to reach out to struggling children and include them in adult led youth activities. The danger of a poor influence is dramatically reduced when adults are present and actively involved. Helping your children become influencers and reach out to struggling peers will help prepare them to be a good friend later in their college days when you are not around to help them.
• Teach parents with struggling children to look for opportunities to share their challenges with other parents and ask for prayer. Humility fosters support and provides an opportunity for families to join together. When other parents know you recognize the challenges they see, they will often offer their help.
• When you observe a family with struggles – that is usually an opportunity to inject a bit of pastoral care to them come up with a plan to press into their children’s lives and actively disciple their children.

Conclusion

When families in your church begin to take a more active role in the formation and discipleship of their children’s friendships everybody wins. That doesn’t mean you won’t have challenges, but it does mean most challenges won’t go undetected and grow into a larger problem. Active parenting which includes proactive discipleship, and the tending of our children’s friendships is hard work. Let’s remember the encouragement of Paul as we labor, “And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.” (Galatians 6:9).

© 2025, Marty Machowski. All rights reserved. Used by permission.