How Your Childhood Friendships Shape You

How your childhood friendships determine who you are as a person.

By Tawney Noyes and Violet Wise

How to build your own friend.

Childhood friendships leave an impact that shapes who you are as a person, through your childhood and your adult life.

As a child, you grow through a lot of critical points as you develop. You learn how to speak and understand language, how to function on your own and begin to develop your own interest through childhood. Having someone else developing with you often shapes who you are as a person. They shape your personality and interests and often influence things you enjoy doing in your spare time.

When children develop, they have critical periods where they must learn certain skills otherwise they will be far harder to learn later in life, for example learning a language. Learning language as a child is far easier than as an adult simply because your brain has a specific period in its development where it braced itself to learn a language. When talking to people who are close with one another, it’s easy to tell that they speak similarly. They use similar slang and often have similar senses of humor. No matter how different they look it’s easy to tell whether or not friends are close based on how they react around one another, this is the result of childhood friendships shaping people. While the way they act may evolve and change overtime, if they stay in constant contact the way childhood friends act will stay parallel with one another.

“We played T-ball together and then our parents became friends and then we just started hanging out,” sophomore Jackson Clarke said. “We’ve been friends for 11 years,” sophomore Sam Wilson said. Sam Wilson and Jackson Clark are childhood friends, they both agree that their friendship has shaped who they are as a person and influenced some of the things they do in their free time. I used to get really quick-tempered on the field and Jackson would come over and calm me down. I don’t think I would still be playing basketball if it wasn’t for him,” Wilson said. He is now on both the varsity and junior varsity basketball teams and continues to improve thanks to his friendship with Clark.

Most people who have been friends with someone since childhood don’t often participate in small talk. You learn their favorite things based on what they do and what they say. They never have to explicitly tell you their favorite color or food. While it’s easy to ask a friend their favorite genre of music, it’s much more rewarding to figure it out on your own. Wilson said, “I think we know each other pretty well. Yeah. We never really asked those, like questions, which is your favorite color, we just kind of figured it out on our own.” All friendships reach a certain point where asking these questions aren’t necessary and almost all small talk is eliminated and most conversations are about more important things.

Friendships that have been developing since childhood are almost impossible to end. While there are outliers in every situation, it’s easy to tell which friendships will continue to last if anything challenges them based on their confidence in each other. “We have a couple of small arguments here and there, but nothing that would ever get us to stop talking to the other,” Wilson said.

When people change and develop, so do their personalities. In high school some best friends fall into different cliques, this leads to some people who seem completely different being close friends. Some of these people are so different it’s hard to imagine that they would be friends if it wasn’t for the fact that they met when they were children. It’s easy to question, if they had met today without ever meeting each other before would they still be friends? “100 percent,” Wilson said. “Yeah, we have a lot of similar friends. We would end up becoming friends anyway,”

Clark said. They both agreed that they would still end up becoming friends, even if they hadn’t shaped each other’s childhood,

On the other side of the spectrum there are childhood friends that are so similar it’s hard to tell them apart. Whether they dress the same or act the same, or share similar niche interest some friends act like they’ve never known a life apart from the friendship they have, and it shows in their behavior and their attitude towards each other,

“We are basically the same person,” Elizabeth “Liz” Smith said. Smith and Serenity Hogue have been friends since they met in fifth grade. “We met in elementary school, in the gym when our bus was running late,” Hogue said. She remembered playing on her phone and Smith approached her, before plopping down next to her and shamelessly asking to play on the girl’s phone wile they waited on the bus. This became a recurring thing that they both reminisce on fondly. They’ve become inseparable ever since.

However when they first met they couldn’t be more different, Hogue was described as caring and empathetic while Smith described herself as cold and closed off. Smith said, “ Used to view the world as a cold and unbearable place, but after a few years of hanging out with Rin (Hogue), she rubbed off on me and I realized that this world has so much love in it.” Smith was adamant that before she had met Hogue she was an insufferable and pessimistic child. While Smith would still describe herself as more negative than Hogue she also admits that she’s seen herself grow and improve over the years due to the optimism and empathy Hogue shows others.

The distance between the two of them is large, as over time they’ve moved almost an hour away from one another. However, both of them remain friends despite their distance. They close the distance by gaming online often and calling. They both agree that if they had never met each other they wouldn’t be the same person they were today. “I was so mean to my friends and to strangers because I thought that’s just how the world worked. After seeing Rin be so kind and empathetic, I realized I wanted to be like that too and I changed,” Smith said. Hogue admits that she’s become kinder and more empathetic towards others since the day they’ve met.

“Truthfully, I can’t remember what I was like before meeting her. But I do remember that I used to be caring to everyone, and she was the cold one.” Hogue said,” I don’t think we could meet each other today. She’s agoraphobic, so very unlikely. Despite that, I’m sure we would be friends even today. I just don’t think we’d be as close.” Hogue and Smith have gone through a lot together, all throughout Middle and High School they stay friends and have stayed friends as they’ve transferred to homeschooling. The distance between them has put no gap in their friendship.

Their friendship has remained almost completely unchallenged in their seven years of friendship, as they’ve both shaped each other in their own ways. “Honestly, I don’t think so. Maybe small things, like what kind of food she likes versus what I like. But nothing big.” In turn they share a wide variety of similar interests. They both enjoy the same kinds of games and music. While they’re favorite artists, food and colors vary in the end they still speak the same and have similar mannerisms. While their friendship didn’t form until the 5th grade there are still plenty more critical points within the time span of 10-14 years of age.

People can also develop different personalities but remain close friends. Opposite to Hogue and Smith, friends that move away from each other can start to develop different habits than they had before. They can start to act more like the people in the town they moved to or the friends that they hang out with when not talking to each other, or mimic people they have parasocial relationships with. While this has the potential to cause some issues, more often than not long standing friends can work through those issues and even become stronger together while exposing each other to different ideologies and media.

Friends that are opposites also influence each other. They can start to find similarities in the movies they watch or the food they eat while maintaining the differences they had before, while still developing parallel to one another. Unlikely friendships like this can be surprising to see, but are more common than you think. Oftentimes, friendships like this can give the people in them a more open mind and a higher understanding of the people around them. They can be more accepting of others and take into account how different people are from one another. These opposites can begin to mimic one another more closely and become more similar than originally assumed, like Hogue and Smith.

These friends will continue to shape one another through high school and into college. Even if friendships come to an end the effects of being around one another through the critical points in ones life will always remain and show through their whole lives.