Importance of close male friends for teen boys

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Teenage boys make incredibly loyal friends. Their friendships are really important to them, and they can be life-saving. I met so many boys whom their teenage friendships who really made the difference between them. Falling to the cracks becoming incredibly depressed and being able to live really rich lives. I think their parents should do whatever they can to make sure that their teenage boys have a really cool core group of other teenage boys that they can hang out with maybe slightly older mentor, because teenage boys not going to tell you everything. Teenage boys are not going to go to their parent and tell them every single secret that's going on in their lives. Parents have to kind of back away from this notion that their kids have to tell them everything, because that's never going to happen, but what you can do to make sure that your teenage boy has a safe place to go to, where they can talk about these feelings is to help them find a friend. Friendships are key. They literally can save boys from killing themselves by making egregious errors and mistakes that could be life changing. I can't overstate enough how important it is for a teenage boy to have another guy in his life to really help him take down a path of success in their teenage years and into adulthood.

Video Categories: ALL PARENTS, Family Life, Gender Differences, TEEN, Social Life, Friends

Malina Saval, Journalist and Author, explains how important close male friends are for teen boys and the major benefits that close friends can have for a teen boy

Transcript

Expert Bio

Malina Saval

Journalist & Author

Malina Saval is the author of The Secret Lives of Boys: Inside the Raw Emotional World of Male Teens. As a journalist, her work has appeared in Variety, Los Angeles Times, Glamour, LA Weekly, Flaunt, Jerusalem Post, Forward, Heeb, Premiere.com, Moment and Fanzine, for whom she pens a monthly column entitled "Sponsored in Part." Her short fiction and essays have been included in Palehouse and The Truth About the Fact literary journals and in the anthology Now Write! Nonfiction: Memoir, Journalism and Creative Nonfiction Exercises from Today's Best Writers and Teachers. She's lectured at several universities, including University of Central Florida and University of Eastern Michigan, and has appeared as a special expert guest on the Tavis Smiley Show (PBS), Fox News, NPR's "Talk of the Nation" and the Patt Morrison Show.