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ibakecakes wrote:Thee other side of the coin I have witnessed is where the mothers really get on and try to make the kids friends so that they can spend loads of time together.....

Ignoring the inflammatory first aspect to the op.
There have been studies that suggest that very many parents choose very different friends at the school gate than they would choose otherwise. The benifits of obtaining friends associated with your children's schooling and some of the children's after school activities have many advantages in a parents daytime and mundane lives away from those that they hold most dear.And they will do as much as they can to keep most of the two types of friends apart.

I will have to find a link to support the above statement when I have the time.

To some degree I would guess that the above is true for some people in there online lives too?

I was extremely influential when it came to whom my children befriended. If they cussed, the first time they were sent home, the second time they were told not to come back. The same for any other type of behavior that I did not want my children to adopt as their own. Smoking, stealing & drugs, sorry but they needed to find another kid to be with, not mine.

I'm not sure what your definition of a "traveler" is. Here in the US we have migrant workers & gypsies, which I'm thinking may be the same as travelers. My mother in law came from a gypsy clan (Roma) this I found out years after I had been married. She went to the extreme in eliminating the friends that her grandchildren befriended. She had this uncanny ability to just know which child was going to grow to be the adult you do not want around. We had several heated discussions about this. Years later I realized she was right 99% of the time.

My parents would have never allowed me to date her son if they had known that at one time she had been part of a gypsy clan. LOL

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Isn't part of the job of a parent to give their children the tools to know right from wrong, to allow children to make their mistakes, to learn from them with your guidance and to be the safety net if it all goes tits-up?

i think it is better for a child to learn who are the "good" friends and who are the "bad" at an early age when the trouble they can get into is minor, and not leave it until they are in their teens or twenties before they find out the (very) hard way to distinguish between the two.

Without 24-hour surveillance how can a parent possibly monitor the friends their child makes? As long as one sets out one's own standards within one's own home, of course.

In my opinion.

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this is a traveller.

Re question.

If you can exert some control do it .. your kids will work a way round you or rebel though if you don't give them the tools and experience to make up their own minds. So it is balance. When your kids have good freinds encourage them and facilitate the friendship. Bad friends usually come from boredom.

I don't have my own children....but, my parents were very good at accepting our friends in our home, and as long as they behaved there, they didn't assume anything. Some kids were allowed in our home, that weren't in other kids homes, for superficial ( they were poor and lived in the "bad" part of town), or, irrational reasons ( the way they dressed, for instance)....there were obviously those they thought were a bad influence...but, they never said we couldn't be a friend to anyone...and almost always we figured out for ourselves if someone was not a good person to hang out with, for whatever reason..that trust kept us from doing something out of rebellion or spite...I think it was a good way to be, and if I had had any children...I would have done it the same...