Is It Normal For A High School Junior To Be Friends With Freshmen? A Teacher’s Perspective
Last Tuesday, I found 16-year-old Mia hovering outside my high school counseling office after the final bell, twisting the NewJeans keychain on her lanyard and kicking a loose tile by the door. When I invited her in, she got straight to the point: she’s a junior, and she’s been hanging out almost every after-school day with two 14-year-old freshmen she met on cross country. Other juniors on the team have been making snide comments under their breath, calling her “creepy” and saying she can’t hack making friends with people her own age. “Am I actually doing something wrong here?” she asked, picking at a chipped mint-green nail polish.
A week later, I got an email from Mia’s mom that echoed the same question. She’d seen Mia’s Instagram story from the weekend, where Mia and the two freshmen had posted photos from a horror movie night, and she was worried. Other parents at her book club had told her she should step in, that it wasn’t normal for an 11th grader to want to spend so much time with underclassmen. “Should I encourage her to make friends her own age? Is this a sign she’s struggling socially?” she wrote.
This question hit close to home. When I was a junior, I was that kid who spent half my free time with a freshman. She was my little sister’s best friend, whose parents were going through a messy divorce, and she’d show up at our back door most afternoons wanting to get out of her house. We’d bake burnt chocolate chip cookies and rewatch 90s rom-coms on our old VCR. I had a solid group of friends my own age I ate lunch with and went to football games with, but there was something nice about hanging out with someone who didn’t care that I hadn’t been asked to prom yet, or that I was still waiting on my driver’s license. The first time anyone said it was weird was at Thanksgiving that year, when my great-aunt pulled my mom aside and asked why I couldn’t “find friends my own age.” It made me self-conscious for months, even though nothing about the friendship felt wrong.
Over the 12 years I’ve worked as a high school counselor, I’ve seen this question come up at least once a semester, almost always framed as a problem. But age gaps in high school friendships are almost never a problem on their own—it’s the dynamics of the friendship that matter, not the difference in birthdays. The narrative that older kids only hang out with younger kids because they can’t fit in with their own peers is just that, a narrative. Sometimes it’s just about shared interests. For Mia, all three girls are into the same indie graphic novels that most kids her age grew out of a couple years ago, and they all stay late after cross country to help the coach put away equipment, so that’s how they bonded. What Mia likes most, she told me, is that the freshmen aren’t obsessed with college apps yet. “Every time I get lunch with my old friends, all we talk about is SAT scores and early action deadlines,” she said. “With them, we just make fun of the cafeteria’s new pizza crust and talk about what we’re drawing. It’s a break.”
Instead of immediately panicking when you find out your kid is friends with someone a couple years younger, there are a few simple, concrete things to check. First, ask yourself: has your kid cut off all contact with people their own age, or are they just adding new friends? If they still eat lunch with their grade, go to the same events they always have, and just have an extra friend outside their grade, there’s nothing to fix. Second, check if the dynamic is equal. Is your kid getting something out of the friendship, not just giving? Mia gets stress relief from hanging out with people who aren’t wrapped up in junior year pressure, and the freshmen get someone to answer their questions about AP classes and how to deal with difficult teachers. That’s a two-way street. The only time it becomes a concern is when one person is always giving money, rides, or emotional labor and getting nothing in return, or when one person is pressuring the other to do things they’re not comfortable with.
When Mia’s mom came in to meet with me, I gave her three simple questions to ask Mia instead of leading with “why are you hanging out with freshmen?” The first was “What do you like most about spending time with them?” The second was “Is there anything that feels off or uncomfortable when you’re together?” The third was “Do you still get to do all the things you used to do with your other friends?” It worked a lot better than she expected. She told me later that she’d had no idea how burnt out Mia already was on college talk, because Mia never brought it up on her own. The friendship wasn’t a sign that Mia was struggling socially—it was a coping mechanism for the stress of junior year that she’d never been able to name.
The same checks work if you’re the parent of a freshman who’s friends with an older upperclassman, too. I’ve had so many parents panic the second their 14-year-old becomes friends with a 16-year-old, assuming the worst. But most of the time, it’s just a shared sport, club, or interest that brought them together. The only things to watch for are the same: secrecy that’s out of character, pressure to do things that don’t fit with your family’s rules, and a total abandonment of their same-age friends.
A month after that first meeting with Mia, I saw her in the hallway carrying a stack of flyers for the art club’s fall open house. She had one of the freshmen with her, and they were laughing about a misprint on the bottom of the flyers. Mia still gets the occasional comment from other juniors, but she’s stopped caring. Her mom says she still catches herself glancing at Mia’s Snapchat sometimes and feeling a twinge of worry, when other parents ask why her daughter is always with underclassmen. But now she just reminds herself that the goal of raising a teenager isn’t to get them to check all the “normal” boxes. It’s to help them build kind, reciprocal friendships that make them feel good, whatever the age of the other person. This one’s working for Mia, and that’s enough for right now.
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