The friends we drift away from

My son is at the peak of his imagination game years - the years in which your best friend is the person who will pretend to be a Pokemon with you and then join into a fight with Bowser that is filled with explosions. (Side note: Children would make excellent improv artists, except that they have difficulty taking suggestions from outsiders.)

But sometimes we have to remind our son of the basic tenets of playing with others, like "learn names" and "seriously, you need to introduce yourself." I am sure this will get better with time. And while I enjoy watching his social life develop, the one thing I don't think I will be prepared for is the first friendship breakup.

Let's think this through: How many of you childhood friends do you still have? And I mean the type of friends that you regularly hang out with and speak to, not the ones who you keep up with via social media only. The numbers are pretty low, and even more interestingly, most of us lost those friendships at a crucial transition point in our lives. Friendships in which children were really different from one another (in interests, academics or otherwise) become doomed across the threshold years. So, it is harder to hold onto a friendship between elementary school and junior high, or between junior high and high school; there are too many influences around to break those apart.

While that all makes a lot of sense from the safety of my desk, I remember how hard it was to recognize that a friend and I had grown apart. And I imagine it will be just as hard to watch my son go through that as well - even if the act of breaking off relationships is actually a healthy part of life.

Do you still regularly hang out with any of your friends from seventh grade? Tell me how close the friendship still is in the comments.