Hey, everyone. If you are enjoying this podcast, do us a huge favor and leave us a five-star review.

Also, drop us a comment. We love to hear from you guys. This is so helpful when others are looking

for a good parenting podcast. You are listening to Feeding the Mouth That Bites You with

Ashley Parrish and Jessica Pfeiffer. A weekly podcast guide on parenting teens and launching them into the world.

As always, we are joined by psychologist and author, Dr. Ken Wilgus.

Hey, everyone and welcome back.

On today's episode, we will be discussing teenagers and their friends.

So this is a topic we've handled a little bit in some of our FAQs, talking about teenagers and their friends. So this is a topic we've handled a little bit in some of our FAQs, talking about

teenagers and their friends and whether or not we have a lot of influence in that area

or what our role is as parents.

But today we're going to get into a little bit more.

So Dr. Ken, let's reiterate what we've said before in the other FAQ episodes about

teenagers and their friends. Do we get to pick their friends? Can we socially manipulate the

situation? I'd like to know. How do you plan a teenage play date? How do we do it? Yeah. So,

as I've said many times before, a privilege is something that you give.

I hand you this privilege.

A freedom is something that really you recognize.

In other words, you don't decide I'm going to let you have the friends that you want.

You need to recognize that as a teenager, they have the freedom to be friends with who they want. You can try to interfere with it

and so forth, but you have to know that one of the reasons you, quote, give that freedom

is because you're recognizing that they are, in fact, going to make their own choices about

friends. Now, what's really funny and one of the reasons I really want

...