Thank you for downloading the Focus on the Family Parenting Podcast. You can find more helpful advice at

Focus on the Family.com slash parenting podcast.

Something I told my kids from time to time was if you want some good friends, then learn to be a good friend.

And it can be really hard to be or find good friends in the middle school years, the high school years, there's so much

pressure and there's so much of a yearning to be popular. But you can encourage

your child to stand out by noticing others being something that we would call

a contributor in friendships. I'm John Fuller along with Danny Wareton.

Danny you talk a lot about being a contributor, not a consumer. I really appreciate that

emphasis. We'll get more to that in a moment, but first let's go ahead and listen to

a conversation Jim Daly and I had with Danny and with Jesse Manassian. They both offered some really helpful advice on guiding

pre-teens in relationships.

Jesse, you were a guest a while back on the broadcast we were talking about a book you had

written at the time called crushed and it's about boy girl relationships I'm saying this for

the listeners not for you you wrote the book but yeah but something happened around that time I think

with your daughter so tell us remind us what what the story so this is what happens

when you have an author for a parent. I was writing this book called Crushed,

Why Guys Don't Have to Make or Break You.

And my daughter was probably about six or seven.

And so she had heard kind of you know just the talk around the

dinner table or you know what mommy had been doing was about this book they had

even drawn me cute little cran covers to submit to the publisher for a

consideration for this book.

...