What Can Adults Learn From Kids’ Friendships?

Just catching up can feel stale. Playing and wasting time together like kids do are how you make memories.

Rachel Simmons was raised Catholic and later joined a Presbyterian church, but she told me the closest thing she’s ever had to true religion came from a childhood friendship. When she was in middle school, she and two other kids, Margo Darragh and Sam Lodge, formed “RMS”—a name combining each of their first initials—that elevated their friend group to a sacred entity.

As they approached high school, the girls would sneak out of their rural Pennsylvania homes at night and one would drive the rest on a four-wheeler into a forest on Lodge’s neighbor’s property. Inspired by Warriors, an adventure-book series, the girls divided the forest into four territories, and each girl ruled over one. The shared area in the middle, featuring a creek with large moss-covered rocks, became their ceremonial site. They’d chant, “Leaders of Star Clan, we come to these rocks, to drink, share tongues, and faithfully talk.” They’d divulge their feelings, meditate in silence, and drink a palmful of the creek water.

These ceremonies were just one part of the elaborate set of practices that RMS developed during middle and high school. Others included three-day sleepovers and a secret code language. The three friends essentially created their own culture and, with it, a profound bond.

Simmons, Darragh, and Lodge, who are all now 29 years old, still gather at least once a year, usually during the winter holidays, to play gift-exchange games, dance, and gorge on food. Their friendship still feels special, but they spend much less time together. And compared with the lush world of traditions they had growing up, the typical ways they now spend time with their other adult friends feel stale, Simmons told me. “How creative can you get when the premise is two couples are meeting up for mini golf from 7 to 9 p.m.?” she wondered.

Like Simmons, many adults do away with the unhurried hangouts and imaginative play that make youthful friendships so vibrant. Though friendships naturally evolve as we grow up, they don’t need to lose that vitality. Continuing to embrace a childlike approach to friendship into adulthood can make for connections that are essentially ageless.

Little matters more in a child’s development than making and maintaining friendships. It’s practically “the job of childhood and adolescence,” Catherine Bagwell, a psychology professor at Davidson College, in North Carolina, told me. It helps that kids have few responsibilities, and that their lives are set up to foster connection. Whether at playgrounds or school, children spend most of their waking hours surrounded by peers. Even after the bell rings, many students head to playdates, sports teams, or clubs.

Kids’ time together is often dedicated to play. For many children, all they need to entertain themselves is shared space, the right companions, and their imagination. But this is not just a pastime; it’s a vulnerable way to connect with someone, Jeffrey Parker, a psychology professor at the University of Alabama, told me. After analyzing more than a decade’s worth of recorded conversations between children and their friends, Parker noticed a common dynamic: If one kid introduces an unexpected idea, the other must riff to make it work. Doing this with a new playmate is a “high-risk strategy”—maybe they’ll shut you down—but when your ideas mesh, you get to invent something new together.

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Spending so much creative time together can produce intense ties. Laura Goodwyn, a middle-school counselor in Arlington, Virginia, told me about a group of students who all dressed the same and assigned one another familial roles such as “mom” and “son.” A seventh-grade social-studies teacher in Rex, Georgia, Ogechi Oparah, described students who begged to sit together in class because they couldn’t bear to be separated. I’ve seen this exuberance myself, such as in my friend’s 2-year-old, who exclaimed the name of his friend while rushing to the front door to greet him.

RMS became close past the age when make-believe is the norm, yet, in their middle- and high-school years, they preserved young kids’ overarching approach to friendship: Keep one another company for large stretches of time without a preset agenda. Darragh remembers their hangouts as endless “free play.” They took familiar containers, such as a sleepover, and invented complex rituals within them.

Of course, adult friendships have plenty going for them. Adults tend to have stronger cognitive, social, and emotional skills, which allow them to better empathize with, offer advice to, and otherwise support friends. And with age comes longer-standing relationships; this shared history can enrich friends’ understanding of one another.

Many young adults enjoy this emotional depth along with an abundance of free time, before family and career responsibilities pick up in midlife. It’s no wonder that this age is a high-water mark for friendship. Those who go to college get a few extra years of living near their peers. Later in adulthood, though, people have more demands on their time; work, romantic partnership, and caregiving all compete for their attention. Plus, when adults enter the workforce full-time, potential new friends don’t constantly surround them the way they did in school or while living in dormitories. Though some continue to carve out time for their social lives, Bagwell said, friendship tends to become “a luxury rather than priority.”

Under these new circumstances, many people see friends less frequently—and they tend to spend the time they do have together differently. For efficiency’s sake, they might pair socializing with other activities, such as sharing a meal or supervising a playdate. Though grabbing dinner with a friend can be engaging, it’s a far cry from elaborate forest ceremonies. Adults would make a scene if they leapt out of their chair at a restaurant to enact a silly sketch; simply laughing too loudly could elicit side-eye from fellow diners. Friends could choose to confide in each other at a meal, but the activity doesn’t inherently invite the type of uninhibited openness that play can.

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Yet activities with less defined norms, which Sheila Liming, the author of Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time, calls “improvised” gatherings, can make some uncomfortable. Parker, the psychology professor, told me he’d find it hard to call up a friend and say “Wanna go throw some stones in the river?” because he senses that adult get-togethers should have a clear purpose. “We know what to expect of something like a dinner party,” Liming said. But, especially with someone new, just hanging out is more confusing. “There’s this open feeling about, well, how long is it going to take? And what are we going to do? And what am I supposed to wear?”

This pursuit of efficiency and the safety of following norms can come at the cost of pleasure. Liming told me that an efficiency mindset risks making friendships feel transactional, as if each meeting should be “worth it.” But squeezing hangouts into short, infrequent slots is unlikely to feel fulfilling. If you haven’t seen each other in a while, focusing on catching up is natural. Ticking through life’s headlines, however, can feel like exchanging memos, whereas joint adventures create memories—the foundation of close friendship. As the sociologist Eric Klinenberg told The Atlantic, “You tend to enrich your social life when you stop and linger and waste time.”

Even if more adults were willing to ask friends to skip rocks or loll on the couch, our grown-up minds can sap the improvisational fun from these gatherings. To enjoy the rewards of play, you have to take risks, but adults are often too consumed by self-consciousness to run with someone’s silly idea, let alone suggest one.

Our desire for playful connection doesn’t disappear after childhood. For some people, it gets redirected to romance. Couples mimic intense childhood friendships by spending free-flowing time together, marking the relationship with symbolic tokens such as rings, and developing a miniature culture, complete with inside jokes and a shared vernacular. But celebrating adult friendships in this way is rarer—and harder.

This summer, adults flocked to theaters dressed in suits and fedoras or in fluorescent outfits for doubleheader screenings of Barbie and Oppenheimer. It’s a recent, popular example of adults embracing fun with friends, though there are plenty of others, whether Dungeons and Dragons groups or elaborate fantasy-football leagues. Clearly, adults don’t completely stop creatively connecting with friends. The challenge lies in foregrounding play and inefficiency, making these features of hanging out more common.

If RMS’s youthful escapades are any indication, one way for adults to restore unrushed socializing is by living closer to friends, even with them. When I recently had dinner at a house shared by a couple, their four-month-old, and three of their friends, I joined in their playful ritual of sharing a high, a low, and a surprising or fun story. One of the housemates mentioned to me that preparing and cleaning up meals are his favorite moments at home because the group falls into easy conversation. I thought of this when Goodwyn, the middle-school counselor, told me that her students seemed happiest walking between classes or to the lunchroom. Adult friends aren’t usually present for these in-between moments. They may get dinner, but they rarely go to the grocery store together; they might attend a concert, but they aren’t necessarily around when one of them hears a new song. By living together, the friends I visited ensured they’d see one another regularly, helping them develop the sort of intimacy that kids have effortless access to.

Read: Live closer to your friends

Oparah finds that stumbling upon friends is harder in the suburbs, so she and her community make intentional decisions to be around one another, whether that’s tagging along on a Target trip or drinking wine on the patio. They also delight in more whimsical ways of spending time together. One day this year, three of Oparah’s friends texted proposals for how to hang out, including grilling, dressing up in costumes, watching a movie, and playing games. It occurred to them that they could do all of it, and their response was, Why not? “That theatrical idea of ‘yes, and,’” Oparah said, “just feels very playful and childlike to me.”

So the four adults had a sleepover while their partners or babysitters cared for their children. One dressed up as a popcorn container; there was a hunting cap, a flapper outfit, and a French mustache. That night, as Oparah fell asleep on a couch between her friends, she thought to herself, “This is home.”

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