Maintaining Long-Distance Friendships as a Military Teen
For many military teens, friendships don’t follow a typical path. Just as connections begin to feel comfortable, another move appears on the horizon. Over time, the goodbye becomes familiar. What’s harder is figuring out how to hold onto those connections once the distance sets in.
But how military kids stay connected is important because good friendships, even long-distance ones, can help young people feel seen and understood. Fortunately, with the right tools and support, those friendships can stay strong – sometimes even grow stronger – despite the distance.
Mobile phones and internet access can be a big help in this department. Research shows that more than half of teens are open to making friends online, and most teens (55%) find texting friends an important component of their day-to-day lives.¹ This already sets a good basis for maintaining long-distance friendships via text and online platforms. It’s already part of a teen’s typical daily life.
This guide walks through the following aspects of long-distance friendships for military teens:
- Why long-distance friendships matter for military teens
- How relocations affect teen friendships and emotional wellbeing
- Coping with separation from friends (what helps and what hurts)
- Digital tools that support long-distance friendships
- Tips for military teens to keep long-distance friendships alive
- Building new connections while honoring old ones
- How parents and mental health providers can support long-distance friendships
Why Long-Distance Friendships Matter for Military Teens
Teen years are full of questions about identity, belonging, and connection. And for teens in military families, it can be tough to feel anchored when everything around them keeps changing. That’s part of why long-distance friendships matter so much. They bring a sense of continuity when the rest of life feels haphazard.
Friendships also provide us with a form of protection. The 2023 Military Teen Experience Survey found that military teens with strong peer support reported significantly better mental health outcomes, including lower rates of depression and anxiety, particularly during periods of transition like relocations and school changes.² Another report on adolescent social development points out that having strong peer bonds helps teens manage stress and bounce back emotionally.³
So, staying connected with friends, while being comforting, can have an even more important function. It can help protect our mental well-being from harm and help us regulate our emotions day-to-day.
Even if friendships exist mostly through screens or voice notes, they still count. They offer emotional support, help teens feel known, and provide a thread of familiarity from place to place. And for many, they become a kind of lifeline.
How Relocation Affects Teen Friendships and Emotional Well-being
Relocation changes a teen’s social world in an instant. Changing schools means that school routines reset and new friendships have to be made. What felt solid the week before can vanish overnight – and it often does. Research indicates that multiple relocations can disrupt healthy development in teens, especially when friendship loss results from military relocation.⁴
Each relocation brings a sense of loss that can feel overwhelming. For many teens, friendships form part of how they see themselves. So when those connections break, something internal gets disrupted, too. A teen’s sense of identity – already under construction – can begin to feel unstable.
To cope with all of the changes and constant goodbyes, teens might pull back socially, avoid the effort of starting over, or mask the hurt with humor or indifference. This kind of emotional exhaustion sometimes gets mistaken for strength or military teen emotional resilience. In reality, it can be a sign of toxic resilience, which involves pushing through without support, because asking for help feels too vulnerable or even “weak.”
What’s more, in homes affected by trauma, repeated deployment, or anxiety, teens can develop PTSD by proxy – absorbing the stress of the adults around them.⁵ Military teens facing isolation have significantly higher rates of suicidal thoughts compared to civilian peers.⁶ If isolation builds, sadness can deepen into something harder to climb out of. In these cases, long-distance friendships often act as a quiet buffer. They help teens stay anchored in a version of themselves that still feels steady, even when their surroundings aren’t.
Coping With Separation From Friends: What Helps and What Hurts
Teen social life in military families is already complex, especially if teens are schooling with civilian children who may not understand their experiences. When you’re starting a new school and leaving a close friend behind, it can feel like something is missing on the day-to-day. For military teens, that feeling can repeat itself more than once.
Some teens try not to think about it. They’ll brush it off, say it’s no big deal, and move forward fast. Others hold on tightly to the friendship, afraid it’ll slip away if they stop texting for a few days. Both reactions are normal. Neither feels good for long.
There’s no perfect formula for handling it, but certain things do make a difference. Here are some things that help:
- Hearing that it’s okay to miss someone, even weeks or months later
- Staying in touch in simple, low-pressure ways (a photo, a voice note, a shared playlist)
- Keeping one or two rituals that carry the friendship forward, even across the distance
- Having adults who notice the emotional shift and make space for it, without rushing a fix
- Knowing that you don’t have to replace the old friendship in order to build something new
And here are some unhealthy patterns it’s easy to fall into but tend to hurt in the long run:
- Pretending it didn’t matter or never bringing it up
- Feeling pressure to “move on” before you’re ready
- Losing all contact without closure
- Avoiding new friendships out of loyalty to the old one, or fear of more loss
- Keeping everything inside because asking for help feels too exposed
One study on adolescent peer relationships found that high-quality friendships buffer against emotional problems, including internalizing symptoms like anxiety and depression, when teens are going through separation from peers.⁷ Maintaining teen friendships online may not be the type of friendship they’ve grown used to, but it can still maintain an important connection – and support their mental health.
Military Teen Connection Tips: How to Stay Close Even When You’re Far Away
Research shows that teens with one strong, enduring friendship have significantly higher self-worth and lower anxiety and depressive symptoms over the following decade.⁸ This alone makes the importance of helping teens maintain friendships evident.
But it’s not always simple for teens. It’s hard not to worry that the connection of friendship might fade when you’re the one moving. Staying close takes effort but it doesn’t have to feel like a second job.
Here are a few things that can help keep the friendship going:
- Start something small. Maybe it’s a meme you always send on Mondays. Or a voice message once a week. It doesn’t have to be big. It just has to happen often enough to remind you both that the friendship is still there.
- Try a few different ways of keeping in touch. If texting feels off, send a short video. Or use a shared photo album. Or play the same game on different nights. Mixing things up keeps the connection going without forcing it.
- Don’t just update – share how things feel. It’s easy to list what’s new: school, room, teachers. But staying close usually means going a little deeper. Let them know what feels weird, exciting, or hard. That’s where the closeness stays alive.
- Say something if the distance feels hard. You don’t have to wait until it gets awkward. Just naming it – “This feels weird now” or “I miss how it used to be” – can make things feel less tense.
- Let the friendship grow with you. Your lives won’t stay the same, and that’s okay. They’ll make new friends. You might too. Letting that happen without guilt makes space for the bond to stretch instead of snap.
- Reach out, even if it’s been a while. You don’t need a perfect opener. Just a “This made me think of you” is enough. Most people are glad someone remembered them.
You don’t need to talk every day to stay close. Sometimes, a few honest moments are enough to keep a friendship steady, even across states or time zones.
Digital Tools That Support Long-Distance Friendships Between Military Teens
With everyday in-person moments with friends gone, phones and laptops become the last thread tying old friendships together. Teens use different digital tools for staying in touch, depending on what feels right:
- Some rely on messaging apps – WhatsApp, Snapchat, or DMs – just to check in or send something funny.
- Others use voice and video for quick updates. A familiar voice can change the whole tone of the day.
- For some, it’s about gaming – playing side by side, even from far away, gives the feeling of hanging out without needing to talk much.
- And there are shared spaces – playlists, photo albums, maybe even a Google Doc where jokes, lyrics, or notes keep a rhythm going in the background.
It doesn’t matter which avenue you go down when it comes to digital tools – choose whatever works for you and what suits you, and your friends’, interests.
How Parents and Providers Can Support Long-Distance Friendships Between Military Teens
Most teens won’t come out and say they’re grieving a friendship – some won’t even recognize that’s what’s happening. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t feeling it. For many, the loss sits quietly under the surface, until someone makes room for it.
There are a few ways parents and providers can make that separation easier to navigate:
1. Normalize the Sadness
Rather than jumping in with “You’ll make new friends,” try something simpler, like “This probably hurts more than you expected.” That kind of response lets teens feel what they’re feeling without pressure to move on too fast.
2. Support Digital Connection Without Judgment
A teen might be texting the same friend from their last school every day. That doesn’t mean they’re avoiding their new life. It might just be the one place they still feel known. Instead of limiting screen time across the board, look at what’s helping them stay connected.
A study examining adolescents who moved into a new community (typically entering middle school) found that while relocation often disrupts peer intimacy and companionship, quality communication, especially through social media or digital means, can buffer those effects.⁹
3. Watch for Emotional Changes
Some teens won’t talk about it, but you’ll see it. Maybe they start sleeping more. Maybe they snap over small things or stop caring about stuff they usually love. These shifts can be signs of stress or even sadness they haven’t figured out how to name yet.
4. Give Space for Both Grief and Growth
They might still miss their old friend while starting to connect with someone new, and that’s not a contradiction. It’s just how teens process change. Try not to force a narrative. Let both experiences exist side by side.
5. Offer Structure, Not Pressure
Suggesting a call or helping them write a letter can be useful, as long as it’s not packed with emotional weight. Don’t make it a project. Research shows that when there’s a supportive parent-adolescent relationship at play, teens may show less aggression and depressive symptoms.¹⁰
6. Connect Teens With Support Systems
Family therapy or even individual therapy for teens can help them manage the stress of consistent moves and lost friendships. Therapy can help teach social skills to teens in transition, provide support through transition periods, and address deep concerns around anxiety and depression.
Reach Out to Mission Prep for Advice on Building Support Networks for Teens in Military Families
At Mission Prep, we talk to a lot of families who are doing their best to provide emotional support for military youth through major changes like moves, new schools, and old friendships left behind.
When teens feel supported consistently, not just in crisis, they tend to adapt better. The right support comes from relationships that are steady, even when everything else isn’t.
We work with the people around teens including the adults who want to help but don’t always know how. Maybe it’s about helping a teen stay connected to someone they left behind or about making a new place feel less like a placeholder.
If you’re trying to figure out what might help a teen feel a little more anchored, we can help think that through.
Contact the Mission Prep team to discuss your options today.
References
- Lenhart, A. (2015, August 6). Teens, technology and friendships. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2015/08/06/teens-technology-and-friendships/
- Military Family Advisory Network. (n.d.). 2023 MTES peer connections report. https://www.militaryfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2023-MTES-Peer-Connections.pdf
- Katz, D. A., Peckins, M. K., & Lyon, C. C. (2019). Adolescent stress reactivity: Examining physiological, psychological and peer relationship measures with a group stress protocol in a school setting. Journal of Adolescence, 74(1), 45–62. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7181333
- Milburn, N. G., & Lightfoot, M. (2013). Adolescents in wartime US military families: A developmental perspective on challenges and resources. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 16(3), 266–277. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3754801
- Cramm, H., Godfrey, C. M., Murphy, S., McKeown, S., & Dekel, R. (2022). Experiences of children growing up with a parent who has military-related post-traumatic stress disorder: A qualitative systematic review. JBI Evidence Synthesis, 20(7), 1638–1740. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34710888/
- Cederbaum, J. A., Gilreath, T. D., Benbenishty, R., Astor, R. A., Pineda, D., DePedro, K. T., Esqueda, M. C., & Atuel, H. (2014). Well-being and suicidal ideation of secondary school students from military families. The Journal of Adolescent Health, 54(6), 672–677. https://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(13)00502-8/pdf
- Jager, J., Yuen, C. X., Putnick, D. L., Hendricks, C., & Bornstein, M. H. (2015). Adolescent-peer relationships, separation and detachment from parents, and internalizing and externalizing behaviors: Linkages and interactions. The Journal of Early Adolescence, 35(4), 511–537. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5844272
- Narr, R. K., Allen, J. P., Tan, J. S., & Loeb, E. L. (2019). Close friendship strength and broader peer group desirability as differential predictors of adult mental health. Child Development, 90(1), 298–313. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5821600/
- Vernberg, E. M., Greenhoot, A. F., & Biggs, B. K. (2006). Intercommunity relocation and adolescent friendships: Who struggles and why? Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 74(3), 511–523. https://greenhoot.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/vernberg-greenhoot-and-biggs-2006.pdf
- Ratliff, E. L., Morris, A. S., Cui, L., Jespersen, J. E., Silk, J. S., & Criss, M. M. (2023). Supportive parent-adolescent relationships as a foundation for adolescent emotion regulation and adjustment. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1193449. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1193449/full
