Your Daughter. Girls’ Association Schools

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СКАЧАТЬ Can she identify any other girls who seem to be by themselves? They could agree to meet up at break. They may not become close friends, but there’s comfort in having the arrangement.

      • Are there any new girls who seem to be on their own and might like someone to help them settle in?

      As a parent, the real difficulty is that your daughter’s confidence is likely to be very low. She may find making the kind of approaches mentioned above too difficult and may just say no to anything you suggest, not least because she’s afraid of failing again.

      If you’ve reached that stage, you probably need to speak with the school, specifically with one of the staff in charge of pastoral care. They are best placed to quietly help your daughter in school and they can unobtrusively arrange things for her to be involved in. Hopefully, her confidence will then increase and she’ll be able to make friends for herself.

       Friendship Q&A

       No way to treat a friend

       Q: My 12 year old daughter has a group of friends, and at the moment when she walks up to meet them (at break, for example), they giggle and run off. Two of these ‘friends’ usually get the school bus home with her but lately are getting a different bus and not telling her. I just do not know how to help. She is not a giggly, silly girl but her friends are; I don’t think she joins in when they are being silly. She has told me that sometimes she finds them a bit boring but obviously wants to be part of the group. She is a bright girl and does want to do well, but sadly this is not seen as ‘cool’. She says she does not understand why they run off, as ‘it’s no way to treat a friend’. Can you offer any advice? Children spend a lot of time at school and I hate to think of her being unhappy.

      A: This situation is very common indeed. In each year group in every school, there will be girls who exert their in uence by controlling who can and cannot be part of their group. This is agony for girls in Years 7, 8 and 9 and needs help and intervention. In each year group, there will be quite a large number of girls who wish to be ‘cool’ and belong to this type of friendship group. However, there will be others who are sensible, kind and caring and just want to get on with their work and activities. Your daughter needs to join a group of more similar-minded girls. This might be helped by joining in with some new extracurricular activities or finding different places to sit in class and at lunchtimes.

      You may need to ask for the help of your daughter’s Head of Year or tutor who should talk to the girls involved and explain that this behaviour is unacceptable. If you are not happy with the outcome, go to a member of the senior leadership team. If change is to happen, adult intervention will be needed. In addition, your daughter may need your help to stand up to the girls and tell them that their behaviour is unpleasant. You might suggest what she could say the next time they ignore her.

       She’s my best friend, but am I hers?

       Q: My 14-year-old daughter likes school, but she seems generally unhappy and I think it is to do with problems she has being accepted by some of the other girls. She has a best friend and they do things together, but the friend is very popular and gets invited to lots of parties and sleepovers by other girls while my daughter never seems to get invited. She says she hates it when they are all talking any advice? Children spend a lot of time at school and I hate to think of her being unhappy. about what they did the night before and she wasn’t there and she thinks they do it deliberately to spite her. Do you think there is anything I or her teachers could do about it without showing her up in front of others?

      A: Girls’ friendships are crucial to their sense of themselves, their con dence and their wellbeing. When friendships are not going well, every other aspect of their lives can be affected. Some girls have the happy knack of making friends easily; others need support and guidance on how to gain, nurture and keep friends, as well as how to be a good friend. This is where you, as her mother, can offer your own experiences.

      From what you say, your daughter knows how to make and grow one special friendship but has not yet appreciated that having a wider circle is healthier. This is most probably why she feels that these other girls are deliberately excluding and mocking her. It’s far more likely that they are simply being thoughtless rather than that they are trying to make her unhappy.

      The problem is that, just as you cannot force children to eat, you cannot force them to be friends. As her mother, what you can do to aid your unhappy daughter is to help her to develop strategies for surviving disappointment and for making a wider range of friends. It is dangerous for her to be so dependent on just one friend. As people grow up, they evolve and change, so having lots of friends is safer. After all, your daughter may not always want to be close to her current ‘best friend’, even if she cannot imagine such a situation right now. Has your daughter tried asking a wider group of girls to join her in an activity? Has she quietly asked her friend why she is not being invited on these sleepovers?

      Ask her to try both these strategies, as well as encouraging her to develop new interests, perhaps ones that her friend doesn’t have, so that she can meet a whole new set of potential friends. If she is still feeling isolated, try contacting her form teacher to ascertain whether she appears to be isolated at school. If so, her school should be able to suggest further strategies for you both. Nobody would claim that the teenage years are easy; good friendships can really help.

       My daughter’s best friend is too clingy

       Q: My 10-year-old daughter has had a best friend for over a year now. However, she is starting to find her a bit clingy. She still likes her but she wants to spread her wings a bit and is not sure how to do this without upsetting her. Any advice?

      A: The intensity of ‘best friendships’ can be a double-edged sword — a source of tremendous happiness, but also the cause of real anxiety when things cool off a bit, or the two friends mature at different rates, and therefore begin to want different things. Quite understandably, your daughter wants to be really kind in separating a bit, and it would certainly be kinder if the impetus for this separation isn’t seen as coming from her. You can do a lot to help mastermind this, and she will bene t from your help. Start looking at times when they meet outside school and think about cutting these down. There may be all sorts of reasons that you can find to need your daughter at home more, or out with you more often. If your daughter is able to say to her friend, for example, that she is sorry she can’t see her after school on Thursdays now because you want her to do some-thing else, then you will start to break the dependence. Talk to your daughter’s school as well, as they will be able, unobtrusively, to engineer things so that your daughter and her friend are not always together, and are put in different groups and perhaps do different activities, so that they spend more and more time with others. Together, these strategies, with everyone working diplomatically in the background, will ease their separation and yet should mean that they can remain really good friends — the ideal outcome.

       Why does my daughter sabotage her friendships?

       Q: Since my daughter was a little girl (she is an only child), she has been in constant ghts with her friends. As a result, she is now 15 and has no friends. Her pattern is to make a friend and after a few months there are always comments such as ‘My friend is not very nice’ or ‘She did this or that.’ An argument then occurs, and after she leaves this friend, or they leave her, my daughter goes on to another friend and so on. I have talked to her on many occasions about this. We have moved countries often, but I have always tried to make her feel secure. Is it because she feels insecure that she sabotages her friendships?

      A: One of the hardest things about friendships is learning that other people rarely do exactly what we want them to do. When we were little, our world revolved around СКАЧАТЬ