Year 6 child, how invested are you in there friendships etc

[gingajewel]

My dd is in year six and has had the same best friend since she was four. The last few weeks her best friend has turned her back on my dd and no longer really wants to be friends with her.
My dd is very sensitive and shy and doesn’t really have any other friends, and I should point out that all these girls have tik tok/Snapchat etc and my daughter doesn’t. She is finding the fact this girl has turned her back on her heartbreaking and I really done know what to do. How invested are you in your dd/ds friendships, especially if they are super shy and not got many friends?
It is upsetting me as my dd is ultra sensitive and I’m trying to build her resilience etc. They are in isolation at present which is alienating her even more as all the girls in her class are face timing etc but my dd hates things like that.

It might be a good idea to step back a bit OP. Your dd needs to learn resilience by herself and she won’t do this with you hovering. By all means, be there with hugs and love, but she needs to learn to live her own life.

@Nomnomarrgh I totally agree with you and I genuinely never say anything to her face about it unless she brings it up! Resilience is such a tough thing to instill isn’t it! I guess I just feel sad for her, girls can be vile!

Are there any interests your daughter would be interested in pursuing outside school? I think it's helpful to have friends away from school if possible. Girls can be so cliquey, it's nice to have other friends from other settings, especially if the school ones begin to be difficult-- it means that not everything feels lost. The rest is for your daughter to navigate. Be there with the hugs and keep the dialogue open. Girls can be so cruel.

She goes to dance and has been going for five years but doesn’t actually talk to anyone there, she is painfully shy. I think that’s what makes me feel so sad for her.

Social media reinforces friendships over lockdown/ covid restrictions the way playdates/playing out would traditionally. Unfortunately without access to these she's likely to get dropped from her friend groups who are meeting up virtually.

I agree with you re: Snapchat and tiktok, my year 6 doesn't have access to either, and untill lockdown had no online connection with her friends. Roblox and Skype on the other hand have been really useful throughout lockdown, Dd is an only and without it she wouldn't have 'seen' another child the whole time and it has helped develop her friendships which hopefully will continue once they are off to different secondaries. Would she be interested in Skype, she could just use the chat option if she didn't want to video chat. The chat saves so you can read it later if necessary unlike Snapchat and in my experience they just send photos of themselves pulling funny faces and silly gifs to one another. Or if youre my Dd as I found out tonight, load up Disney+ and presents her screen to the rest of the group so they can all watch the same show.

She does play roblox and has asked people to send her their roblox codes however when she tried to join in tonight they ran off from her even on roblox! She is so shy but has for upset about it today! I think people see her as the geeky child but she just hates all the drama and I think that is why she latched on to one child, who unfortunately now wants to be in the ‘popular’ group so therefore is excluding my dd! It sure is a tough one!

*has got upset

It's hard, let the school know so they can keep an eye out and make sure it doesn't turn nasty. They maybe able to pair her up with another equally shy child

It will probably be better once she goes to High School as there will be a large pool of eers and she'll find someone else with similar interests to her.

Bless her, it’s such a tough age.

Can you look at signing her up for something that requires them being in groups? Brownies maybe? If she gets talking to some of them then maybe it will boost her friendships? Even if it just acts as a buffer until she gets to high school?

What about your friends do any of them have kids of a similar age you could meet up with?

Does she have a phone at all? Could be an ideal Christmas present - she doesn’t have to have Tiktok etc just a means of contact with someone.

Poor thing I don’t envy kids at the minute, they must feel so isolated.

Your dd sounds just like mine, OP. Mine is yr 9 now, and has always used Roblox/Minecraft as a way of joining in, as she struggles socially. She also went to dancing for 5 years without talking to anyone there! She made a couple of friends in Yr 7 who then dropped her at the start of yr 8, which was tough. She is young for her years, and doesn't fit in with the more mature girls of her age. She is actually now friends with some of the boys who don't fit in with the other boys - as genuine friends, not in a 'fancying' type way (as said, she's not like a lot of the girls her age!) I'm so glad she is at a mixed sex school.

Nothing really to add other than to say this is us too, and I hope your dd finds her people.

You need to encourage her to make other friends. These girls clearly aren’t.

That’s the problem with ‘best friends’ they exclude all others. How many friends has she sidelined in favor of this one girl? How many girls were hurt by their actions to exclude?

It works both ways.

If she is so shy what have you been doing to work on that for the last few years? How do you intend to build her resilience? It's never a good idea to only have one friend. She could be ill, or leave, or worse still this. Presumably you and your dd have talked about this before. How does she feel.
Maybe talk to teacher?
What secondary is she going to. Are all the girls going? How many girls are in her class? Surely she could be friends with others? Is the secondary big? Lots of feeder schools? How are you planning on her making friends then? Does she even know what to do? You've got 9 months to teach her the skills.

Its really hard, my DSD struggles a lot with friendships as she has quite different interests to the other girls at school but the boys don't really accept her either. We have no choice to get involved as she lives over 100 miles away but I do think its best not to anyway. So hard though when they're sad! I personally would just let her have the social media and monitor it closely - make sure you have all passwords and are logged in on your phone so you get all the notifications, put tiktok on restricted mode so the majority of inappropriate material is filtered out (although be aware things can sometimes slip through). With current restrictions she will be left out without being able to speak to friends on social media - ime most kids have grown out of Roblox by y6, and its no safer than social media tbh, I never let DD near it.

Let your DD sort it out, OP, I know it’s hard because no mum wants their child to be upset at school.

They will be getting prepared for high school, where a lot of friendship groups change.

My DS made a friend from when he started first school, his mum always used to moan to me, if my son had played with another child, it was so annoying, I wanted my v shy DS to make a wider group of friends, but no to exclude his friend of course. Kids are very fickle at times. Try not to worry about it.

I really feel for you here. I can see this from both sides. My elder daughter sounds a bit like yours, but by Y6 she was trying to ‘fit in’ a bit more.

She had a friend called Poppy who was quite eccentric, lovely company for an adult, but actually quite hard work and demanding as a friend. Very controlling. I’m a clinician working with autistic children and I’d say Poppy was certainly on the autism spectrum. Over the years my dd was very accommodating to Poppy.

When my DD began to branch out socially, she had to learn to assert herself. This included telling Poppy that she didn’t want to do something (Poppy wanted her to partner up for world book day, my daughter wanted to do her own thing).

Seemingly Poppy took offence, told her mum that dd was turning her back on her. The mum (who is lovely) cornered me at a school assembly and told me how desperately hurt she and Poppy were that my DD effectively wouldn’t do what Poppy wanted. Said they’d been friends since reception and now Poppy felt she was losing her only real friend. It was a quite an emotional burden for dd as they were doing SATS.

There was another occasion where Poppy was laughed at by the boys in class for having to walk to school the long way round down the path rather than across a field with everyone else. The field was muddy, Poppy’s mum wouldn’t let her walk that way unless she took wellies. I always felt she should have let her get her shoes muddy, it would have saved a lot of trouble. Poppy’s mum was upset again with my daughter for not going ‘the long way round’ so Poppy wasn’t alone. My dd was just trying to fit in.

Inevitably, dd and Poppy grew apart. It was too much pressure. I look back and realise that dd tended to have a lot of friends who were shy, or a bit different, probably because she was shy herself, and also gentle and accommodating. I also realise how much the mums of those girls had come to view my daughter as their child’s social ‘helper’ because she could keep them ‘in’ with the wider social group in school.

So I do see this from both sides, and when you mentioned her ‘latching on’ to another child, I thought how this is being experienced from that child’s perspective. I’m sure your dd isn’t anything like Poppy, by the way, I’m just thinking I probably wouldn’t do anything active about this, rather I’d try to encourage dd to join in with more mainstream Y6 activities, even if she doesn’t like them. I hate social media, but I have to admit that my girls would have been left behind socially without it. I have always screened their use.

I hope this reply doesn’t sound harsh, it’s not meant to. Y6-y9 is awful for girls I think. Hopefully she will find her tribe at high school

I guess I just feel sad for her, girls can be vile!

Please don't talk about young girls like that.

Your DD's friend has every right to branch out and it might have been that DD didn't want to so her pal had to leave her behind. They're not married!

You need to address your child's crippling shyness.

You know how they say "fake it until you make it" - well I would hire a drama coach to do some one on one work/play acting with your DD so she can practise acting bright and breezy, learn how to start a conversation, make sure she appears interested in others until it comes naturally to her.

It worked a treat for my niece.

Best of luck, OP, it's so painful to watch our DC struggle.

I think Moira and CountessFrog have made some valuable points here. People change a lot as they move into puberty, they need to branch out and explore new friendships. Feeling forced to stay friends with the same people can mean never being able to be yourself.

I had an absolutely lovely friend from the age of 4. As I turned 11 or so I started to realise that we had absolutely nothing in common. The only way we could stay close friends was by my never doing the things I was interested in, never talking about anything I was interested in because she got bored, always pretending I was interested in things I couldn't understand the point of. And of course it meant I couldn't make friends with people who were more like me. She is still a lovely person 50 years later and we send Christmas cards, but we don't have anything in common.

I felt horrible at the time, still remember it. But thankfully our parents left well alone. She went on to make other friends.

My granddaughter is yr9 at an all-girls school. She hasn't fitted in to any clique and has been robustly ignored and talked down to by the in-crowd since yr7. With loving support from the whole family, my gorgeous girl is becoming resilient and self-aware, no trying to fit in or be insincere just to gain some flighty friendship. She smiles and tells us that she must be a dweeb but out of school she is socially confident and chatty. I know you're upset for your daughter and you've been given some good advice on here - build up her self-esteem but let her find her own way at school. A listening ear and a big hug goes a long way.

Why are girls friendship groups described as 'cliques'? Can't they just be a group of good friends?

Speaking from personal experience, you really need to force her to address the shyness.

I firstly wonder if she is choosing to excludes herself form many of these activities because she is so shy, which often comes from having a low self-esteem or fear of being shamed and failing in some way.

As children shyness is seen as a quirk, which is understandable and almost endearing to adults. As teens and adults shyness is seen in a very different light, often being perceived as stand offish, cold, unfriendly or even just plain hard work. Teens and most adults aren't looking to do the hard work of persevering with a shy person when there are other fun people around. Your DD will get left behind and I would expect Big school to be really hard and quite possibly lonely for her. She may make a friend or two again, but teen friendships can be up and down as personalities and circumstances change.

I say all this with the bet of intentions as I was this child, painfully shy, never really interacting and kept waiting for the conversation to be initiated with me. Then not understanding why I was alone, I told my parents I didn't like the big groups of friends and things they were into but actually I just felt too scared to even try joining in and was completely isolated. I internalised all this too as being a failing and felt very unwanted. I had similar early teenage years before my sister stopped pussyfooting around and pointed out that no one wanted to talk to me because it was like getting blood out of a stone! She showed me what it was like to try and be friendly with me and basically coached me into making more friends. Obviously it was a different time, pre social media which undoubtedly complicates the issue.