To ask if your DC is liked but not enough for friends to put in any effort

[MeghanMarbles]

I have a lovely, gregarious and very resilient DD aged 13. However, she's getting a bit down about always being the one to arrange to meet up with friends and increasingly having them cancel or already have plans with a mutual friend/s that they don't invite her to join in.

Then she sees photos of them on Snapchat/Instagram having fun together.

Anyone else's teens have this problem?

My dd now 21 did, it was horrible. Went on for most of high school and destroyed her confidence. She made great friends at university and now has a thriving active social life and a lovely boyfriend so don't worry too much, it all gets better.

My daugher didn't luckily she's only got one very close friend. Theyre more like sisters than best friends.
However I was the same as your DD. Long before facebook snap chat ect. However they'd all be talking in school about where they went at the weekend. It carried on long into adulthood. Why i put up with it for so long only God knows. It was always the same excuse. Oh well couldn't get hold of you. FUnny they had no trouble getting in touch if they wanted something.
I bumped into my ex friends sister a while back and She said '"Oh why don't you go down. Our..........misses you. They all do."
My reply was." Well they should have treated me properly, shouldn't they."

Yes but they take after me as I'm the same. I won't lie it has affected me in adulthood

Thanks for replies. I'm quite introverted but DD is a mixture. She's happy in her own company - can occupy herself for hours with screen, reading, screen, art projects, screen 😊- but she relishes the company of her friends too.

IME - both back in the dark ages when I was a child, and also watching my own 3 dc grow up - there are some people that are 'organisers and instigators' and some that are fairly passive, and some that are bloomin' hopeless at ever even responding, or turning up when something is arranged. It doesn't correlate with how 'liked' they are.

Examples - one of my closest friends of over 40 years - hopeless at corresponding. Even these days with texts, Whatsapps etc - she just rarely looks at her phone, doesn't keep a diary. Thinks she'll 'reply later' then forgets. Would be very easy to leave her out of things.
Example 2 - one of my dds had a friend whose Mum always had everything organised in a military fashion - if you didn't book in with her weeks in advance, she couldn't come to play (at weekend or holidays, when we tended to be more spontaneous). After a while, we just stopped asking
Example 3 - one of ds's mates would be "up for anything" and readily available - therefore became the deafult person to ring if we wanted to do something spontaneously.
Example 4 - one of dd2's mates - parent really over protective, and not allowed to do 1/2 what my dd does (incl things like travelling by bus - they are 15 btw)... it limits what they can do, so again, dd2 will ask a different mate sometimes even though mate 1 is a good friend
Example 5 - quite the opposite - another of dd2's mates is allowed to do all sorts of 'hanging out in the park past midnight' type scenarios, which I'm not keen on, so I limit in that case.
I could go on and on.

Friend A doing something with friend B doesn't actually mean they have 'excluded Friend C - sometimes there are practical reasons like ther were only 2 spaces in the car, or they didn't answer their phone / message when called, or they said previously they don't really like curry, when friend wants to go for a curry, etc.etc.

We're in a similar situation- DD's friendship group at school seems to be reasonably wide but she now only has one girl she feels close enough to to ask to make plans - the rest all seem to hang out and she now doesn't get asked along. It's making summer tricky as she is embarrassed to go places with me and her younger sister but I don't like leaving her home alone. She's not confident enough to approach these friends ('it would be weird') and to be fair, last summer when they were just out of primary and closer, they did cancel on her or make vague plans that never firmed up only to appear on Snapchat later to have done stuff without her. The one girl she does see is sometimes great friends, sometimes a bit offhand, and never invites DD along if she sees other friends. I'm just hopeful that she makes new/better friends soon - it's hard to watch so you have my sympathy. I didn't really find my tribe till university and I hope it's sooner than that for my DD and yours.

Sorry - couldn't get back online yesterday.

I'm glad some of you found your tribe at university.

I think DD is a bit bewildered by her tribe dispersing and not understanding why she's being left out or not able to make new connections. Like I said, though, she's resilient and hopefully will be fine.

DD (11) has this at school. Thankfully she is involved in a sport and a scouting type group so has those friends rather than flakey school 'mates' when she feels let down.