To think it must be my daughter's fault that she has no friends

[persianpeach]

I have a 20 year old daughter and a 10 year old daughter (I also have two sons but this hasn't happened to them).

Since middle school both of my daughter's have struggled with friendships, this I know is normal to some degree but I'm really starting to believe that it must be my daughter's faults or the way I have brought my daughter's up that has caused this problem. I feel absolutely gutted for them.

They are alike in the respect that they are both lovely girls, mature, kind, good morals, witty, funny, genuine, honest and maybe a little shy. I would have thought that these were great qualities for someone to want in a friend but not so.

They can't seem to keep friends and friendships that start really well seem to end abruptly with no explanation and they are then outcast and totally ignored like they don't exist.

This is making me so sad. We invite girls over for play dates, days out and occasional sleepovers but still this happens.
I'm starting to think I must have raised them in a way that makes them seem unattractive to friends but I just can't figure out why.

My 20 year old daughter still suffers now not having girls to hang out with or holiday with and what's so awful is I can see this pattern repeating itself in my 10 year old daughter.

Has anyone else experienced similar, if we knew what was going wrong we could try and put it right but we are clueless. I'm wondering if they are socially inept, if they have some sort of undiagnosed autism or similar. My eldest has had counselling but they couldn't see why she would have a problem and thought it was just a self esteem issue.

They are lovely girls I just can't see why this is happening but it's heartbreaking please help. I don't think I can go through it all again.

I know several people who only made close friends when older. Now your oldest DD is at university is she seeking our people with the same interests? Not specifically to make friends, but a theatre/book/chess/sports/writing/maths club? Whatever she cares about it might be helpful to meet people who care about the same things.

I would try not to pressure either of your DDs into ‘having friends’ and feeling unfulfilled if they don’t. You sound a lovely mum and she had a great family

🤔 I wouldn’t worry OP

I was exactly like this and now (mid twenties) have plenty of ‘adult’ friends, a wonderful (soon to be) DH, a very fulfilled life and an annual income of six figures between us. (I assure you the girls who ‘fitted in’ through my school/college experience have not faired this well.)

I never drank or smoked, didn’t sleep around and had little interest in freezing my arse off in a mini dress outside some shitty bar on a Saturday night 😂. They all thought ‘ I thought I was better than them’ which wasn’t the case at all I just didn’t enjoy or want to do those things. I was always decent looking and quite confident and tbh I just think a lot of girls didn’t know what to make of me. I also had 0 interest in bitching and girly politics! There’s so much insecurity as a teen that anything different is scary.

I forget the name of the female comedian who does an amazing skit about not fitting in back in her home town.

Them- ‘Why can’t you be be more normal?’
Me- 😬 You’re not ‘normal’ - you’re ordinary, there’s a difference!

It’s tough until you get out of uni and hit the real world- then your DD will be fine!

I feel absolutely sick reading this post because I have few to no friends ... my mum is probably the same now I think about it and my daughters might end up the same. I don’t want this lonely life for them.

Can anyone tell me how to fix this? Please. I’ve actually sat and cried worrying about this tonight. I let my daughters end up like me.

I wish I had been more like your daughter when I was younger instead of trying to fit in. It sounds like she needs to find “her people”. If she has any interest in any causes like animal rights, feminism or even if she’s interested in certain music she could try some groups. Even being active in certain communities on Instagram could introduce her to like minded people and hopefully new friends.

With your 10 year old I guess it might be a bit trickier. Are there clubs away from school she could join like gymnastics, ballet, football, coding?

They both sound like really lovely young ladies and you should be proud that they aren’t bending over backwards to fit in. If I could go back to school again I would do it that way. I don’t even see my old school friends anymore.

So you only meet up with some friends once every three months? That may probably explain it.

They both hate bitchiness and two faced people and will avoid these people once they have found them to be like this (but this seems to be the norm at that age which makes it so hard).

That sounded very judgemental and a bit snotty. Which is very different to having good morals and values. I had a lot of friends who took drugs at an age when I didn't. They didn't judge me and I didn't judge them. There was no issue. Had I judged them for their choices, we wouldn't have been friends.

My youngest dd went through a tough time at school. She was hell bent on being in with the "popular" girls. She didn't fit in and was regularly excluded from the group, laughed at, bullied, lied about, and basically was used as a scapegoat whenever there was disharmony within the group.

There is nothing worse for a parent than when your dd tells you she is not allowed to speak to the "popular girls" at break times. Instead she had to keep her head down, stand outside of the group and pretend to be busy on her phone, so she wasn't in the thick of it when things went wrong. So she couldn't be blamed. They wouldn't allow her to leave the group either.

When 6th form came around dd was determined not to go back to school. School were useless in helping dd to get out of this clique.

She attented 6th form college and now has lots of like minded friends.

It is neither your fault or your dd's fault that they dont fit in with a particular group. Teenage girls can be extremely bitchy and look to, deliberately, exclude other girls. They see it as "fun" 🤷

Your dd's will find their niche once they leave school, and enter the big, wide world and meet people more in line with their interests and personalities

"I agree- a wider circle of friends is better than just one friend, for sure!"

Oh yes, 1 is better than none, definitely.

" if you make friends with one person, they may also have a bigger group or other friends you could join for a film or invite to a birthday party."

Depends. Socially dysfunctional people tend to befriend similar people (not talking about OP's daughters here) so it wouldn't really be shocking if their friends don't have a large group of friends either. Also, something I've noticed over the years is that some people won't share friends or won't mix groups. When I moved to where I am now, I was hoping people I knew here would introduce me to my friends, but it didn't happen at all. I've also known people who have a kind of split personality, being almost a different person with different friends.

*to their friends

"So you only meet up with some friends once every three months? "

I think she said GOOD or BEST friends so that struck me as well, but I thought it was maybe because I'm single. A good friend fr me would be someone you see at least once a week, but I realise that people have different demands on their time.

My parents never had any friends visiting the house when I was growing up and I thought that was completely normal for parents/married people/grown-ups.

"They all thought ‘ I thought I was better than them’ which wasn’t the case at all"

but earlier you said

"a very fulfilled life and an annual income of six figures between us. (I assure you the girls who ‘fitted in’ through my school/college experience have not faired this well.) "

Your 20 yo DD sounds like me. I was badly bullied and a total outcast at my first secondary school, but at my second I was not bullied nor even especially unpopular, and I flourished academically too. Same person, different environments. I think your DDs have been square pegs in round holes. Regarding the disappearing friends, I think your DDs may have been duped by Instant Best Friends: you know, those women who act effusively nice and confide in you like a sister and invite you to everything for a few months after you meet them, then they suddenly drop you like a stone and you find out indirectly, or strongly suspect, that they have been saying nasty things behind your back, all without any obvious falling out betwen you. I've known a few of these and they are just nasty people who live for drama and gossip, but they can be very plausible in the beginning, at least to people who aren't good at spotting red flags or who are just starving for a bit of human contact. :(

One question, and it isn't intended as victim-blaming: how does your DD get bullied at university? School bullying happens because there's nowhere for the victim to hide, but at university you generally have your own room with a lock, and thus the ability to avoid any or all social interactions should that be necessary. Plus at university everyone wants to look mature and grown up, and that's not really compatible with schoolyard behaviour such as following someone around all day heckling them and hair-pulling and pelting them with chewing gum (or whatever). If this sort of behaviour is occurring and your DD has no locked door to hide behind, she should leave now and not waste any more time, money or effort on her studies. Or have I misunderstood? It also seems a bit strange (maybe because our generation wouldn't do it) that she has confided in a tutor of all people. I think I would honestly have preferred violent death to any kind of intimate conversation with my tutor and I imagine he felt the same way. We talked about Schubert once, and that was as personal as it got!

I'd explore social anxiety in adults and children and also research the presentation of autism in women and girls.
www.autism.org.uk/about/diagnosis.aspx

I'd advise you (as presumably NT so you can compare responses and scores afterwards) and your older DD to do the online AQ test independently. It's not diagnostic at all, it only gives an indication of the likelihood of someone being on the autistic spectrum. There are lots of sites online for this, one I googled at random is here www.aspergerstestsite.com/75/autism-spectrum-quotient-aq-test/

What interests do they have where they can socialise with other people but not have to fit in to a certain 'group' mode of behaviour to take part?

For example and very generally speaking, with sports, anything team-based where they need to pick up on social clues and inference to take part can be too challenging because they don't understand what's expected of them or others see them as different.

Things like martial arts, archery, shooting, swimming, photography, horseriding, skiing etc. can involve social contact as part of a club or group, but it's centred around the individual doing their own thing and achieving their personal best.

Certainly for your 10 year-old, their school should be aware and should have some supervised activities at lunch and break times for kids who have poor social skills, see the SENCO and if necessary move schools if the bullying doesn't stop.

I think they need to mix with people who share similar interests.I find a lot of young people have dire social skills. I'm guessing your children have great social skills but alas these are unrecognizable to the youngsters who live their lives through social media etc. There is hope.

I’m going to be purposely vague, but a child I know very well, let’s call him Tom, has trouble making friends. Has done since primary and still is now (is sitting GCSEs next year).

He is very clever, funny, moral, witty, etc. If he was away from school, at a soft play area for example, he would confidently chat to other children and appeared to have good social skills with children and adults alike. However, at school he had no close friends and was seemingly unable to make and keep any.

For ages I could just not work it out.

To cut a long story short, Tom’s parents, in a bid to bolster his self-esteem had encouraged him to believe he was better than the other children. He was arrogant. Worse still, he held the other children to impossibly high standards and wrote them off at the tiniest mistake. For example, Bobby plays with Tom on Tuesday. Bobby plays with Tom on Wednesday. On Thursday Bobby wants to play a different game with Mary and Billy, and Mary says she doesn’t want Tom to play too. Instead of trying again on Friday, Bobby is obviously a terrible friend, a stupid person and will probably end up in a dead end job whilst Tom will be a multi-billionaire. I am really not exaggerating that much. I have actually overheard him complaining about a really very minor slight and his mother telling him he’d have the last laugh when this boy was emptying his bin for a living.

My own DC are younger than Tom so, with that cautionary tale ringing in my ears my default reaction to “X was unkind/didn’t want to play/etc” is always “I’m so sorry to hear that, you must have felt very sad, I wonder why X did that, it wasn’t very nice behaviour. I wonder if something sad had happened at home etc etc”. It seems to have worked (touch wood)

Sorry for the long and ramble post. I’m sure your DDs are nothing like ‘Tom’, but I do notice that many children who struggle to make friends also struggle a bit with empathy and inflexible thinking / too-high standards.

I hope things improve for them both.

Hi OP,
Please, please don't beat yourself up about this. It's nobody's fault.
So sorry to hear your daughters' friends have treated them like t.
I'm a university student who is very introverted and "nerdy." I have quite a few friends but don't see them a lot, as they like to go out and I have a lot of more solitary hobbies.
I'm wondering if maybe your daughters might just be interested in something "different" that not a lot of people can relate to. That's completely OK, but I know that it's very hard when what matters to you isn't that important to others. For example, one of my interests is Celtic folk.
I really do hope that they will soon find friends who treat them the way they deserve to be treated.

Also, to add, when I was younger, I always felt closer to adults and younger children than my peers. That's OK too.

Yes, the idea of making one friend and getting to know others can sometimes work.
But there will be people who much prefer spending time with one or two others than with a full group.

Can I ask about the university bullying? What’s happening there? In my experience bullying is rife in secondary schools but I’ve never seen it at a university- which isn’t to say I don’t believe it’s happening to your daughter, I’m just wondering if there’s a clue there as it’s less common.

Could be off beam here, but I read somewhere that if you only ever behave to (your own) high standards, it comes across to other people as you don’t want real intimacy.

It’s a bit like letting yourself be a bit vulnerable demonstrates trust I think. So showing you are human with faults and foibles is endearing. It shows you trust someone if you let them see the real you.

So the no smoking/no drinking/no criticising parents/strong moral compass etc are all fine as individual behaviours, but all together and with nothing to balance them out can come across as a front.

It's almost like they are too mature and sensible for their years
OP, bullying is never nice but... the way you describe your daughters remind me of the daughter of one of my friends who used to be close to my DD but grew apart. Her daughter is also at uni and all through her schooling years struggled to keep friends. Like yours, she makes friends OK but then is pushed away without understanding why.

I've never told my friend because it's not my place to do so but her DD is overbearing. She is a nice and lovely girl, always want to help, but she is very controlling in her manners. She thinks she is always right, expect everyone to take on her views, is often preaching about what others should do or not do and after some time, people get anxious around her.

I didn't see it so much at first, my DD mentioned it, but after meeting up for a few months, I understood what she meant. She was so lovely, polite, curious and interested in others, but then would put too much pressure on the girls, constantly interrupting and just had an air of superiority.

This girl is doing OK overall. She has close net family and a boyfriend she's been with for 4 years. She has a couple of friends but she is often hurt by people she gets close too suddenly appearing to push her away.

Not sayi g your girls are the same, can't judge fully in a few posts but some of the tings you said did make me think of her.

One thing I noticed with my DD and DS when they were younger was that their 'principled' view of things meant that they could be a bit inflexible. Ie at primary, they wouldn't play a game they didn't want to, even if it meant they might get to choose the next game. So they sometimes isolated themselves by not being able to compromise and do what other people wanted to do.

As they have gone through their teens years this actually stood them in good stead. My DD wouldn't go to certain events or get involved with groups if they were being excessively druggy or she felt out of her depth (ie too much sex and drugs and rock and roll). Her friends respected her choice and she has always been equally happy spending time in her own company. Now she is older she has lots of friends and a great social life - but she always maintains a balance, she basically doesn't get afflicted with FOMO - whens she's tired or needs time to herself she just opts out.

My son has had more ups and downs but seems like he has some good friend groups now. But he definitely is still quite stubborn and wont compromise.

So I thought maybe OP your DD's principled maturity might be something similar. A bit of inflexibility.

Also, both my DC started at new colleges this term and I did point out to them that their first friends might not necessarily be their forever friends. This has turned out to be true for both of them - it took them time to find 'their people'.

Interesting about family background. My parents didn't have many friends and my sisters don't. I have a lot of friends. But with work and family life I see my best friends only every few weeks and sometimes every few months. I don't think that is unusual when you have very busy lives.

@RiotLady
In my experience, I have found that there is university bullying although it's different to when we were younger.
At a younger age, it's more of a concept of a bully thinking "This kid looks weird, so I'll make fun of them."
Whereas in university it seems like it's more about broken friendships and relationships leading to strains in groups that can sometimes lead to nastiness. Such as "Zach and Anna broke up and Anna is my best friend, so in order to stay on Anna's good terms I'll pretend Zach doesn't exist"
Of course, this doesn't happen all the time. Just showing the difference I have seen.

Actually, in thinking about it, as someone who keeps more to myself, I can relate a bit to the story about Tom and to the post from SwingofThings.
When I first got my phone, my parents drilled it into me that it was always iportant to respond to a text message from a friend or family member when one was sent.
This culminated into me jumping to the conclusion (not their fault) of thinking that answering texts is just a basic expectation, and that if one does not answer it means the person does not like me.
It took me a long time to realise that not everyone sits by their mobile phone desperate for texts so that they can type back at the drop of a hat.

Thread makes no sense. OP's picture doesn't make any sense to me (and neither do most people's sweeping generalisations).

I just wondered, OP, what are your daughter's interests? What do they like to do for fun? What could they have in common with other people?