For some time now DD (6) has been saying that she struggles to find someone to play with at break/lunchtimes and has mentioned some specific problems with four other girls in her class.
I spoke to DD’s class teacher about this as it does sound a little bit more concerning than just not being able to find someone to play with. DD and friend 1 went to nursery together and were inseparable - then they started school and I think friend 1 made lots more friends very quickly and wanted to split her time between all of them, whereas although DD did make new friends, I think DD would have preferred to spend all of her time with friend 1, had she been able to. We have spoken to DD a lot about this and the fact that she needs to respect friend 1’s choices and it would be nice for DD to make friends with the other girls too. The girls in the group would then often play together as a five, or as two smaller groups, and all of the girls seemed happy with this. This seemed to be fine until recently.
DD has been saying that now the other four girls often play together as a group without her and this is where the problem starts. Individually all four girls seem fine with DD but she says that when they are together as a group, she is often excluded. I know with little children that it is difficult to know if it is just a one-off or if it genuinely happens all of the time, but when DD came home on one occasion and said that the others had “finally said she was allowed to play with them today”, it was clear from the gratitude and relief that she showed that this probably does happen quite a lot and that she had been waiting for a long time to play with them. DD is really resilient and where there has been unkindness from others towards her in the past, the first we have known about it is when the class teacher told us that she had taken action to try and resolve it.
DD has said that normally when she asks the others to play, they either see her coming and say “Run away, DD’s coming” or they will say “yes, I promise you can tomorrow”, then the next day when she reminds them of their promise they will say “it’s today, it’s not tomorrow yet, it won’t ever be tomorrow will it, haha”, and so on. She said that even if they say to her face that she is allowed to play then she hears whispers of “not really” and then they run off and leave her. She says that she often walks about on her own looking for them as they hide from her or tell her where they will meet and then deliberately don’t turn up. This kind of thing has made me quite concerned, and DD made the comment of “only the teachers like me, I haven’t got any friends any more”.
Unfortunately DD has said that the main ringleader of this is friend 1, and from what DD has said, it does seem that when the girls are together as a group, they do look to friend 1 as a kind of leader. Again, I fully understand that friend 1 does not want to play with DD all of the time but it just seems a shame that the other girls have become involved in this and that the situation sounds like when they are together, they are all joining in with this and being quite unkind towards DD. I doubt that they have really thought about how DD will be feeling and am sure they are seeing it as some kind of game but DD does seem really upset by it and is just desperate to play with them! I am not sure how I feel personally about DD’s desperation to keep playing with them - as an adult I would try and make different friends if I were treated like this (!) but I’m sure that as a 6-year old trying to fit in, all DD wants is to play with the girls that she normally gets on well with. The teacher has spoken to DD and is encouraging her to play with other children and has said to me that she is aware that friend 1 has been unkind to DD for a long time and they had been monitoring the situation - I was unaware of this.
I am genuinely stuck on this one - DH says that I should speak to friend 1’s mum about this as he feels she would want to know, whereas I don’t want to stir things up even more if the teachers feel that they have sorted things with the girls directly. I am good friends with friend 1’s mum but have never had to approach her about anything negative before. It is likely to become awkward soon though as there are a few events coming up in the near future (don’t want to be too outing) where DD and friend 1 would normally do things together and now I don’t think they will do them together this year - do I explain why to friend 1’s mum or let the school deal with it?