DD friend is a furry/therian. Trying to encourage (strongly) my DD to be the same.

[Sockmate123]

What would you do in this situation? Child in class is 'recruiting' other children (mainly very quiet children) to be furries. She says she is a therian and presents as a wolf. School has banned her wearing wolf items to school but she still does on party days/world book day/non uniform etc
Parents seem to do littke about it
Quite older parents. Children are 10. My DD has so far not engaged but likes the child involved but is being pressured. It was her birthday recently and friend bought her a tail 🙄

I think this is completely weird. Child digs holes at lunch time, barks at people etc cute/acceptable up until age 5 or 6 but not girls that are on the cusp of puberty!

AIBU?
Yes- she's only a kid, will spon grow out of it.
No - its weird, school and parents should do more to address it

Id be telling my child that it’s fine to play make believe. Most children don’t by the age of 10 but if her friend still wants to then that’s ok. I’d be emphasising that it is play and her friend if a human child making believe and nothing more.

Rarely at 10 though.

Many girls reach puberty at 10 and have periods.

It's more the behaviour of a younger child.

I call BS
a ten year old child is 5 years into being a full time furry ???
has a book and is actively campaigning to recruit ?!!
come on !!
really ???

It's not a game for the child

Really I've never heard so much shite in my life

Whatever the furry community is, I very much doubt they have any plans to ‘recruit’ children.

really this thread sounds exactly like the gay panic, saying gay people are going to recruit children. Or the satanic panic where the satanists were trying to recruit. Really everyone needs to get a grip.

Sorry but this is hilarious. By all means, have a conversation with her about not giving in to peer pressure, because that's just good parenting.

If she DOES end up pretending to be a wolf, just make sure you take lots of pictures! When she's a teenager, you horrify her by remindingher of it. When she's in her 20s and working in an office somewhere, or as a teacher or whatever, you can laugh about it together!

No serious harm will come to her if she barks a bit (😂😂😂) and digs up the school playground for a few weeks, until the next craze. But it will make for a very entertaining story.

@Neodymium it’s more what they are accessing to make it more than just dressing up

We’ve got a local furry going round trying to lure kids with sweets. Police involved. It’s fucking weird and not ok. Keep your child away from this imo.

Genuinely. This is going on this long but at 5/6 it was sort of cute but it has gotten completely out of hand now.

Thanks to everyone for all the responses. Sorry I didnt include the actual poll.

To answer a few questions

Parents are older, mid 50's. Have very respectable jobs. Don't want to say much further than that as its outing but one parent in particular is in a very 'high up' job.

Both career people, child with childminder most of time. Father has MH issues. Though not of this nature. Severe depression and made a suicide attempt in the quite recent past. I am not sure if the school are aware of this.

I dont know if perhaps major issues in the family and this child is using this as a form of escapism. As I said its going on 5 years now and has only gotten worse. Parents seem to laugh it off-in public at least.

I think school have tried to address it but not successfully or adequately. I think i might request information on what their policies are regarding all of this...

It’s incredibly likely that the therian girl is neuro diverse and being influenced online. If it was my kid I would be heavily expanding my child’s social circle in an attempt to move her on from this kid. I would also tell my kid all about social contagion and about the identity explosion. I would give that tail back, as per the previous poster, and have a word with parents and I would hit the roof with the school for allowing this crap without mitigating against the safeguarding risks

It must be really pleasant to be this naive, I'm actually jealous.

Comparing this to 'gay panic' is ridiculous.

Do you actually know anything about this community? Do you know what 'cub' porn is? Do you know that there are hundreds of children being groomed daily by adults on roblox into 'roleplaying' with them? Starting off innocently and ending with graphic sexual acts being 'acted' at these primary school aged children? Have you seen the men with dog collars and visible erections managing a 'pup play tent' aimed at young children at past pride events?

So respectfully, if you know fuck all about this, maybe hang off trying to dismiss any concerns those more well informed might have for the safety of children being left to fend for themselves on the Internet.

My DD was saying for a couple of years ish that she wanted to be a boy. Every play, she'd be the male role. She wanted to be called Gregory. She's been 7 for nearly 2 months now.
She's a tomboy and was gutted to learn that she was still actually a girl despite the word boy being in tomboy.
NGL, I was a bit worried. My DD is everything to me and I would like everything to stay as is. But I indulged her in play because she's a child.
She's talked about it less more recently and is referring to herself as my daughter.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for being who you are but children should not be making choices like this and being supported by the ones that are supposed to be protecting them.

I know that children can know from an early age that they are gay or have body dysmorphia but there are children out there for who, it's not a game. Identify as a cat (yes, seriously). So this post wouldn't surprise me if wolf girl is really thinking that she's a wolf.
And it's a problem especially if the parents are going to entertain the child.

And at one point my DD wanted to identify as a wolf. She'd howl and say about her wolf instinct, she even dug in the mud. That went on for a little while, not very long because I didn't give it all much attention unless it needed it.
She stopped doing it.
This other child sounds much more like she's taking it too seriously.

BDSM gear is a bit different though, isn't it? Because it's almost exclusively to do with sex. You wouldn't find anyone in a gimp costume, doing anything but shagging.

HOWEVER, cats, dogs and wolves do exist outside of sexual fantasies. And in fact, because almost ANYTHING can be a fetish, you can't ban anything that could, in some instances, also turn someone on. For example, children and adults both, can sometimes get covered in food, for entirely innocent reasons. Just because some people, in some circumstances, get turned on by other people being covered in food, doesn't make weaning intrinsically inappropriate. You'd also have to ban children ever dressing up as clowns, vampires, doctors, pizza delivery boys, teachers, octopuses....

I don't think that's completely true. I'm so glad the internet wasn't around when I was a kid because in primary school I wanted to be a boy and a fox at different periods of time and would 100% have been sucked into this bollocks instead of growing out of it.

I don't think so. Sometimes being direct and blunt is best so kids are under no illusion how the parent feels.

People in general are becoming more and more infantile. This is part of that.

If I was pretending to be an animal and wearing a tail etc. at ten, my parents and peers would think I had had a knock on the head.

O have absolutely no time.e for this nonsense.
I have had several children who i work with telling me they are felines. They soon change their tune when I tell them that cats aren't allowed to do the activities we have planned.
One child was absadamant she was feline and meowed evertime me or other staff spoke to her. I told her she would have e to stay behind and have some dreamiest while th other children went to an ice cream parlour. Again she cha get her mind.
It's always been girls that have been felines or furies or whatever they call the.selves*
Tell your daughter if her friend wants to be daft that's on her but you will not put up with such daftness.

Oh my God!
Sorry about my appalling typos!! I didn't have my readers on when typing the post.
😳

To look at this in a positive way, its a good time for you child to learn how to enforce boundaries.

The other child sounds very charasmatic and likes to be the centre of attention by making their thing, everyones thing. These people exists as adults so it will be good practice adult life.

The trouble with taking it seriously at this age and not calling it playing (which is considered offensive to a lot of therians) is that normal boundaries you might have around play are not established. If it was a harmless game, a ten year old would know there was a time and a place. In it being their soul or identity, it seeps into everything.

The one in my DDs year is nearly 14 and has made absolutely no friends at high school. People who are already friends at primary might tolerate it a bit but it's terrible, socially, to meet people for the first time and paw at them or whine at them instead of saying Hello. It's a lovely school as well, but this poor kid has been set up to fail by adults in her life acting as if people have to accept it and it's them being unfriendly not to like it. The parents are telling her she's being bullied when she's actually testing the patience of everyone she meets. How can she grow up normally with this "your truth must be accepted, you are the centre of everything,' parenting. I like that I can laugh with my mum about some of the things I wore as a teen - whereas this is being taken as sacrosanct.

Back in the 1990s my DM used to work at a further education college, where she ran a drop-in maths class.

It was for anybody who showed up each day and she had a regular who was a middle aged man who thought he was a werewolf. He was very open about being a werewolf, though I don't know the specifics of how this affected his behaviour.

The school installed a panic button under her desk in case she needed to summon help, but she never did.

He was apparently a werewolf who really wanted to improve his skills in mathematics in later life, and he got on with the job perfectly quietly.

I’d tell the school my child is very uncomfortable, has been trying to be kind but doesn’t want to be a furry and is getting a lot of pressure. She needs school support. Does your child know or have ideas about what they want to be when they grow up? I doubt any of it is acceptable as a furry so I might take that line.
and very importantly are they going to different high schools, that would be my plan for sure.

I would explain to my child that the therian at school is on the path of mental illness and to steer well clear. Delusions are serious issues that require treatment and it’s a slippery slope to auditory hallucinations and off kilter perceptions can easily cloud a brain not grounded in reality.

I was that horse girl 😂. I used to gallop in the play ground, get my friends to jump over stuff, neigh, all sorts. It was fun. I was. Much later in life diagnosed with asd, adhd and I had a bit of a turbulent home life so I think it was all just an escape. I loved horses, used to ride and help at the stables until I was twelve.

BUT I never dressed like a bloody horse, or ate hay, sugar beet, slept standing up, wore tack etc. I knew i was human, and I was pretending.

someone I knows dd is 18 and has been a furry since primary, parents never said no..they’re a weird family anyway (related to my ex, no surprise 😂)