AIBU to think primary friendship fallouts seem too young?

[Enchanted82]

Daughter in y5. Most years from y1 there seems to have been some sort of issue with other girls- friends deciding they don’t want to be in the group, suddenly not liking one of the group, deliberately leaving someone out.

I know it’s nothing serious but I don’t understand it at such a young age. I had such a lovely group of friends in primary school although secondary was a different story.
Am I being naive?

Mine was like that in the early noughties. It's horrible but I think pretty common.

I’m not sure what Year 5 is (Scottish) but in my experience the nonsense started about age 9/10 and kept going til they went to secondary and eventually all settled down and grew up a bit.

It’s a funny age where some start to mature much faster than others, and pecking orders are always up for debate and challenge.

In my experience this is more common with girls than boys.
Partially due to hormones/body changes and secondarily because they are friends not by choice but by circumstance. Moms are friends, in the same class and not because they have personalities that mesh or common interest.

I can very much vary depending on cohort. Some groups (especially girls) go the whole of their time in school together creating drama. Falling out, being best mates, falling out, sulking, being best mates……
Some groups go the whole time which very little drama. Just getting along and enjoying their friendship groups.

Very common. I saw it in both my DCs’ classes.

Common at that age I think. They go from being generic kids to developing their own interests and hobbies. I would say it's more common in girls but I'm not sure it's wholly true. In DS's case it was ostracism because he didn't want to play football.

My daughter is in yr6 and this has been an issue in her group of girl friends since pre school. More recently she's become better friends with some boys and they seem a bit more steady. My younger son has a mixed gender friendship group and they've not had the same problems. So from my sample of 2 it feels like it's a problem with solely female friendship groups in primary. However I'd like to be wrong about this and it just be pure chance.

I remember this happening at primary school and that was in the 80s

I remember year 5, from my experience, being exactly where this sort of stuff started. They weren't happy years for me. Groups of girls can be so mean the way they isolate and do a special kind of bullying of members of the supposed friendship group. Reading the novel Cats Eye by Margaret Atwood later in life helped me process a lot of it.

I was happy to get to secondary school. When my supposed primary school friends tried to keep doing that stuff there, I just made other friends. I remember the shocked look on their faces when they made a show of "we don't want you to be in our group" (when we had to pick a work group or whatever in PE or something) and I could just say "I don't want to be in your group anyway" and went to join the other girls from a different primary school I'd made friends with.

I think it's common in Year 5 as some girls hit puberty/have matured more quickly than others/start to form more distinct interests and grow away from previous friends.

My daughter basically made a whole new set of friends in Y5 and then a whole new set again in Y6 (granted this was partly caused by the school's policy of shuffling classes every year).

Very common in my experience. Primary was much worse than secondary for fallouts and shifting friendship groups. DD goes to a small school, there's 5 girls in her year so they all kind of have to be friends but the dynamics constantly shift.

I was a teacher in a Primary school. Although I didn't teach that age group it was pretty well known that yr 5 and 6 was famous for this.

Yep! Having this exact problem with my DD in year 6 with her “bestie” who wants to bring a new friend (former bully of both of them!) into their friendship and DD doesn’t want to, so now DD has become their target. It’s horrible

Primary school was definitely like this for me, right from Year 1.

I think it depends on the cohort. For my 13 year old it didn’t really start until year 6, whereas for my 11 year old their class was known for it from year 1. It was hideous really.

Y5 is standard

From Y1 is unusual but does happen. My older DC had a “queen bee” in her class who seemed to be an expert in manipulating a group right from age 5. I wouldn’t have thought it possible at that age had I not seen it myself.

My younger DC however has probably had more friendship dramas in her year group but they didn’t really kick in till year 4.

Totally normal. They are learning about friendships.

Very common and especially with girls.

Girls mature earlier than boys in general so are starting on this kind of nonsense when they are younger. But they're also maturing at different paces and this will create fractures between them as they're in quite different emotional headspaces.

I also think that, for most boys, sport anchors friendship groups together for longer. So even if they're all maturing at different rates, it doesn't matter too much because their bond is rooted in knocking a ball around together.

In primary, friendships are moulded together through external forces - mums being friends, living close etc. In secondary, they'll find their tribe more naturally and there's more freedom to drift in and out of friendship groups. Far less friendship drama at secondary, I'd say.

It really depends on the class. My P2 class last year were not like this. My P2 class this year are. All P5 classes are like this though!

I think it's a girl thing, my DS kept fairly constant friends through primary (they drifted when they went to different high schools), but DD's group has been fracturing and re-grouping in various different ways since year 3. She's year 5 now and part of the problem is that there seems to be a gulf in maturity between some of them - she and one other girl are very much still little girls playing pretend etc, two of them are like mini teenagers and the rest are somewhere in the middle.

It’s very common. I remember one of my DD’s best friends telling her and the rest of their little group in year 5 that they were all “too ugly to be my friend now” and she dumped the group for the cool girls!

Their group squabbled for years, most of it quite trivial but also quite upsetting!

Fairly common, and its not just a girl thing. I'm male and had a friend in primary (early 90's) who at least once a term would have a massive fallout with one or more of us and decide he wasn't our friend any more. Would last a couple of days before he decided he wanted back in.

God knows why we all put up with it to be honest. I think he always expected the rest of us to follow him and ditch the person he'd fallen out with, but it never worked out that way. He'd stopped it by the time we hit Comprehensive.