My only child is missing her friends.

[mummyloveslucy]

Hi, my daughter is 6 years old and has been HE since Christmas. She loves it and is doing very well. I do feel that she misses the social interaction of other children though. I don't drive so it's hard to get to most of the groups, she has a good friend who is HE but she's always bussy and she only gets to see her at clubs. Her old school friends are always bussy with clubs etc.

She keeps asking for me to have another baby and saying she wants a sister sh that she'll have someone to play with all the time. I don't think I can have any more children due to PCOS and not sure I could go through it again as I was so ill with Lucy.

She definatly dosn't want to go back to school. She does 3 clubs a week where she meets other children but because they are clubs, it's not like just playing together.

Does anyone have any ideas? She is such a loving sociable child, I don't want her to miss out at all.

Could you sort out a swap with someone? Suggest you have her good HE friend over one morning a week while the mum/dad get some time to get on with things and then Lucy goes to them on a different day? (Or after school with other friends)

I could try but her best friend has 3 siblings, 2 brothers of 11 and 13 and a 9 year old sister. I could offer to have the 2 girls. There is another only child in the group but she's 10 so probubly wouldn't want to play with a 6 year old. I'll also try some of her old school friends.

It could work; it can't hurt to ask. Parents of several children often find it handy to have somewhere good to leave one or two of them while doing things with the others. For example I like to take my older daughter to lectures which her little sister wouldn't sit through quietly. Try and see!

It also wouldn't hurt to see whether the 10yo likes to play with your daughter. HE kids are much less rigid about who they play with than schoolchildren. I don't know whether you had many cousins or neighbour children to play with as a child? I did, and I remember that we didn't stick closely to kids of the same age and gender as we did at school, where you'd get teased for doing otherwise.

The child I played with most when I was ten was the six year old boy across the road. Why? He looked up to me in a way my classmates didn't. I knew he wouldn't criticise my fashion sense or what music I listened to. He usually played the games I wanted to play, and I usually won. I could show him how to do things. I felt competent and helpful and grown-up. That didn't happen at school where everyone was the same age as me, or at home where I was the youngest. It was refreshing and relaxing to be with him.

And - although it sounds a bit mean to say it - sometimes kids like to come over not necessarily because they want to play with my kids, but because they like a change of scene, some new toys, a different garden, or maybe my company. There's nothing wrong with that, and they usually do end up playing with my children once they are here. It makes a nice change for all of us. You could make a bit of extra effort to offer a tempting activity to entice other kids over in the first instance. Baking, craft, fires in the garden, and playing in the paddling pool are crowd-pleasers here.

Could she go to the local school after school club? And just play with other kids from 3:30 - 5:30 or whatever?

They're normally paid and not run by the school, so in theory it shouldn't matter at all that she doesn't go to the school.....

(Can also go to there holiday club in the holidays...)