My dd1 is 8 and seems to be having a tough time at school. I am struggling to get to the bottom of it but from her perspective she has no or very few friends and the others deliberately leave her out of their games. She reports low level bullying behaviour like all targeting her in a game, and says people don't want to play with her *because she is messy" which seems random enough to have some truth behind it. Most of her complaints are more about certain people"hogging" other people and going off with them to have secret chats so that she is left alone and she can be a bit "my way or the highway" about things and it may be six of one half a dozen of the other.
It seems to have escalated to the point where she has lashed out at school although school have reported nothing to me - this came from another parent. I am waiting for her to finish a club and then will have a serious talk with her but i really want to understand what is going on as much as reinforce the message that violence is never acceptable.
I asked about friendships at school and the teacher said she had reported not having enough friends but then so had had the girls in the class and if there was a problem it was nothing she was doing wrong as she is warm and friendly. Her last teacher did report she was veey squabbly though and found it hard to woek harmoniously with her partners without fighting over worksheets etc. That was a while ago though and apparently things had improved.
The weird thing is that whenever i observe her with friends they seem to be getting on well. She plays well 1:1 on playdates here and parents say the same about when she goes to theirs. Her classmates seem genuinely pleased to see her if we bump into them out and about or on the way to school, and they voted her class rep though she was convinced she would get no votes. So on the one hand, perhaps she's just aggrieved not to be one of the golden crowd and i should encourage her to ficus on other friendships, but it's hard to ignore the fact she's now been left out of a lot parties (all of them so far this year), even of those she's consistently invited to hers and considers good friends, and that other parents tell me she is often alone in the playground, as she reports.
Anyway, one name keeps cropping up in her reports of injustices and i know the mum reasonably well. We aren't friends exactly outside of the context of being fellow parents but have helped each other out sometimes. I eas wondering about suggesting we go for coffee without the kids so she can explain things from her child's perspective and i can get a bit more insight about what's going on, and if her child is also unhappy about the playground dynamics, as i suspect, we could put our heads together and come up with a plan to help them resolve it. I am prepared to be told that my dd is difficult and has behaved badly, but also want to put across her version of events to explain how she sees things, without accepting one way or another whether she is mistaken/misreporting. Is that a terrible idea? On here parents are always told to leave these issues to school, but school don't seem to think there is an issue and i am totally unsure of what the real issue is myself.
Part of me just wants to change her school and let her start over but i worry that if i did that without getting to the bottom of the issue she wouldn't have learned what it is about hee interactions with others that is causing these responses and the same thing could happen again. For full disclosure i also haven't ruled out some form of SEN and have discussed this with school before but they decided not to make a referral.
Sorry, this is long. Just a bit all over the place in trying to work out what to do.
Am also prepared to be told i am way too soft and need to punish her for hitting, but my instincts are that she's hurting and i don't want to alienate her further. Thoughts welcome.