DD11 is the “back-up” friend. How do I support her?

[octonuddle]

DD11 attends a large school (around 70 girls in her year with 13 girls in her class). She is popular and has friends not only with the girls in her class but has friends across other classes too. She is often invited to birthday parties by girls in her class and in her wider year group too. She is friends with girls in other years and outside of school she gets on well with girls from other schools who participate in her hobby club. In short many friends and loves to be sociable however is increasingly finding those friendships a bit unreliable.

Over the last 2 years her class has formed into cliques/groups who play separately in the playground. She has friends “across the cliques” but isn’t really invited to play with any clique in particular and often finds herself alone and excluded during break. When she asks to join in, she is told “oh we are just playing our group today” or she will arrange to meet with people at lunch and they won’t turn up because they can’t convince the other members of their group to go along with them.

The only time she is in demand is when there is some drama or other and a falling out and the injured parties all gravitate to her as she is a good friend, dependable, empathises with them and happily plays with them. She will have a lovely few days with someone to play with before that person inevitably makes up with whoever they fell out with and then desserts DD again 😢

She is very conscious of it and feeling left out. Interestingly when I asked her which group she would most like to play with, she picks specific people…all from different groups. It doesn’t help there is an odd number of girls in her class either as there always seems to be work that require the class to work in pairs so she ends up having to go with one of the boys or in a three that the teacher decides.

I’ve tried to tell her it’s good to have a wide range of friends and that these groups are usually filled with drama and fall outs and she can see that is the case, but that doesn’t really help her when she has nobody to play with in the playground :( How do I help her?

This is sooo common at her age. Is she going into y6? Friendship groups seem to shake up as the kids deem themselves too mature for previous friends etc. i know this is much easier said than done, but when they fail to meet with her, does she try to find them and be with them anyway?

Why can't she work with a boy or hang out with the lads at play time?

This really resonates with me about my DD’s friendship experience (and my own, to be honest!). I’m really struggling to help her navigate it, solidarity.

Hi yes she is year 6 equivalent (we are in Scotland so term already started) but her final year before high school. To be honest her confidence is pretty low now and she is too scared to go and find the girls in case she is rejected by the others in the clique (which has happened a couple of times). It’s heartbreaking to watch her go from a previously happy confident girl to a nervous wreck.

I think this would be considered social suicide by the rest of the girls in her year…she gets on ok with the boys but they are playing football or rugby which she isn’t interested in.

Poor thing. Hopefully once she goes to secondary that will shake friendships up a bit as there'll be a bigger pool again of kids. Not massively helpful for this year though. Could you help facilitate some cinema trips etc with one or two girls that she really likes to try to shore up those friendships? Or with girls from hobbies that go to other schools?

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Tell her to make friends woth boys. They don’t go in for this nonsense

So every single boy is playing sports? I just think she's struggling to find her person at school and this kind of absolute split of "Omg can you imagine, I had to do group work with a BOY" or "eww, a had to talk to a BOY at playtime" isn't healthy or setting her up well for secodnary school.

The downside to being friends with everyone is that it does tend to make you peripheral to everyone. Is there a singular person she likes the most? Can you organise play dates / sleepovers or whatever is socially acceptable with this one friend and encourage her to focus on building a stronger link with that one girl who'll look out and call for her at playtime?

Are they likely to mostly move up together next year or are they at middle school?

My DD made some friends in the year below when year 6 girls were doing something she didn't want to do or wouldn't let her join in. I believe there was also an indoor activity she sometimes did. Other DD changed friendship groups a lot so I'm sure there's potential for changes that might work out better for your DD this year.

Respectfully, isn’t she already in ‘social suicide’ if she’s literally always the last to be chosen for pair activities, and is only acceptable as a friend of last resort when the chips are down because her confidence is so low?

She needs to start centring herself, and not being grateful for attention that is offered only when there are fallouts. To be very blunt, no one respects a people-pleaser who accepts being dumped for a more exciting option over and over. Her lack of confidence is allowing her to be taken for granted, because there are no consequences for befriending her for a couple of days and then ditching her again. Encourage her to stop this, and stop going along with the ‘emergency friend’ thing at school.

It may be that school is a dead loss for this final year, anyway, and that she’s better off concentrating on friends from out of school, and that you do everything in your power to build up her confidence before starting secondary. She should approach all social situations thinking not ‘Do they like me?’ but ‘Do I like them?’

I don’t disagree with any of this…my challenge is helping her be that person and gain the confidence to push back. She used to be but hormones, an innate desire to be liked, peer influence and the social “rules” that girls in this age group face is difficult to change with words alone…I can tell her all this, but expecting her to be streetwise enough to apply it all in the moment is a big ask. I’m having her focus on her out of school activities and friendship groups, but being in a class with your peers 5 days a week, 6 hours a day is a big chunk of time to feel lonely in a large group of people.

I guess the additional challenge at this age is the popular girls are all pairing up with the boys and “going out” with them so she’s smart enough to know that’s a whole hornets nest best avoided. She’s gets on well with most of the boys in her class, but there isnt one that she would be interested in forming a closer friendship with. And yes, at lunch time most of them are out in the fields playing sport or in the chess club (in which she has no interest).

If she is literally on her own at play time, what does she then do? I don't think you can fix anything with the social interactions with her peers, but you can make sure she's got a good backup plan with her. Help her choose books, for example, and make sure she always has the next one in a series. If you and she have trouble getting started, the local library might have someone wonderful to help with that. Or maybe a pack of cards, she could play solitaire or try practicing some card tricks. Or juggling balls! If she starts practicing and getting good at something like that, others might be intrigued.

Or yarn wrapped pens! Everyone wanted to be my friend for a month or so while I was making these

Though it wasn't exactly that, it was simpler and allowed you to write your friend's name. DM me if you want me to try to describe my technique.