Oh god, small girls and friendships. What do you advise your child to do when another child or a few children together are being deliberately mean to them?
DD aged 5 in Reception is having a really crap time at the moment, culminating in an incident on Friday when her supposed best friend told her that her favourite toy was junk and she was going to come round to our house and throw it away in the middle of the night (obviously I pointed out that said child is four and her mum would be really cross if she even got out of bed in the night, never mind came round to someone's house and stole something, which DD did see made sense). Added to this, the other girls in the class are playing a game of It/Tag/Had every break, where if you get up on the bench you can't be got. DD is always It. The others are always up on the bench and don't get down so she can't try to get them. She spends her break times fruitlessly pleading with them to either come down or let her up on the bench. She doesn't want to go to school because she is frightened of play time. She loves class time and her teachers and TAs but breaks are torture to her.
I realise nothing terribly bad has happened but DD can't cope with it at all. She's not at all like me. I'd have hit/pushed/scratched one of them and been told off by now (if I was five, obv) but they would all have been much nicer to me afterwards despite the telling off. I keep telling her to try talking to a grown up helper in the playground about it, but she knows that they are expected to try and sort out disagreements themselves, at least to some extent, and is reluctant.
I am too fighty and 'so what, loser' to give her proper advice that she would want to act on, and she's such a gentle girl. She hates the idea of having to be mean back to them. In a way, I don't want her to lose that gentleness. It's a nice quality.
I have also told her to just walk away and find her big girl friends (she has a few friends in higher years who she didn't know before starting school yet has forged great friendships with - they're all lovely to her), and she does. But understandably, she wants friends in her peer group too. Some play times are reception only so she has nobody to realistically play with at these times.
Could anyone wiser than me tell me what I should be suggesting to her? Should I talk to her teacher? When I raised the issue at the last parents evening (just of DD feeling like she didn't have anyone to play with as nobody was actually being mean at that stage), her teacher was amazed and said 'But X plays with everyone, I think she's doing brilliantly socially'. But she isn't. She's unhappy and lonely. She wants to just join in the games on equal terms.
I really don't know how to tackle this. Please help!
Sorry, v long!