Fey Child

[HoneyBeeMum1]

I feel I am in a difficult situation and would be grateful for the advice of the Mumsnet community.

My husband and I have been living in a remote and beautiful part of the Scottish Highlands having relocated from London a few years ago. We have five children, including a boy at university in England and four girls.

My husband is the love of my life and he loves me as deeply as I love him. Our children are healthy, happy and beautiful. We are fairly insular and - until recently - did not have much social interaction outside the immediate family. We have much to be thankful for and not a day goes by that I do not appreciate our good fortune.

So far, so good.

Unfortunately, there is a potential flaw in our blissful existence and I am in a complete quandary trying to decide how best to act.

My eldest daughter - who I will refer to as 'Emily' started at secondary school this academic year. Due to our remote location and the considerable distance to school, she boards from Monday to Friday and returns home for weekends.

Fortunately, she made a friend - who I will call Sarah - who lives only a few miles from us. We have become close friends with Sarah's parents and we share travel arrangements for the girls as well as regularly socialising with them.

Everything seemed to be working so well. However, I have started to have some concerns about Sarah. She is something of a 'fey child', given to flights of fancy and strange moods. I have noticed on occasions when she has been staying at our home that she has moments when she appears vacant and I suspect she might be experiencing petit-mal seizures. I have mentioned my concerns to her mother who insists that she is fine and puts her strange behaviour down to being an only child.

Unfortunately, Sarah's strange behaviour has been noticed by the other children at school and this has led to her being shunned. They accuse her of being a witch and some even claim to be afraid of her. Sarah is also prone to tantrums for which she has been punished by her teachers.

Emily is fiercely protective of her friend which makes me enormously proud. However, I fear she will be tainted by association and that this will affect her relationships with her teachers and other pupils.

Am I being selfish and unreasonable to feel that I would prefer Emily to make other friends and distance herself from Sarah? I realise that to do so will also jeopardise the newly forged friendship between our families which I would deeply regret losing.

Your advice and opinions would be of great assistance.

Thank you.

Which broadband are you using?

You were the poster who saw her husband in an intimate embrace with her best friend weren't you? And it was all a huge misunderstanding thank heavens.

OP, encourage your daughter to make other friends -not so that she isn't 'tainted' but because friendships at that age can be quite volatile. If your daughter and Sarah fall out or if Sarah is ill one day or if Sarah 'goes off' with another girl, your daughter will be very isolated if she doesn't have anyone else as friends. There must be some nice people in her class who aren't bullies.
I get that you feel protective of your daughter and don't want her to end up ostracised because she's friends with someone who isn't like everyone else (kids can be nasty to people who are a bit different, hell, so can grownups apparently...), but, setting aside the moral issues of that and dealing solely with the practicalities, I doubt your daughter will listen even if you do tell her to abandon Sarah. More likely, she'll perceive you as being part of the ' witch-hunt' and it will make her even more protective.
Be proud of her that she's standing up for someone who's being targeted. Don't make her feel that you feel negatively about her friendship: if you do, she's less likely to come to you later regarding problems -either with Sarah's tantrums or bullying issues. Be someone she can talk to openly.

I can understand you wanting your daughter to have a wider circle of friends, and I can understand that you worry she will be bullied along with her friend.

Make the school aware of the bullying and encourage your daughter to widen her circle- that may well help her friend to widen her circle too.

Win win.

Thank goodness your children are beautiful.

I'm very confused by all the posts suggesting the word witch is from another century.

I was bullied at school in the 1980s and called a witch often. Probably to do with my physical appearance.

My ex called me a witch for over 20 years and most recently my two sons have joined in with the insult.

I'm only mentioning the above because "witch" has never left the vernacular and every child I have ever met would know what a witch was and that it's not nice to be called one

Emmageddon

Bad form. And nasty.

I'm only place marking really but what have the facts of you and your husband being 'deeply in love' and your children being 'beautiful' got to do with this apart from smuggery?

Are contributors seriously suggesting that I should prioritise another child's welfare over my own? Can they say - hand on heart - that they would do the same?

Well, I wouldn't be encouraging my child to shun another and basically join the side of the bullies.

Not suggesting you should prioritise another child over your own, OP, but every relationship in life comes at some kind of cost. Encouraging your children to weigh up how good something is for them and cut 'the weakest link' is not the way to lasting happiness for them or the community they live in.

Well at risk of joining the dark side I have told my ds (y7) not to sacrifice himself for his unpopular irritating friend. Not saying this is the same scenario but making other friends is incredibly important at this age.
Ds has been told not to join in, to continue socialising etc but not to blindly defend his friend when he does something annoying and gets called on it.

So looking out for your own kids is kind of normal really.

This is very disturbing, from the way it's written to the ops subsequent posts.

Let the mother deal with the school and her child and stay the hell out of it, your daughter is not being bullied, and she's got a good friend. Past that it's nothing to do with uou, if and when a problem arises with your own child, deal with it.

Past that, speaking to the head, medically diagnosing someone's daughter, speaking to the parents, deliberating who a child should be friends with is , if it's real , appalling behaviour.

You can control who your daughter socialises with outside of school,but you can't control who she is friends with in school. And if there was a sure way for me to actively maintain a friendship(at any age),was my mother trying to stop it,or worse "pushing" me towards other "mainstream" girls.

Don't know about Sarah being s witch but OP sounds like a right bitch & only people my grannies age (dead) use the phrase "a fey bairn"

Drudge, there is a big difference between calling somebody a witch and actually accusing someone of being a witch. It is the latter that the OP claims is happening, and that does sound a bit 17th century.

apologies, missed the OPs 11: 49 post; I see the witch is indeed name calling.

Re the general question, I imagine the emotional consequences for your dd will be far harder if she has to realise in a few years time that she has been part of the social exclusion and bullying of a child with SN and that it was her own mother who encouraged her to do it. It is a hard thing to find out that parents are not the forces for good that you believed they were: have seen it happen to friends and it has really hit them hard and had long-lasting consequences.

This is very disturbing, from the way it's written to the OP's subsequent posts

^ This

I wonder if Sarah's parents are having the same conversation in reverse.

I think Sarah has bigger problems than her 'fey' friend

I'd love to.know the relevance of the first 2 ridiculous paragraphs about the wonderful children at uni and how much in love the op and her husband are. Wtf is the relevance

Maybe the fey child is the only shadow on an otherwise sunny existence?

HoneyBee re: the film The Daisy Chain - I'm not sure if it's on Netflix, sorry. Only do Freeview here! But it was on in the last 3 months, I'm thinking probably late night BBC film (don't recall it having ad breaks) On googling it was made in 2008. It's an odd film, in that it appears to paint autistic children as evil, which I thought was unnecessary..

It's about a couple who go to live in a very remote area (thought Scottish Highlands, but apparently it was in Ireland). They end up fostering a young girl (about 9 or 10yrs) who has either witnessed or caused the deaths of her parents (my memory's a bit foggy on the details). She is non-verbal for a while, seems to have absences. She tends to wind up an elderly neighbour who thinks she's a witch or a demon. There are some unpleasant incidents here and there which make other people think the same thing. The old man tries to kill her if I recall correctly. There's no happy ending. More of a complete WTF!! ending.

I love a good British thriller, but this one was just so odd, I don't know if I'd recommend it.

Hopefully you can see why I drew parallels with your first post - the remote area, young girl, absences, witch, etc. I can see why you'd want to protect your child as well as wanting to help her friend, and I hope that a medical professional gets to check out her apparent absences/seizures, because that does sound worrying. If a friend had told me my daughter was doing that, I'd be taking her straight to the doctors!

The more times I read the OP the more bewildered I am by it and the funnier it gets. I just can't take it seriously at all, sorry.

Ooh we had one of those fey bairns here, a friend of my dd's. It was a bleedin' art form. She thought it was v cool to pretend to be dark and dangerous and would ham it up for all it was worth until she had the whole year group going. When she decided to keep going on about fire setting I got bored of it and suggested strongly to dd that she not encourage her friend quite so much in the deliberate oddity.
After a couple of years the gal realised that she didn't have to play a stupid role to have friends and gave it up. It was seriously hard work whilst it lasted though. Andthe other kids were just as culpable for giving her the reaction she wanted. The whole thing was entirely circular. She's a good kid but the whole dark foreboding routine was v wearing.

I am lol at the whole 'land that time forgot' routine though. Just as unnecessary as pretending to be dark and mysterious and slightly evil in order to create a character to gain notoriety.