Pre-teen Granddaughter

[Kabakalli]

Sorry I think I also posted this on another person's thread by mistake. I'm new to this so apologies.

Hello I'm Nanny not Mum,
My Granddaughter is nearly 13 & is on the whole a good girl. She has a group of friends though that the same can't be said of. The thing is my Granddaughter comes home & tells us what her friends get up to, the latest things include vaping in the school toilets & stealing from shops. Here's the problem we definitely want her to tell us about these things but our instinct is to stop her hanging out with these girls because of being guilty by association etc but that also feels like we are punishing her for telling the truth. What do we do?

Talk to her and discuss whether she thinks they're making good choices or poor choices. She's probably more than aware that they're doing wrong.
Children need strong boundaries- she may be telling you because she knows they're a bad lot and she wants you to stop her from seeing them, but needs the decision taken out of her hands. It's hard to stand up to our friends, even when they're in the wrong.

She wouldn’t be telling you if she was impressed by it. I would advise her to keep her distance, and ask if she wants you to help her distance herself - but let her make her own decisions. She sounds sensible. Just make her aware that if she’s with them when they’re caught stealing, she could be accused of being a decoy, which could be recorded.
I was once shopping with a friend who was caught shoplifting and had a trip to the police station in the back of a police car. I was mortified and had no idea what she was doing. Fortunately they believed me.

I don't know.
When we say that she can't hang around with them anymore then she says something like, well I won't tell you anything anymore because I can't be with my friends. She says she's not doing any of these things so why should she be punished (which is how she feels by not being able to see her friends) I just wonder if the only option we have is to trust her to do the right thing?

Certainly don’t ban her from seeing them if she doesn’t want you to! She’ll never tell you anything important again. Trust is a fragile thing.

An anonymous conversation with school about the vaping might work though - just never tell her that you did it 😉

This is our main concern. We want her to always be able to tell us anything but over-reacting sometimes is very difficult to not do. We don't want her to get into trouble because she's with them but it might take that for her to see that maybe it's not a good idea to be with them.