17yo daughter being left out by friends

[Dadadan]

Hi all, so I’m new here. Just signed up in the hope of getting some expert advice on how to help my 17 year old daughter through a difficult time.

Basically, her friends are terrible. She’s at 6th form college and the circle comprises a few girls from her high school and some others she met there when she joined in Year 11.

My daughter, who’s the eldest of 2 has to an extent always struggled with friends. She’s always been mature for her age and is pretty academic. Her mum and I always told her that things would get better at 6th form and now I feel like we sold her a lie.

She’s always up for doing stuff, be that thrifting on a Saturday, hanging out or going out. Her friends are welcome to drink and smoke at ours if they want and for a while they were coming over quite regularly to hang.

But for reasons none of us can quite ascertain, they’ve stopped. Not just coming over, but inviting her to anything - in the day or evening- there’s at least one ‘other’ group chat where they’re making plans and not including her, and my daughter is finding out that they’re doing stuff, inevitably, when they post it on social media.

It honestly breaks my heart. Especially as she is apparently the one they go to when they want to trauma dump all their shit on someone. Its like they’re literally just using her.

This evening, after being ghosted trying to arrange something, anything, she texted one friend who replied that she was going to a rave. Not ‘do you want to come?’ Just ‘I’m going, see you later.’

My daughter’s just been lying in bed for hours now, scrolling endlessly, utterly bored and feeling like the world’s biggest loser. My heart breaks for her. She deserves so much better than this.

If she was a bit younger, I feel her mum and I might be able to intervene a bit more directly, but she’s 17. What can we do? I feel so helpless.

We have a good relationship with her and she knows she can talk to us, and she does. But this is making her depressed and destroying her self confidence. Where/how does a 17 year old make new friends??

Is she nice to people? Sorry to ask but the two girls of this age I know who struggle socially were frankly not very nice to their peers who eventually got sick of it. I know as a parent that’s very difficult to hear.

Dd is 17 and having a party tonight at her limit with numbers I asked her to invite my friends dd who I know gets quite left out but after dd explained some of the things this girl had said to her about my younger child my sympathy drained away. No invite for her.

Ha, I’m bit surprised!

My own daughter, from what I’ve seen of her socially, is fine, which is what’s making this so upsetting as there’s nothing we can really put our finger on to work out why this has happened.

Back when she was younger, she could be quite dominant in terms of only wanting to do what she wanted to do, but there was never any nastiness or bullying around it. She just had fixed ideas abut what she wanted to do and had to learn to accommodate other kids’ ideas and interests. In large part she’s aged out of it, although there have been occasions where she’s turned down invites if what’s on offer doesn’t really appeal.

it certainly doesn’t seem like she’s committed any great social faux pas that would result in this, that’s for sure.