The writing prompt: write about an experience shared by two friends.
grade level: 6th, so ages 11-12 years(prehaps a few 13.)
For some reason about 75% of the kids write about fights they’ve had with their best friends.
The causes for fighting are:
Friend 1 meets Friend 3, so Friend 2 (F1’s best friend) flips out and insists that F1 can only be friends with them ** or ** F3. About 60% of “the fight” papers are for this reason.
F1 and F2 like the same girl or boy.
F1 and F2 fight about something random.
I don’t really understand the whole “you can only be my friend or hers/his” thing. In sixth grade most of the people I knew hung out with at least a few people, not just one.
As for the random fight thing, how is it that their friendships are as shallow as they are? About half of them end the paper with “and we never spoke again.” Causes for fighting include things like: one girl was brought to see a play for her birthday- her dad only bought tickets for himself and her; one kid has to move, so the other is pissed at them; one kid’s team beats the other; someone ** lies** to one kid about something the other supposedly said etc.
Anyway, I’ve read at least 500 versions of “the fight” so far, and I just don’t understand. Were your 6th grade friendships so jealous and tenious? Mine weren’t. I was friends with the same people in 6th grade through 10-12th grade. I’m curious if I’m odd (as well as all the other scorers at my table) or if this is a new trend.
Elfkin477, what gender are you? I ask because my husband and his buddies from 6th grade are still in touch. I’m still in touch with a friend from 7th grade, but I’ve found that to be really unusual in women. (But then I’ve been accused of being an ‘old soul’ since I was about nine.) I’ve no cites or proof, this is all IMO.
I know it’s oft repeated that in adolescence girls are more mature than boys. While it seems to be true in with regards to independence from parents and personal responsibilty (i.e. homework & chores) I however, don’t see that to be true in how pre-teens (girls in particular) treat each other. From my childhood memories and my observations of my sons childhood and adolescence, I think boys treat buddys as ‘buddies’ for the most part and if they fight often, they duke it out and then let it go. I’ve noticed a ‘tribe’ type behavior, once you’ve won the foot race, or cracked the funniest joke about your sunday school teacher or broken your arm saving a kite from a tree, you’re ‘in’. Once in, you’re part of the tribe and the lil indians stick up for each other. With girls, this circle of friends is less cohesive, less ‘tribe like’ and more like the a tide, the eddy constantly changing color, size, shape, depth and sometimes leaving one or two of them out there stranded in a lone little pool. Within a year of when my son was born, 13 girls were also born in our social circle. Now and then there’s been another boy or two, (and he’s got two close buddies now) but for the most part it’s been KidSthrnAccent and these 13 girls. As young girls they were a good group, basically kind to each other in age appropriate ways. But when they hit 10 or so, the girls attitudes became much more volitile, ‘catty’ if you will. I’ve read books an articles that say their self esteem drops dramatically at that age for girls, perhaps that is a contributing factor. I’m sure I’m over generalizing, but I took liberties since its late and this is IMHO and not GQ.
Oh and we’ve assured KidSthrnAccent that when he’s 16, he’ll be really glad our friends all have girls!
Kids that old haven’t really had that long to develope deep, emotional relationships. Me and my friend had a fight about something stupid when we were young, but we were good enough friends to forgive each other.
I agree with much of what Abby has to say about the way girls change when they reach 10 or so; certainly I remember middle school as absolute hell, and my peers caused, oh, 99.9999% of the misery.
But I’m not sure that’s the whole explanation for the friendships dissolving statistic. When people reach sixth grade, they’re really changing. That can mean that two people who have been friends since age 4 suddenly have much less in common; they may also develop different goals, social behaviors, etc. The fights, especially those that were about random events, probably arose more from these differences than from any one event - in essence, it isn’t so much that the fight ends the friendship as that the kids are fighting because it’s time for their friendship to end.
Also, young kids are relatively uncritical. They often seem to stay friends simply because, well, they’ve been friends with this person for a big chunk of their lives (at age 8, a year is an enormous chunk of your life), and what has been is what will be. Kids who are approaching puberty are, for the first time, developing critical and judgemental faculties of the kind that will allow them to say “I don’t have to be friends with X simply because I have always been friends with X” or “I might prefer to be friends with Y than with X.” Again, in these cases, the purpose of the fight is to end the friendship, or, more exactly, to acknowledge and explain the end of the friendship.
Now, if the friends are pretty well-matched to start with, and they happen to grow in similar ways, these fights don’t have to happen. It isn’t a guaranteed thing. But I do think these sixth-grade fights are the early warning signals of all that teenaged wonderfulness on the horizon, symptoms of puberty and development.
(And as support for the statistic about the frequency with which these fights occur, look at the huge numbers of juvenile fiction books about the end of a friendship. It’s what you might call a persistent theme.)
I remember about that time, 4-6th grade, that the girls would write out lists, ranking each of their friends–first best friend, second best friend, third best friend, and so on. You couldn’t have a group of three “best friends” anymore–only one person could be the best friend. If the second-best-friend started horning in on the first-best-friend’s territory, sparks started to fly.
Maybe it’s the evolving critical sense that deepbluesea talked about. Very sensitive heirarchies develop. I don’t think that changes as kids grow up to be teenagers–they just have enough sense not to write it down and show it to people.
Yes, deepbluesea I agree that evolving critical sense is likely a huge part of it and I should have thought to mention it. I’m glad you did. A slight hijack, in that I of the opinion that in addition to young teen friendship this quote
applies to older teenagers as the time approaches for them to leave their parents home.
Female. Does “Elfkin” strike you as particularly masculine?
I’m still in touch with a couple of friends from grade 6, but having moved twice since graduating high school, it has made it a little difficult. Like I said though, I didn’t know any 6th graders who fought like these kids do, and I was friends with the same kids through high school with a couple of exceptions. Other people I work with, mostly female, had similar 6th grade experiences (as mine) so…
Elfkin, I have some friends who are still friends with everyone they knew in middle school and high school; other people, like me, are in touch with almost no one from that time. I think some of the factors are:
How much you’ve changed. I would not necessarily have anything in common now with the people I knew in high school. I’ve changed a lot. Most of the people I know who are still friends with their hs and ms circle have changed less.
How happy you were at the time. Most of the people in the stay-friends group were at least relatively happy in middle school and high school - not necessarily at home, but at school. People who weren’t very happy don’t seem to want to hang onto those friendships.
Your sense of community. A lot of things come under this heading. I notice people who grew up in cohesive communities tend to stay friends, whereas people who grew up in more nebulous communities don’t have the same ties. People who moved during their school years seem less likely to stay friends than people who lived in one place the whole time. And so forth.
Does that jibe with what you’ve experienced? (Apologies if this isn’t the most coherent post; I’m very tired.)
Oh, and btw - I see Elfkin as a gender neutral name. Probably comes from my years of playing role-playing games.
Well, dang, I read the OP and my immediate thought was, hey, Elfkin, you a boy or a girl? Because your OP described to a T exactly what goes on every time La Principessa and her going-into-sixth-grade-next-year gang of girlfriends get together. A isn’t speaking to B, B would like to be friends with C but can’t because A doesn’t like C… And your bafflement sounds exactly like the Dad-in-Residence, upon receiving the details of the latest pitted battle over whether they were going to play School or Barbies or Dressup or Ride Bikes (it all comes down to Politics and Power, not whether anybody actually feels like riding bikes or playing Barbies.)
My second thought, upon finding out that you’re a girl, was, “Yeah, you’re like I was, one of those horse-crazy little girls, and all this stuff just passed us by, washed right over us.” And the friends you were friends with were your horseback-riding friends. Am I right?
If not, and you had actual real live human beings for the same friends all during junior high and high school, then I’d say you had a completely abnormal adolescence, and I think you should get some counseling ASAP.
Actually, I was afraid of horses, for some reason. I guess everyone in my school was odd then, since no one acted like these kids, except maybe for the most “popular” ones, whom I didn’t care enough about to observe much.
Whew! Thank you deepbluesea and Duck Duck Goose. I was worried I’d made an awful faux pas. In fact, at the kids swim meet today I asked the group of teens and parents gathered on the cheering benches what gender they thought an elfkin might be. One said a wizened old man, one said a young girl and all the rest said they wouldn’t have known. I feel so much better. Even so, elfkin I meant no offense by asking, please pardon me.
