I’m the mother of a similarly “weird” thirteen year old girl - who takes pride in her geekiness and who has social issues at school. And who is the child of two geeks who had social issues in school.
I wouldn’t send her. We do a lot of our educational opportunities where we control it - we take her places. We don’t let her into the Lord of the Flies world of lightly supervised middle schoolers.
But we find places where she can meet kindred spirits. And do our best to create social activities with them. She loves the girls at the Unitarian Church, who tend to be a lot like her - not surprisingly the adult leaders are former geeks. She loved robotics camp. She loves getting together with the few like minded girls in her school - and so they have a Girl Scout Troop (two of the girls left middle school for private school and home schooling respectively this year - in part due to social issues - so its more important than ever that the girls get together).
Her reaction to being forced to spend time with her class is extreme. Do not force her to go, and ask her whether she’s being bullied at school, in cyberspace or both.
If she has any so-called social-media profiles, investigate them first-hand.
Thank you, monstro. This covers a lot of the things I was thinking about.
So I talked to her, and apparently one girl in particular is making life very difficult. She is spreading rumours and lies to turn the other girls against my daughter and her friend. Now no one will talk to them, or come near them. She says when she tries to set the record straight, the other girl just talks over her, and no one will listen. She says the other girl is very smooth and convincing. So that seems pretty sucky.
You mentioned that your daughter’s one friend was not going on the trip, so it’s not likely that your daughter will feel left out of the post-trip hoopla. If she does, lesson learned; maybe she’ll want to go next time.
I can picture the gruesome details of your daughter being on the trip without a friend. Every time she gets on the bus, there will be the trauma of having no one to sit with, or someone being forced to sit with her, or god forbid having to sit with a teacher. Long hours on the bus, feeling like she’s wearing a big “loser” sign. Every event of the trip will be excruciating as it is made obvious over and over that daughter is an outsider and is alone unless a buddy is assigned to her. Nightly room assignments will be another humiliation; IME the children are usually given some choice of whom they share a room with. Daughter will be tossed in wherever there happens to be a space, feeling very much like she’s not wanted there.
The trip definitely has the potential to be an emotionally scarring experience.
Your daughter sounds like my kind of gal. I love that she is a non-conformist and that you embrace her weirdness. And while I’m a huge believer in dealing with problems head on, and teaching kids that school is important, I would make an exception here and let her stay home. You’re not going to ruin her life either way, but if she feels that strongly, she must be stressed about it. She sounds like the type of person who will excel in life—but often those types of people struggle through childhood.
Here’s one of my favorite quotes:
“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently . . . About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them - because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.” - Steve Jobs
Yep. Middle school girls can be some of the nastiest people on the planet. It’s all very passive aggressive, a lot of back stabbing and rumor-monging. Not the kind of bullying you can stop with just a punch in the face, sadly. One week they’ll be your best friend, the next your worst enemy. Usually they grow out of it around 9th-10th grade, but until then, ugh. (Even the popular kids usually suffer through it – the weird ones go through hell.)
Don’t make her go. There will most likely be other opportunities, hopefully when all this bullshit is over with. And while she most likely won’t believe you, tell her that sometimes, it’s better to ignore the rumors (depending on how bad they are). Her real friends won’t believe them, and she’s better off without the assholes. I know middle school seems like forever, but it’s not. As Dan Savage said, “It gets better.” (Yes, he’s speaking for gay, bisexual teens, but it’s right for pretty much everyone)
If it’s just one person making her miserable, she’s going to need to learn some lessons soon. Some never learn it, but she needs to, soon.
She is letting this other person ruin her life. Not by not stopping her, because there will ALWAYS BE people who don’t like your face no matter what you do. But by allowing her to affect her THIS badly just by talking, well…she needs to learn number 2, which is
You can’t control everything that happens to you, but you ARE in control of how you react to it. The other girl’s a bitch; so what? Your little lady will probably figure it out eventually, but the sooner she can learn that SHE doesn’t have to be a bitch, or a fraidy-cat, or tiptoe around the other girl, or hide from situations where people are trying to make her uncomfortable…yeah.
She needs to NOT let the other girl ‘win’. And the way to do that is to ignore her, and keep being her wonderfully weird self despite other people.
Ask her if she’d be looking forward to the trip if she knew the other girl wasn’t going.
If the answer is yes, just let her know that by not going, she is letting the other girl control HER life.
She oughtta get pissy about that.
I was a shy kid. You can’t “teach” a kid to stop being shy by forcing them into social situations they don’t want to be in. The only skills you learn is how to withdraw emotionally from the world around you. Don’t force her to go.
Another “weird” teenager back in the day, here. I wasn’t hated by all the girls but as a quiet observer I saw how vicious they could be.
Echoing what others said- don’t make her go. You’ll waste $300 to make her miserable, she probably won’t learn much or gain much from the experience if she’s so miserable, and she’ll probably regret being forced to do it.
Hell, my mom forced me to do something despite my begging and pleading and I still resent her for it (16 years ago!) A little different scenario- She forced me to go on a rollercoaster; I’m deathly afraid of heights and knew I wouldn’t like it. I cried during the entire wait in the line. I’m not much of a crier so it was also a terribly embarrassing experience but my mother would not take no for an answer. It wasn’t even so much the fact that I had to go on the rollercoaster -I knew I’d survive- but the fact that I knew that I didn’t want to go and I knew that I wouldn’t have a good time (even at that young age), and my opinion was ignored/overruled regardless. To a kid, especially one like yours that age where they are becoming more independent, that can be very insulting.
She’s pretty smart - in school she is relatively protected. Teachers see a lot, and there is almost always a teacher around - put your head down to get from class to class and be careful in the lunchroom. So while nasty rumors spread, they are spread in hateful whispers - not confrontations. A trip, and one where she doesn’t even have one friend along, is an exercise in isolation - its much easier for that one girl to find a few girls and pin her down when the chaperones are more distracted. The bullies can be much more direct. And it can hurt a lot more (and even get physical).
Last year my weird daughter was getting bullied in the locker room - another place where teachers can’t see and hear it all. We brought it to the attention of the female gym teacher, her locker was moved to be right in front of the gym office, and the problem went away.
My daughter is going on the same trip very soon and she sounds similair to yours, talk to the teachers and send her. It is I assume her grade 6 camp, my son did it last year and the feedback was that it was very well run and the teachers really worked with some of the less socially adept kids. I have sat down with my daughter’s teacher with her and she is now pretty damn excited to go.
Exclude her from this and it’s just another reason for the other kids to single her out.
So send her but not cold and also ensure she has some nice clothes to wear, doesn’t have to be expensive but a quick trip to DFO to pick up a couple of nice tshirts could do wonders.
You know your kid but if it were mine, I would 100% make her go. Mostly because all of the things my daughter has loved have been because I made her do them.
I am glad you talked to her. I would bring up what is happening with the school. Not so that she gets branded as a tattle tale but so that, while on the trip, the teachers can be aware that there is a bullying situation going on and make sure that your kid is safe.
Not sure how far away it is or what technology is like there but I would also make sure that she is able to text (limitlessly) her friend and you whenever she wants when she is gone. Just having that small lifeline could make it a lot easier for her to put herself out there.
This. I know you care for your daughter, and that wishing for her to og on the trip comes from the right place. But don’t try to make your daughter into something she is not. You say you don’t mean to put her down for being weird, and this is the time to show it. Let her be her.
There’s nothing better for a child who is the target of bullying than to know that his/her parents have their back and support them. I remember going to a private school when I was her age, and a HATED it. I was the target of bullying and disliked having to go. My mother eventually told me, point blank, that if they bothered me again, I could punch them, get in toruble, and she would have my back the whole way. I never punched them(wasn’t the kind of kid I was). But the fact that she was one my side meant more than I could ever possibly describe. It’s one of the most powerful memoreis of my childhood. The next year, my parents pulled me out and put me in public school, and I’ve never thanked them for something more.
If you make your kid go on the trip, it could very well be something they will hold against you for a long time. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t push your kid to engage in social activities(or at least try to find ones she enjoys). Just don’t force it. Do it gradually enough and she won’t even notice what you’ve done until she’s changed into a more complete, if not any less wierd, person.
Your husband is right that she cannot just sit at home all day and still magically make friends. He’s also right that she needs to stretch herself sometimes, and do things that make her kind of nervous, and learn to cope with them whether or not they turn out okay in the end. He can help her do this by helping her find something that makes her want to stretch and put forth effort. Find a community class in something she’s interested in and is structured to make her work towards a goal for some length of time – an art class where the student needs to have X, Y, Z and a big finished project in their portfolio at the end of the semester, for example.
(And please tell him never to use the phrase “building character” ever again. Soaking up damage just for the sake of learning how to soak up more damage isn’t a useful life skill, it’s an object lesson in learned helplessness. Particularly when your parents, the people who are supposed to love and care for you, are the ones that shoved you off the cliff in the first place.)
This has nothing to do with that. The issue here is not really “I don’t know anyone going”, it’s “all of the other people who are going are people who make me miserable”. She might have been okay going if her friend was going, because there really is safety in numbers. She is not okay going if she’s going to be all alone, because then she is all alone, for three days, in a sea of people she normally gets to escape at the end of the day by fleeing for home.
Your daughter’s behavior is not causing the problem. The behavior of the other children is. If nobody can control them in school, then nobody will be able to control them on the field trip either. It would be three days of what amounts, for a twelve-year-old, to being in an active combat zone with no backup at all.
She thinks she hates people, incidentally, because this is a perfectly logical hypothesis to develop when most of them are rather mean to you. I nose around a lot in the social psychology of the gifted and talented, and this is surprisingly common among the weird smart kids. They have close to zero friends through grade school, pick up a few in high school, and then normalize (socially, in the statistical sense) in university, when they have the opportunity to meet people who actually think about the same odd things they do. She’ll stop believing she hates people when she gets older and meets some she can actually talk to.