My daughter told me she didn’t want to go back to school. When I asked why, she explained that late last school year, the girls in her class started picking on her friend. She told them they shouldn’t pick on her friend; since her friend hadn’t done anything to them. They told her, that if she was the girls friend, they would not be her friend. Through sobs my little girl said, “I won’t ignore my friend, but now I won’t have any friends. Why are girls so mean?”
So, why are SOME girls so mean? I put this in IMHO in case anyone wanted to share an anecdote or give advice. My daughter will be entering 4th grade.
I don’t know, but girls are like that. We’ve chosen to prepare my daughter, work on her self esteem and cultivate the “misfits.” We tell her that the school says they are all her ‘friends’ - but they are not. We tell her that girls often like to have one “best friend” and play the “if you play with her you can’t be my friend” card - and that isn’t fair but most of them generally grow out of it. And that boys make good friends too. And that there are more important things than being liked by everyone - like being able to respect yourself.
And we talk about all this A LOT. The American Girl series of “self help” books are pretty good as well. And we still have our drama, and will have more.
Best of luck. It takes a lot of strength to get a girl though school - for both you and her.
Boys and girls have the same level of meanness, generally - they just express it in different ways.
Boys will just punch you in the face, knock you in the mud, kick you a few times and be done with it.
Girls opt for the less violent, but IMHO more insidious shunning, back stabbing, underhandedness like you’ve described in your OP.
I’m really not sure what to say other than I feel for you little girl, 'cus 9 year olds can be totally bitches. FWIW, in my experience the passing of the summer may have erased past ills and your daughter may be OK in the new year. At least she has her one friend.
Tell her to value her one friend. Give an example. Maybe something like, “if you could have all of the stiff, uncomfy cots in the world, or just one really, really comfy bed, which would you choose?” She would probably say the one really comfy bed. Use that as a segue into talking about the value of good friends.
Two daughters here, so I’ve been there.
Seems to me it’s the nature of some girls to be Queen Bitch and the nature of others to be the followers of the Queen Bitch. For some reason girls seem to place so much emphasis on being “popular” and they also use this as a weapon.
What I taught my girls is that it doesn’t matter what you do, someone is always going to talk about you and it won’t necessarily be complementary. However, their opinion shouldn’t really matter, because it’s just one opinion, and if there are hangers-on who go along with it, well, they probably couldn’t come up with an original idea of their own if their lives depended on it. Even an idiot can be agreeable.
Let this be an introduction about how some people are manipulative, and that it’s no good to be involved in any capacity with someone who tries to get you to do what they want by threatening certain actions against you. Right now, it’s her female schoolmates; in four or five years, it could be the male schoolmates that are trying to be manipulative.
My grandfather used to say that one good, real, true friend was far better than fifty fair-weather friends.
My wife was a teacher and has broken up her share of fights, both between girls and boys. She and all the other teachers and counselors I’ve talked with seem to agree that boys get into fights because of direct physical confrontations or “disrespecting” one another. Girl fights, OTOH, stem from gossip, backbiting and general “she said. . .”
Teach your daughter to avoid either listening to or spreading gossip, and not to fall into one or another of the cliques that start to form at about that age.
And ditto about one good friend being better than 50 acquaintances.
does she have any friends outside of school? Make sure she has friends she can be with where she doesn’t have to choose between them and others. Not that she should abandon the one friend, but because it helps to have friends who aren’t part of the drama.
I was often the new kid and therefore usually an outsider. Sometimes, when the other girls were being bitchy to each other, the outcast would want to hang out with us. I always made room for them, but they usually were quick to turn on us the minute their ‘real friends’ decided to let them back in.
I always felt sorry that they never realized who their real friends were - us, the ones who took them in when no one else wanted them.
I have never understood how mean and popular go together. When I was a teen the “popular” girls were really nice and that’s why we wanted to be friends with them. They became popular by being friendly and outgoing.
I bet dollars to donuts the other girls wont even remember on the first day of school. Tell your daughter some people can be mean, but they get over it. All you can control is you, so- in life- do whatever makes you happy.
Particularly if what makes you happy is spreading rumors that the girl who was picking on your friend doesn’t use toilet paper, so no one should touch anything that she has touched or get within ten feet of her.
That post mixed with the tagline in your sig. . .ha!
The other thing is that usually when boys have it out, it’s usually physical, it’s done with, and things usually get back to normal. When girls “fight”, it’s more mental and can go on “forever”.
I’ve been told I could be an honorary girl.
We socialize our girls not to show physical aggression. “Be nice” is sometimes all they hear, but they are never given appropriate channels for their anger or aggression, which they have just as much as boys.
So, they get in trouble when they hit someone, but then discover that it’s a lot easier to hurt someone by saying/doing something mean, and it has the added bonus of being much more difficult for the adults to catch and reprimand.
I’m not saying encouraging girls to settle disputes with physical violence is a good thing, but we need to recognize that when we stifle one outlet, that aggression will find another. Overall, I’d say the occasional fist fight does less damage to a child’s psyche than weeks of ongoing social bullying. I’d rather see all the kids taught how to settle disputes without cruelty.
Anyone seen the movie Mean Girls with Lindsay Lohan? In it, one of the chief mean girls, after being completely pwned by the main character joins a field hockey team and gets her aggression out on the field, becoming a much healthier person. It’s an idea.
You’re probably a little too girly.
About all I can think of is to tell your daughter that sticking up for her friend was a good thing to do, and some people just suck.
As I said in the “Becoming Alpha” thread, it’s because when someone is generally mean, but they’re nice to you, it makes you feel extra special. Being friends with the nice people is easy- everyone’s friends with them. But being befriended by the mean people? That’s like winning the social Superbowl.
The mean-one-day/nice-the-next dynamic is a form of intermittent reinforcement. It’s the most addicting kind of conditioning. Essentially, mistreating people can addict them to you like slot machines draw in gamblers.
It is because girls are the larva form of women…
(I’m joking. I love women!)
While counseling your daughter on how to deal with being on the receiving end of mean girl manipulations, don’t forget to remind her to not participate in this kind of behavior and how hurtful it is.
It sounds like she already has a great grasp of this, though, by defending and sticking by her friend when the others were being hateful. You should be very proud of her strength of character.
Luckily, I never had to deal with this as a girl. It’s when I got older that this sort of thing happened to me. Adult, professional people that should have known better were behaving like school children and worse. The scary part of it all is that I was friends and worked with this large group of ladies for seven years before “SHE” was hired. It was a great working environment where all the ladies worked in harmony, believe it or not. It’s amazing and frightening how one person can lie and gossip and poison the minds of many. I’d never been around anyone like her before and totally didn’t know how to deal with it. I finally quit my job and moved on. Maybe if I’d had to deal with it as a child, I could have handled it better.
If faced with something like this again, I won’t sit back and let it happen like I did before. As a result of my not saying anything, taking the high road and hoping it would run it’s course, this woman became bolder and bolder, meaner and meaner until she had turned everyone in the office against me, including our new boss. I look back on it now and it seems surreal. I NEVER believed people like her existed. A pathological liar and manipulator all directed at me. I finally asked one of the ladies what this woman had against me. She said that I was the only one in the office that didn’t ask to look at her baby pictures when she brought them in. WTF??? This lasted for 3 years… CRAZY! :eek: Looking back, I know now that it was all about jealousy.
Sorry, didn’t mean to hi-jack your thread figure9. This is a great time to prepare your daughter for dealing with this kind of thing later in life. Unfortunately, some “mean girls” NEVER grow up!
Because we expect them to be sugar and spice and everything nice. SO when they’re not, it seems extra bad.
Looking back, most of the mean girls I knew had horrible self-esteem (thanks, in part, to other mean girls as well as plenty of mean boys – they don’t just fight with their fists). If they can distract people from their own perceived inadequacies for a second, they’ll do it. Bonding over hatred of someone else is also fun and great for group morale.
I recommend reading a book called “Queen Bees and Wannabes” - a very fascinating insight into the social orders of girls.