I'm doing this all wrong.

[karne]

I'm wondering if other moms of pre-teen girls struggle at all with their child's friendships? If so, what do you do? My dd has a pretty exclusive friendship with another girl at school, and I think it's really negatively impacting her. i'm worried for her, but any discussion is difficult because dd gets very, very defensive. I feel like I've turned into my own mother here-lecturing is coming out of my mouth! Yikes:. This is not what I want to be doing. That said, both dh and I are not especially wanting to encourage this relationship in any way, but yet we understand that it's very important to dd. Does anyone have any BTDTwisdom? Thanks.

[suabel]

We frequently have this issue with my ten-year-old. She tends to choose friends we don't have much in common with as a family value-wise or show behaviors that I find to be negative. One thing we often do is invite the friend to our home for hanging out or sleepovers. It's a safe environment to explore the friendship and often we end up finding good traits in the child that we didn't know about before and are a lot more comfortable with the friendship. If not, at least we witness the relationship and can speak more specifically if we notice things that are detrimental to our dd (ie. controlling behavior, etc.). We've also made sure our dd has lots of activities (sport, Girl Scouts, etc.) so that one friend isn't her whole life and she has ample opportunity to make lots of friends of all backgrounds. I've never forbidden a friendship, because certainly it isn't my place to choose her friends, just give her the tools to manage her relationships.

[Calee]

I agree with the PP about having this friend over to YOUR home as much as possible, and doing family activities or including them in family meals, etc. so that this young girl gets to know you, and you her.

Example is the best way to influence behavior, and if she/they are doing/saying negative things in front of you, you can guide the conversation or activity in a different direction. Maybe you could even take the two girls on a fun girls night!

[karne]

Thanks Suabel and Calee. We have had the playdates at our house, or gone on other trips, etc. The friend has been away for a bit and it's so nice to see my dd enjpying other kids, and kids are telling her that they want to hang out with her, but the other friend makes it too hard. I hope that dd can build on these positive experiences and branch out a bit.

My big piece-the parenting piece, I guess, is letting go and understanding that my dd's friendships are hers. These are her choices to make, and they are important to her. I so want to support this, yet I can't help being apprehensive of my child falling in with kids who aren't the best influence on her. I trust her and our connection is strong-but I still have worries.

[journeymom]

Karne, how old is your daughter?

I had this same experience. My daughter is now 14 y.o. She had a friend who fairly dominated her from 1st to 6th grade. It was very difficult to watch, but I tried my best not to come between them. (My mom and big sister had this issue, Mom objected to sister's friends and told her so and it just made my sister defensive and caused her a lot of tears). Dd's friend isn't a horrible person, but she rubs all the moms in our circle the wrong way (so I knew it wasn't just me). If this is who my daughter wanted to be friends with then I figured I should just bite my tongue and not interfere.

I could see that this girl wasn't necessarily influencing my daughter's personality. Dd was still her own beautiful self. And she'd come home from sleep-overs at the girl's house exhausted, simply because the girl is so UP and ON all the time, and such a drama queen, always needs to be the center of attention. She'd spend the whole time gossiping about everyone else. At birthday parties she'd stir up trouble just to add drama and unwanted negative energy. Dd simply isn't like that and never will be.

My point here is that your daughter still is who she is. Friends can maybe influence them to do things they wouldn't have done. But that's another part of parenting, we try to help them learn how to say no and be true to themselves. I told dd that if her friend was trying to get her to do something she didn't want to do, or begging her to sleep over or go shopping when she didn't want to, she can always say her mean mom won't let her. That way she didn't have to look bad to her friend. It got to the point that every time she spent the afternoon at her friend's house, her friend would want to turn it into a sleep over and beg her stay. So dd would call and ask if she could stay the night and I'd ask her if she really wanted to. She could answer with a simple 'yes' or 'no' so that her friend wouldn't know. So then I'd tell her to tell her friend that she can't stay over, we have something else going on that night.

I managed to not rag on this girl to my daughter. Rather, I pointed out things that her friend did that had really negative consequences, without directly referring to her friend. I kept my focus on dd, not the girl. Though in 6th and 7th grade I finally told dd that I was simply furious and disgusted with the girl when dd repeatedly came home in tears because of the various stressful situations the girl had put dd in.

Fortunately there seems to be this built-in mechanism in middle school that allows kids to naturally drift away. It seems to be fairly universal, it's when kids start noticing what they really like and choose friends who hold similar interests. By the end of 7th grade dd had found a different circle of friends and she finally feels at home. It is a HUGE relief to me, her mother.

Dang, sorry for going on and about my own experience.

I totally agree, keep up the separate interests. Dd has been in the same Girl Scout troop with her real best friend since 1st grade, even though they're in different schools.

Point out negative actions and consequences.

Don't put down the girl directly to your daughter.

Come here and complain to us!

[Storm Bride]

DS1 had a friendship that concerned us quite a lot. The dymanic between ds1 and the other boy was really strange (the other boy turned on him and actually tried to beat him up at lunch once). It lasted from partway through 4th grade until 8th grade.

All we ever did was express some of our concerns, and occasionally ask him what he got out of the friendship (not much, from our perspective!). He couldn't really answer it, but I think it did get him thinking. I'd hoped that starting high school would break it up a bit, but they ended up being scheduled into six of the same classes (out of 8) in 8th grade. Ugh.

To make a long story short, the other boy's issues finally blew up in grade 9, and he got expelled. I'm not sure what he's doing now, except for smoking a lot of pot (he transferred to an alternative school, but I don't know if he's still there). By then, his friendship with ds1 had been gradually fading away for a couple of years, and now ds1 has moved on and has lots of other healthy friendships.

I will say that, the more we had the other boy over, the more I saw that he wasn't quite as bad as he'd seemed at first. He definitely had a lot of emotional issues (divorced parents, and they played all kinds of nasty games with each other over him), but...he had his good points, for sure. For one thing, he was really good with dd and ds2, and I always appreciate that.

I won't lie. I'm glad he and ds1 don't hang out, anymore. But, I also hope that, wherever he is and whatever he's doing, he comes out of it okay...and that he gets whatever help he needs.

[karne]

Journeymom and Stormbride, thank you for sharing your stories. I said initially that I felt pretty low even having these concerns because the reality is that the friend has the behaviors she has based on what life has given her at this point. It's not hard to guess why controlling behavior and isolating a friend might be learned behaviors. I try a lot to find something positive to say, but honestly, dd sees through it, so I am better off letting it go. DD gets something, even if I don't understand it, out of the relationship. There is almost a bullying feel to it, but it's not quite that because my dd experiences this as a friendship. Am I making sense? My hope is that they aren't in the same class next year, but I feel bad saying that too because I know dd would be upset.

Anyway, said friend has been away for a bit so dd has reached out to other kids with good success, so I'm feeling good about that. We don't have lots of together time at our house w/ the first friend because there are too many difficult issues with the family and our own sense of safety. Being a bit cryptic here, but you might get my drift. We try to keep it on neutral territory.

[churndash]

Girls' relationships are so complicated, aren't they? My daughter is now 15 but when she was that age she had some friends that I just did not like. Her 12th birthday party was a real eye opener!! There were some girls that I just knew I was never going to allow to set foot in my home again!

But I didn't want to be the mean mom forbidding certain friends. Fortunately, logistics helped a lot in curbing these friendships. The friend I did not like didn't live within walking or biking distance, and I just managed to have a good reason why I couldn't ever drive her over there. Her mother worked during the day, so could not drive her to our house.

Basically I just tried to keep my daughter busy doing lots of other things with lots of other people. The friend became just a school friend and by the next year they were in different classes, so they just drifted apart naturally.