First-Grade Friends And Nemeses

March 10, 2010 · Behavior | Help Pater | Influences | School

Do kids need to be mad at somebody in their group? Is it a girl thing?

Hand with Band-Aid® - illustration by Peter Arkle.

Child Nurses Resentments, Holds Grudges, Dad Wonders What’s What

Thank God, is all I can say, that I am not a practically-seven-year-old female.

Just listening to Girl Child talk about the social warfare at school and up and down Wrenmead Street makes me want to chug some of the Killian Reds I bought to serve to parents picking up from GC’s birthday party on Saturday.

Sounds like a shark tank. Endless maneuvering to dominate and crush the competition. You win when you make somebody else’s friend yours, then freeze the loser out so she has to play all by herself. Optimally, she’s very gentle and sensitive and wants to cry and all the other kids snicker and say rude things behind her back.

Not a pretty picture, but probably not completely accurate, either, except right this minute to our GC, who gives me blasts of grief and rage. Today at school, I am gathering, she took a hard hit from a kid – Evilla, let us call her – who monopolized GC’s favorite classmate Luna and wouldn’t let GC play. Evilla gloated and trash-talked. And GC was never anything but nice…

So this E-Child is our Nemesis of the Month, one in a chain going back to preschool. Nemeses are major presences, like part of our family. Just listen to how much more of the talk-time goes to Evilla than to Luna, who’s the actual friend. GC speaks, fumes, weeps about Evilla, period.

Long after she’s all howled out and smiling, she starts to retell the story to Minerva, home for dinner.

Out of my depth here. I am flat mystified by all this little girl keep-away, played with friends instead of baseballs, and heart hockey and other emotional sports. Games or not, I can’t just shrug it all off ‘sometimes my girl's really upset. On the other hand, I don’t know what – if anything – Dad is supposed to say or do. So I don’t do much.

When it doubt, sit it out – get a lot of that on this site, right? That’s because it’s fundamental to the Pater School of Child Rearing, the parental version of the medical-ethical Primum non nocere– First, do no harm.

When the kid comes home banged-up, like this time, I do a little Daddy emotional first aid. But I don’t do what I want to, for a Mad Dad moment, which is to say, “Make that little byeatch hurt worse than she hurt you.”

Good thing, because the day after the crisis GC comes home and says she and Evilla are fine. They went to the teacher, who will arbitrate future disputes. Poor woman.

Evilla will be at the birthday party.

If you don’t have advice, just give me an opinion, Aren’t girls really meaner than boys?

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Comments

As a former young girl myself, but now raising two boys, I’m going to vote that girls are meaner than boys. Boys will get into a scrapping match, beat the tar out of each other and be done with it - sharing sandwiches the next day.

Girls, on the other hand, hold grudges. Girls are manipulative. Girls can be just flat out mean.

I always wish my older self could go back to my younger self and tell me to be nicer to people, and in turn, not to take too seriously the bullies of the world. Odds are they have other issues prompting their rude behavior. But hard to understand that at seven when the world is your playground. Or, the playground is your world, rather.

Hang in there - and let us know what you find out. I’ll need the advice for my future seven year old boys myself!

Comment #1, posted by Liza Jones on March 10, 2010 at 06:25:34 PM

As a father of 2 girls (the oldest the same age as yours), what I’ve noticed is that girls value 1-on-1 play in ways that boys don’t, and it has some negative consequences. With boys, it’s the more the merrier. “You want to play with us? Sure! Join right in!” But girls seem to want to concentrate solely on the friend that they’re playing with right now. That’s great for working on that particular relationship, but as a result anyone else who wants to play is just interfering. “You want to play with us? Get the hell away! We’re doing fine without you” This necessarily causes resentment in the rejected friend, who then sets out to win what she now perceives as a competition for the object girl’s attention. Hence all the friend-trading and daily drama.

Comment #2, posted by Jeff on March 11, 2010 at 09:06:24 AM

Yes. Yes, they are.

Some girl meanness is definitely in the DNA, but I wonder how much is a product of the school/prison atmosphere?

Comment #3, posted by Chief on March 11, 2010 at 11:35:08 AM

Pater’s Plays

O mio babbino caro (from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi) by Renée Fleming

Pops of love-struck teenagers will relate. A daughter works “dear little daddy” so he’ll let her marry a guy she’s crazy for. She gets cute, begs, threatens to throw herself in river, howls how it hurts. But very, very beautifully, no?

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