ASK THE EXPERT:Children can pick up if parents are worried about them fitting into their peer group, writes DAVID COLEMAN.
I WORRY FOR my nine-year-old daughter because of her friendships in school.
Since she started in Junior Infants, she never really made one particular friend but is friendly with a group of girls who went to playschool together.
Because she wasn’t in playschool with them I sometimes feel they know each other a lot better and also their moms are friendly so these girls probably meet at events outside school also.
Now, I have gotten to know two of the moms very well and we organise play dates. In school, though, as all nine-year-olds do, they often get a bit nasty towards one another. The group of girls seems to make up immediately but leave my daughter out. She is very sensitive and I feel this really upsets her. One friend in particular, it seems, tries to keep the upper hand and threatens the friendship.
In the past few months my daughter has started wetting the bed a lot. She used to wet the bed when she was younger but seemed to grow out of it and I’m wondering why the re-occurrence? I do talk very openly to her and feel she can and does confide in me but that doesn’t eliminate my worry. It hurts me to see her sometimes isolated in this gang of friends. Should I just let it be? What advice can I give her?
IT IS VERY upsetting for a parent to feel like your child is being excluded or singled out in a group of friends. Sometimes, if our child seems picked on, or isolated, it brings up strong feelings of victimisation that we may have felt ourselves when we were children. As I read your query I am struck by the level of anxiety and distress that you express and I wonder if this is something that you are experiencing now?
I’m sure that your daughter does find the dynamics of her peer group to be difficult to manage. It is quite likely that she does feel upset if she is excluded or isolated from the group. It sounds to me like the recurrence of the bed-wetting is in fact an indicator of her anxiety. She probably is very upset at feeling left out after a fight and maybe she finds it hard to feel equal in the friendships.
I wonder, however, if her level of distress is being matched by or even exceeded by your own distress?
Small children look to us, their parents, to regulate their emotions. They learn to judge how they feel themselves according to how we seem to respond to their life experiences. If you take an example of a three year old who falls over and perhaps hurts herself, she will often look to you, the parent, to see what your reaction is. If you look panicked and worried that she has badly injured herself, she will probably become very upset. If you seem nonchalant, or matter-of-fact about a small trip, it may be that she responds somewhat more stoically.
Older children too will look to their parents for emotional regulation (albeit not as regularly). So, even at age nine, something similar might be occurring. Your daughter may be picking up from you that she can’t quite fit into her peer group because she didn’t know them from the start. She may also be picking up from you that it is a terrible thing to fall out with your friends and for it to take time to repair that relationship. She sees how distressed and anxious you are about the quality of her friendships and so it exacerbates any distress she has herself.
In order to help, I think you should project a bit more confidence about her ability to create and sustain her friendships. Try to manage your own anxiety so that it doesn’t transfer onto her shoulders and leave her with more stress and less capacity to deal with it.
Practically, you can explain to her about how relationships can work. Let her know, in a matter-of-fact way, that girls can be bitchy but that it is not the end of the world. She may sometimes be left out now, not because she’s a bad person, but because scapegoating her makes everyone else feel safer. Remind her of the fact that this group is not the only group she will ever be part of and that her experience here will not necessarily generalise to other friendships.
Then, focus on building her self-esteem so that she feels good about herself and this will add to her self-confidence. Remind her of her strengths and her abilities. Keep creating opportunities to strengthen some of her individual friendships with the girls. Find role models in your extended family or in the wider media of women who stand out on their own, with confidence.
David Coleman is a clinical psychologist, author of Parenting is Child's Playand broadcaster with RTÉ television
Readers’ queries are welcome and will be answered through the column, but David regrets he cannot enter into individual correspondence. Questions should be e-mailed to healthsupplement@irishtimes.com