advocates & articles

My Daughter’s Best Friend

By Leslie Morgan Steiner

My eight-year-old daughter is our middle child, sandwiched between a smart, athletic older brother and an adorable curly-headed little sister.

She’s tall (the pediatrician predicts six feet), beautiful in an old-fashioned cameo way and headstrong. Being a middle child myself, I have oceans of sympathy for her self-esteem battles; I know all too well what it feels like to be riddled with doubt about measuring up to talented, beloved older and younger siblings.

Complicating her issues at home are problems at school. Since kindergarten, her class has been dominated by some of the most self-confident alpha girls you’ve ever seen. My girl is one of them: she’s got a lot to prove in this lifetime. These alpha girls will rule the world one day. But so many concentrated in one class creates problems too big for little girls to handle.

Last year, my daughter burst into tears nearly every day when I picked her up from second grade. The trauma always centered around recess when teachers couldn’t guide conversations or protect feelings. My daughter’s tearful reports went like this: Kira butted in line at the monkey bars.

KT and Jennie whispered the whole time by themselves. Mercedes said her new haircut made her look like a boy. From the stories, I could tell my daughter was inflicting her fair share of whispering and excluding and hurting others’ feelings. The worst came one day when the other alpha girls created a new club. The sole requirement for membership was that you had to be born before November 1st to join. My daughter’s birthday?

You guessed it.

Gradually we moms started to whisper to each other about the problems. We talked to the teachers, who thought the problems would work themselves out over time. I’m sure they were right, but we moms (and our crying daughters) couldn’t wait. So came the first solution: we moms decided to organize a series of class-wide girls-only parties and casual afterschool field trips and yoga classes, activities that any girls in the grade could join. By modeling no-exclusion events, we taught the girls not to exclude. It worked.

But my daughter needed extra help. She wasn’t crying every day anymore. But once or twice a week still seemed like a lot. Her fears centered around having (or not having) a best friend. Her closest pal from kindergarten developed new friends in a normal, healthy fashion. A new friend got angry when my daughter invited someone else for a sleepover, arguing that they were best friends so she should have been asked first.

I tried the standard parenting self-help line: it’s good to have many friends, boys, girls, etc. My daughter gave me one of those blank “mom you are clueless” looks. So I dug deeper. And came up with a solution that has given my daughter priceless solace.

“Honey, you know what you say next time someone asks who your best friend is?” I told her one night as I was tucking her in, her favorite time to dissect the thorniest social dilemmas. “Tell her I'm your best friend. Because you know what? I am.”

My daughter’s face split into a jack-o-lantern grin. She let out a sigh of relief that could have filled ten birthday balloons. Pretty soon, she stopped coming home crying. Sure, she still faces down the predictable social and developmental problems young girls tackle as they make their way in the world, and try to diagram the complex, archetypal sisterhood of women with all its pros and cons. But now, whenever an alpha girl problem surfaces, I remind her (and she reminds me) of the ultimate sisterhood of women: Mom is her best friend, no matter what.

What kind of peer pressure does your daughter face?

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