Dear agony aunt: why do girls fall out?

Q My daughter is 12 and has just started at a girls’ school in Bristol. She has become obsessed with having ‘one’ special friend. This becomes traumatic when things go wrong. What can we do about this?
Angela

Dr Helen Wright, 38, has been headteacher of St Mary’s Calne, for six years. She is married to an IT specialist and has two children, five-year-old Harry and three-year-old Caitlin.

Dr Helen says: This is a remarkably common situation, but knowing this doesn’t make it any less distressing for parents, who – quite understandably – find it difficult to see their child distraught about something they can do very little to help.

Rather than racking your brains trying to work out how to create that special friendship, however, what it is important to realise is that your daughter’s obsession is all bound up with how she feels about herself at this moment in time.

A time of transition

It is a time of transition, both to a new school and from childhood into early puberty - puberty in girls now starts on average at age 10, so she is likely to be in the early stages of hormonal change, even though you may not have seen any outward signs.

Understanding this, and knowing that you can instead focus on building her self-esteem, can sometimes make it all more manageable for parents.

Encourage your daughter to talk about how she feels, and make sure you listen to her very carefully. Don’t attempt to provide immediate solutions such as ‘if you do X, you will find a friend’, and don’t just try to placate with ‘I am sure it will be OK’.

Adopt much more of the role of the counsellor, listening intently and mirroring back to her what she is saying, to help her see what she is saying and to encourage her to find solutions.

Ultimately, you want her to come to realise that it doesn’t matter at all whether or not she has one friend or several friends – she needs to like herself first, and everything else will follow – but she will not take this at face value from you and needs to find it out for herself, so resist the temptation to provide an easy answer.

By allowing her to talk to you and by discussing it with her, you will help her to come to a deeper understanding.

Do everything you can to make her feel loved and wanted for who she is. Spend more time with her on her favourite activities, making sure you listen to what she really wants to do, and don’t just assume that she will want to do what she always used to do.

Questions and doubts

She is entering a stage of her life when everything she thought was stable will begin to feel less certain. She will question and doubt, and she’ll need constant reassurance. Be strong in this respect. If you exude confidence, then she will pick up on this and respond, even though you may not see it.

Don’t be put off if she says she doesn’t need you, or by her getting cross with you – one of the main ways that pre-teenagers and teenagers test out whether we really mean what we say is to push us to the limit, and one of the most important things we can do is to be strong in these boundaries, hard though it can be.

This can be a difficult time, but it does not go on forever – very few 15 or 16 year olds have or want to have a single ‘best’ friend. Take comfort from the fact that it is a necessary stage that your daughter must go through, and put your energies into helping support her emotionally. It will pass sooner if you do!

St Mary's, Calne, is a Tom-Brown.com featured school

Over to you

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