#A bumpy road girl how to

“I am constantly thinking about what advice to give Kelsey, how I can help her with social situations,” says Laurel. In the case of inevitable girl friendship problems, it can feel as if nothing a parent says is right. Perhaps most important, she’s struggled to avoid making things worse.

#A bumpy road girl how to

But knowing how to best support her daughter through friendship turmoil has been one of her biggest parenting challenges. Nor does she mean to engineer her child’s social life, prearranging and monitoring playdates. Laurel Smith doesn’t enjoy tracking her daughter’s emotional well-being day after day. They may have experienced a few friendship plateaus along the way, moments of great relief for their parents, but those peaks are regularly followed by steep declines into hurt feelings and loneliness.

Some of the girls who head off to first grade chatting away, chins high, and a skip in their steps, are withdrawn and tender by the time they reach the end of middle school. The geography of female friendships in grades K–8 is notoriously inhospitable terrain, a landscape difficult for even the most attentive parents to navigate. It was Kelsey’s mother, Laurel, who found herself tucked behind that oak tree, hoping to gather intelligence that might allow her to help her daughter. What level of desperation would bring her - and many other parents of preteen girls who attest to having done the same thing - to this point? Inhospitable terrain of girls’ friendshipsĬhildren’s social life can be bumpy, and the road has been especially rough for 12-year-old Kelsey Smith, now a seventh grader in Marin County, California. She peers nervously around the tree, following the movements of a large group of girls who have gathered near a drinking fountain. Looking more closely, we notice a young mother hiding behind a large oak tree just outside the schoolyard fence. On a seemingly average Wednesday in a sunny northern California suburb, people go about their normal days, working, grocery shopping, stopping by the post office, and middle school children run outside their shouts and laughter carry on the breeze.