My kids went to a HS with 60, and it isn’t really better – hard to escape. I was the Girl Scout leader for their school troops, and had almost every girl in my troop in middle school (yes, over 20 middle schoolers in each troop!). But it gave me good insight, as I knew most of the girls. Who was a queen bee, who might be saying things behind my kids’ backs, etc. I think I was better able to judge what was going on.
Have not read the whole thread , so forgive if what I say was already stated. Middle school is known to be the worst time for teens, especially girls. My two daughters had some awful experiences. Basically, things do get better as they move into HS and mature and find their own niche, whether sports, theater, newspaper or whatever.
I think, and this is very hard at this time, it is important to remember that this is a short time in their lives and it will very soon be a thing of the past. When I think of the things I got so concerned about back then, I wish I could go back and realize that " this too shall pass."
What worries me is how the daughter really wants to get back into her friendships with the toxic bandmates. That could be like blood in the water to the Queen Bee. Things generally get better from a low point in middle school and high school. People mature. But some people stay toxic and we all know of work environments and adult relationships where the culture is toxic. I hope the bandmates mature before this trip!
I would echo the small classes are not necessarily better. My 4 kids have all attended the same small middle school (60-75 kids per grade). It really differed from one class to another. The common denominator is the parents. Parents who insist their kids are nice, polite and inclusive resulted in a close class that genuinely cared about each other. Parents who were all about competitiveness and popularity resulted in fractured classes with a lot more mean girls.
Unfortunately, D2 is going through it now. She is strong and self-assured…but it is not easy when she is smart, but not into the popularity thing. She likes sports, but is not the most athletic in her class. Fortunately, she sees how much HS has been better for her siblings. They all found friends in their own niche.
@greenwitch
I agree with you and I am torn about my daughter resuming some kind of friendship with the Queen Bee. I really don’t see anything good coming out of it, but my daughter is optimistic that things will get better. My daughter tells me that she figures they might as well learn how to get along now, since they will spend the next 4 years in band together and probably a lot of the same classes in high school (they are both academically matched and will be together in a lot of the limited honors and AP classes offered at our high school).
@Torveaux
I do think parents make a huge impact on how their kids treat each other. However, the queen bee has very nice, inclusive parents - her father is one of the friendliest, most gregarious and well-loved faculty in the kids’ school district. In knowing her parents, I would have never guessed the queen bee would act that way. And after reading all of the stories here about small schools vs. large schools, I’m thinking that it’s probably an advantage for my daughter to have a wider circle of people to make friends from at her large junior high.
Thank you everyone!
I just found this thread, and gosh, does it hit close to home. D is a Senior who is pretty, smart, and to my sadness, a bit of a loner. After mean girl experiences early on, she did stop putting herself out there. This initially upset me much more than her. She seems content and much more so since I stopped nagging her about being more social.
Her small friend group is a hodge-podge: a BFF from middle school who moved thousands of miles away after 8th grade so it is all long-distance, her coach who recently graduated college, a young married woman who used to live next door, and a few guys who originally wanted to date her but settled for being friends.
So, here’s hoping when she goes to college in the fall she finds her “tribe.” But mostly, here’s hoping she is happy which actually has happened within what seems very unconventional to her perennially worried mom.
Another on the small class size. My 8th grade class had 20 some people and I was bullied mercilessly. My high school class had something like 1700 people and thus when I lost my friendship group, it was easy to just find another one.
OP, interesting that you know the parents. Still, I know from past experience it is difficult if not impossible to intervene with the parents of a bully without making them defensive, ruining the relationship you have with them, or making the situation worse between the daughters. It’s so hard as parents to be objective about our children, to see and admit their faults, but wouldn’t it be ideal if you could speak to the other “friendly, gregarious, well-loved” parents and work something out?
i agree with so many posts here, including #71 – @carachel2 . Dont get sucked up into the roller coaster. Be loving, supportive, a listener, but dont dwell on it all.
to OP, i have SO many thoughts on this all, i’ll try to keep it short!
-
find another mom to talk to and share with, but not a mom of your daughter’s age and grade as that’s too close/competitive. Someone who’s removed but has been through things.
-
D16 liked MS; its was the last few years of HS that were hard on her with the girl drama. So, i cant say it gets better. What i can say is that situations & friends come and go. It seems to be back and forth all the time with girls. good times/bad times. be prepared for that.
-
be as supportive and loving at home as possible. Have your home and family as HOME BASE; enlist the support of aunts and grandmas and other females.
-
have family plans (backups) just in case on those big nights when there’s social activity that your daughter might not be involved in (but will hear all about it on social media.) EG: valentines day. we always do a group dinner outing for our family; and the boys in the house give the girls in our house roses. Develop some outside eccentric activities and hobbies with your daughter.
-
dont talk badly about your daughter’s friends who have turned or are being nasty. Its so hard to not feel anger to them, and want to talk to their parents even sometimes; but dont. Because often times those friendships can turn back around.
been through this with one, and now starting with another daughter. the boys are so much easier. but i’m much closer to my daughters . . .
Like others, this thread hit a nerve. D, a freshman in college now, is very pretty, smart and just a bit different (some would say a lot different). After a bad and prolonged bullying environment starting in 4th and 5th grade and lasting through 8th grade in a very small Montessori school, she has shied away from girl friends except for a very select few. What hurt her the most was one of her worst tormentors was one of her closest friends since they were 3 and 4 years old. That betrayal taught her to not trust even the ones she knew longest. D found first solace and then friendship among the boys in her classroom. A couple of them saw D getting cut from the herd, so to speak, and brought her into their small group of boys.
In high school, she pretty much recreated a friend group composed only of boys. Transition to high school was rough because she entered a totally different environment with only one classmate (a boy, her best friend). She didn’t trust girls. The boys, at first, thought she was flirting and wanted to date them. They were all on the robotics team and the boys learned she was more than capable with power tools, she had bigger biceps and packed a harder punch - she quickly became one of the guys. four years, she allowed a couple of girls befriend her but they were never close friends.
Now in college, I am happy to say, her friend group includes a girl! Maybe two! Her group of friends is still mainly boys but just the fact she befriended a girl during orientation week was great news to me.
@vineyardview - you would think the parents would have an impact. The four worst offenders in elementary school were a year ahead of D. I knew and was friends with all the parents. Absolutely delightful people. Except for one thing - they refused to see their daughters’ actions as bullying. They all declared the girls (including mine) were just going through a phase in their relationship, and of course, girls were mean to each other. It’s a phase. Why they were even disrespectful to their own parents - the girls talked back and sassed and even cussed the parents to their face. Didn’t D do that? (uh, no) In other words, they saw and allowed this unacceptable behavior because it was a phase.
^What she said. Some of the worst parents are very nice people. That can often lead to a lack of consequences for their children or rose-colored glasses when analyzing their own children’s behavior.
OP, sorry for your daughter’s troubles. Middle school is definitely the height of girl drama. One suggestion is to ask your daughter why she wants to be friends with this group of girls. Often, in middle school, the popular girls are the mean girls. If she is pretty and nice, she will always be a threat to that group. She doesn’t need to shun her old group, but if her own attraction to them is based on their social status, then she needs to understand that she is choosing them for the wrong reason and that may cause her to suffer disappointments again. I would encourage her to look for other girls who may not be in the Queen B’s orbit, but who share interests or are just plain nice. Yes, she may drop a peg or two on the social ladder, but who cares. It’s the hierarchy of cliques that causes this
@SlackerMomMD
The last part of your post reflected the reality of my daughter’s situation. I was friendly with all of the parents involved, including a very close relationship the mom of my daughter’s former BFF. All of the parents knew the girls were having problems and assumed that this was a learning situation. It was like “girls will be girls.” Furthermore, they assumed that my daughter had deleted texts and invented situations to make herself look like a victim, because they constantly find that their own daughters delete texts and use “disappearing” social media to hide things from their parents. Even when I presented them with pages and pages of texts that my daughter had taken screen shots of - that clearly showed that she was being bullied - they assumed that my daughter had done some sort of technological wizardry to change the dialogue. At that point, I simply gave up. These parents aren’t willing to believe that their children are capable of bullying and/or spreading rumors.
I think my daughter may do what your daughter and other poster’s daughters have done, which is seek out friendships with boys. She just wants to get away from the drama.
@palm715 I hope your daughter finds her “tribe” in college, too:)! My daughter has always been a bit of a loner, also, so I can relate. Thank you so much for sharing.
@b1ggreenca Thank you for the input. I wish I could work this out with the parents, but I don’t see it happening. Also, I forgot to mention in my earlier post, my daughter asked me to not talk about it with the other parents, so that was another reason I didn’t speak to them further about this.
@bgbg4us I love all of your suggestions. Thank you so much!
Thanks again, everyone. I’m concluding from all of this that it probably will get better, then maybe bad again, and then probably better again. I harbor no resentment or anger against the other girls, and I hope that one day that they will understand what happened and perhaps reach out and make amends. In all, I’m really glad that you all offered to help me and I am optimistic that my daughter will come out of this situation as a more self-assured, more mature person for having experienced it. You all have really helped put my mind at ease.
Forgive be for being naive or ignorant here. But what is queen bee? I know it means something (some female student) negative. My confusion is: What kind of damage could such a person do to others?
I grew up in a school environment where boys did not interact with girls at all (in both middle school when boys and girls were in different class rooms, and high school when they went to different schools. – And most college-bound students had more grave concerns than “social scenes” so middle/high school students really did not pay attention to social aspects of the school life. Social butterflies were “damned” into their “bad student circle” where the grownup/authority kept a close eye on them so that they would not interfere with the school’s main mission – to get more of their main stream students into good colleges. Otherwise, the staff or teachers would all get into troubles next year. The socialite kinds knew that they had to behave in order not to get into an even bigger trouble.) So I really had very limited exposure to the dynamics there.