Finding Positive Friends
One of the best protective strategies for your daughter is to surround herself with numerous positive friends. You cannot be with her in school, after school, and during her practices and meetings. You cannot cull through her classmates and kick the negative ones to the curb, but you can give your girl every opportunity to associate with positive friends who add to her well-being rather than subtract from it. Girls change in their stages of forming friendships as they go through their school years.
Fact
As girls get older, they go through “transitory” friendships that change according to age. At age eight or nine, girls walk in loose clusters of three to six members, with all of them talking, as observed by school psychologist Dr. JoAnn Deak. By age ten or eleven, girls walk in sets of twos, a sign that the “best-friend era” has begun.
Typically, your daughter and her girlfriends graduate from an early stage of side-by-side playing to interacting as they play. Next they move to friendships in groups and the best-friend stage. After that, girls reach the clique stage, the interest-based group stage, and finally — in their senior year — they develop an accepting spirit and openness to finding friends almost everywhere.
Friendship Variations
Not all girls follow the friendship stages exactly. Some linger at a certain stage while others skip one or two. No matter where your daughter finds herself in the development of friends as she gets older, she can benefit from having a wide range of girls to choose from. Should her friends move, for example, or should she change schools, she will be able to select new or more friends with ease and confidence.
Benefits of Girlfriends
According to Lyn Mikel Brown, a women's studies and education scholar, girls make use of their girlfriends as their “emotional and psychological safety nets.” With their friends beside them, they will be braver, speak out more often on important topics, and show more courage as they stand up for others — and for themselves.
Essential
According to a KidsHealth poll, only 19 percent of boys who have been threatened or mistreated by their peers tell someone or ask an adult for help. In contrast, 32 percent of girls tell their friends, parents, teachers, or guidance counselors about peer problems and ask for help. Encourage your girl always to tell someone.
Therefore, having girlfriends is most important for your daughter. She needs them as her allies and to make her strong, feel respected, and more successful. Even though your daughter may already have one fabulous friend or best buddy, how can you make sure that her army of allies expands?
Types of Girlfriends
Explain to your daughter that girlfriends come in many different forms, from casual to close ones, and that it is best to have one or several in each group. Life for a growing girl is filled with possibilities, so she should not limit herself to just one relationship with one girl. She should be sure her circle includes many different girls. Here are a few types of good friends:
Study buddies. These girls are in her classes; they are motivated and, like your daughter, want to excel in scholastics.
Good friends. These are girls your daughter is comfortable with; they make her life more fun. They can be old friends she reconnects with, or new friends she meets now.
Best buds. This is usually one girl, or two, who is a close, reliable, and unwavering friend she can talk to about everything.
Soul pals. These are girls with whom your daughter can form a forever friendship because they think and feel alike, almost like twins. No matter how much they grow and change, their connection stays the same. A soul pal may even be the girl herself, to herself.
Assuming your daughter is ready to make more friends, point out where she can best find some.
Girlfriend Meeting Places
Where your daughter meets new friends is important because the places are often an indicator as to what kinds of friends she will find there. Although she might meet new girlfriends anywhere, she can increase her chances by looking around the school library, the computer lab, or where girls usually hang out to study. Also by being an active participant in clubs and extracurricular activities, or in youth groups in the community, she can scout out more potential friends.
Girlfriend Keeping
By watching you, your daughter has already learned the friendship basics. But it will not hurt for you to remind her of the most important friend-keeping strategies:
Being trustworthy and not telling her friends' secrets unless they are in danger or need help.
Not being envious or jealous, and remaining good friends even when the going gets tough.
Sharing some of her failures, as well as her successes, to bond better.
You, the parent, have a lot of influence on your daughter's friend-making skills. You can make your house a place where your girl and her friends want to hang out by providing plenty of healthy drinks, snacks, and appropriate movies. You can encourage her to bring her girlfriends home, but do not critique them harshly.
Alert
The more you find fault with your daughter's friends, the more she might feel she has to defend them. The same goes with the groups you may find your daughter beginning to cultivate. Forbidding her to associate with certain peers may do the exact opposite of what you want: It may cause your daughter to find them more appealing.
You can also be a good listener when your girl complains about her friends or about being excluded from something they do. Listen to her with all your attention and tell her that her friendship dilemmas will diminish the older she gets.
