When Jeannie’s mother picks her up from after-care, 9-year-old Jeannie surprises her by bursting into tears and saying:
“I hate Molly! She said I was too bossy and she didn’t want to be in our new club! I told her we didn’t care, because no one likes her very much either. The other girls said I was being mean to Molly, and they all went to talk to her and make Molly feel better. Tanya even said Molly was right, and everyone does think I’m too bossy! Now no one wants to be my friend, and the club is ruined! It’s all Molly’s fault!”—and Jeannie bursts into fresh sobs.
Jeannie’s mom doesn’t know what to say. Her heart is breaking as she listens to her daughter cry. She too can remember being ostracized once or twice by the other kids when she was growing up. She hates to see her little girl go through the same painful experience. But, on the other hand, she has noticed that Jeannie really can be pretty bossy with her friends sometimes—so could this experience be the one Jeannie needs to help her to learn something important about how to get along with her peers?
Compared to the happy eight-year-old homebodies, nine-year-olds tend to be more interested in their friends than their families. The typical nine-year-old is very knowledgeable about all the details of their friends’ interests. The nine-year-old also has clear opinions about what they like or dislike about other kids. Forming these opinions is another step the child is taking towards developing their own identity. The nine-year-old working very hard at finding out how to be their own special self and how to belong to their group of peers. This is the age, for instance, where some children delight in inventing their own clubs—and greatly enjoy planning all the various details of their (sometimes secret) organization.
Nine-year-old boys and girls often are part of friendship groups at this stage, as well as beginning to have true “best friends.” Nine-year-olds tend to choose their closest friends on the basis of common interests, shared likes and dislikes, and compatible personalities. There are some subtle, but important, differences in the friendship styles of boys and girls. Boys tend to have one or two close friends and may enjoy small groups that like to hang out together informally. Compared to the boys, girls’ friendship groups are more frequent, more stable, and more intense. In addition, girls’ friendships and friendship circles are often focused on shared interests, such as a mutual love of playing dress up or enjoying horseback riding.
Nine year olds can be loyal and devoted friends. In addition, children this age also tend to have a very strong sense of fairness. This sense of fairness and equity can be quite rigid at times. According to the typical nine-year-old’s code of ethics: everyone has their own point of view and everyone should look out for himself or herself. This can result in nine-year-old children holding each other to very high standards and being quick to hold each other accountable. You will often hear this in the way nine-year-olds speak to each other: “You shouldn’t have taken apart his Lego spaceship without asking him first, that’s not fair! You shouldn’t expect to be the line leader every day, that’s not fair! You shouldn’t take the most red beads for your art project, that’s not fair!”
With their new and more intense enthusiasm for their friends, nine-year-olds are now less in awe of their parents and more apt to see us as the imperfect human beings that we are. Because nine-year-olds now think that parents shouldn’t “boss them around” all the time, they are very pleased to catch their family, both parents and siblings, in occasional behavioral lapses. They will sometimes take this to the logical next step of holding you to the same standards required of them. You may have seen this one evening when your child looks up to you self-righteously and says “If I have to go to bed at 8:30, then you have to, too, fair is fair!”
Nine year olds are now getting close to adolescence, and are showing a new interest in what their friends think about them. This increased sensitivity to the opinions of others is a sign of real maturity, but it can also make children more susceptible to teasing and to being “punished” by their friends when they overstep the boundaries—as we saw in Jeannie’s case. In addition, their strong sense of fair play also leads the nine-year-old to believe that every wrong must be righted. This rush to retaliation can lead nine-year-olds to fight more often with their friends and peers, rather than seeking more peaceful ways to resolve disputes.
So what can Jeannie’s mother do to help her daughter in this situation? The first way any parent can support and help their child (at any age) is to really listen to the child’s story. Being a good listener is communicated by being physically close; looking in your daughter’s eyes or glancing occasionally at your son’s eyes; using a tone of voice that is compassionate without being condescending; and asking only enough questions to keep your child talking. Listening with sensitivity and a non-judgmental approach conveys to the child that you really care about their experience and their feelings. The hardest part for Jeannie’s mother is to bite her tongue and not offer advice to her daughter. She had learned that if she said as little as possible, beyond clarifying her understanding of her daughter’s feelings (“that sounds like it was embarrassing for you” or “it seems like your feelings were really hurt”), Jeannie would be able to process her own feelings.
As children experience their parent’s love and understanding, they can begin to make the bridge towards experiencing compassion for their playmates. After listening for a while to Jeannie’s story, her mother began to wonder out loud “I wonder how Molly felt when you said ‘no one liked her’?”
Learning to feel empathy for the feelings of others is a slow and gradual process. Parents first support their child’s learning by providing a loving environment and modeling unselfish love. Their love helps children make the next big step from “It’s right to look out for myself” towards “It’s right to think about other’s feelings as well as my own.” This is a difficult step for kids to make, because it is a big challenge for a 9-year-old to move from feeling angry with a friend to feeling a sense of empathy for the friend’s hurt feelings. The nine-year-old has usually begun to sympathize with their friends, especially if their friend is sad or hurt and they are not (remember how Jeannie’s girlfriends went to comfort Molly when she was sad and hurt). If Jeannie can now begin to appreciate that Molly’s hurt feelings are just as important as her own hurt feelings, then she is making important progress towards learning how to be a tolerant and compassionate person.
The next big challenge for Jeannie in this situation is to repair her damaged friendship with Molly and the other girls in her friendship group. It is important for children to learn how to quickly resolve arguments with their friends and move past them without bitterness, or their friendships are at risk. Jeannie’s mother wants Jeannie to learn how to do this for herself, and not to rely upon her mother to pick up the pieces for her. So Jeannie’s mother asks Jeannie what she thinks she will do next, now that she understands that Molly had some pretty good reasons for being upset. When Jeannie can’t think of what to do, her mother asks her what she would want Molly to do if the situation were reversed. At that question, Jeannie’s face lit up as she smiled confidently and dashed upstairs. Later, Jeannie showed her mother a lovely card that she had drawn and illustrated, in which Jeannie told Molly that she was sorry and would like to be friends again.
Jeannie’s mother sighed with relief; her daughter had learned valuable lessons about hurting and healing friendships. As Jeannie grew and her relationships with her peers became even more important to her, she was laying a good foundation in understanding her friends and their feelings, as well as her own.
