Making and keeping friends is almost a full-time job for the 9-12 year old. It’s much more complicated now than it was when they were younger, and a friend was simply “someone you like to play with” or “someone who likes the same things you like.” As children like your daughter grow up, friendship becomes more of an inter-personal relationship, making it more interesting and important but also more challenging.
Because older children care so much about their friends, there are going to be many more disagreements with them. Expecting more kindness and loyalty from a friend means the possibility of being hurt more easily when disappointed. Wanting to give more kindness and loyalty to a friend may mean too much personal sacrifice. These conflicts often feel personal for an older child, which adds to the emotional intensity. She may feel both angry and hurt when quarreling with a friend, both because she isn’t getting what she wants and because the fight also means that her friend doesn’t like her.
Essentially, this is the toughest dilemma older children struggle with: how to be true to their friends while also remaining true to themselves. No child wants to have to give up their sense of knowing their own mind, but they also don’t want to be isolated and lonely as a result.
You don’t need to caution your daughter to avoid conflict, but you can encourage her to learn from her experience. It may not be elegant at first, but that is because neither your daughter nor her friends are very experienced yet. Their lack of skill and grace is exactly why children need to go through these experiences, though. Learning how to handle conflict and disagreements with others—whether close friends or colleagues or neighbors—is an important life skill. Experience with conflict teaches children how to stand up for themselves, when it is important to do so. It also teaches children that they can choose not to fight, when they don’t want to. Experience can show children that their skin is thick enough to get bumped around a bit, and that they aren’t necessarily going to melt under pressure. Experience also shows children that other people have their own points of view they believe in just as strongly, and that fairness requires respect for other points of view as well as their own.
One way to help a child figure out how to deal with a conflict is to help them expand their choices. For instance, at this stage, your daughter may be learning not just how to get into a quarrel, but also how to get out of one. This is a tough dilemma for children, who often find themselves caught up in a disagreement before they know it. When another child offers your daughter the choice, “do what I say or I won’t like you,” she can learn that there are more than two choices open to her. She might reply, for instance, “I still like you and I want to be your friend, even when I don’t want to do what you want me to…”
Another common dilemma for a child is to be asked to choose sides when two other friends are quarreling. “Who do you want to be friends with? Me or her?” Maybe your daughter would like to give herself a third choice, “I want to be friends with both of you.” Or even a fourth choice, “I’d like to be friends with both of you again after you have ended your fight.”
I have often found that children are greatly relieved to find that there are ways to both stay true to themselves and true to their friends.
