When your daughter keeps playing with the ‘difficult’ girl: What I learned as a parent
I was leaning against the 2nd grade playground gate last week, wiping sticky grape juice off my 4-year-old’s jacket, when another mom leaned in, voice low like she was sharing a secret. “Does your Lila still play with Mia?”
I nodded, and she winced. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, but Mia is so bossy. My daughter came home crying last month because Mia pushed her off the climbing wall. I just don’t let her play with Mia anymore.” I sipped my lukewarm iced coffee and didn’t say anything at first, because six months ago, I would have said the exact same thing.
Mia is the 7-year-old who’s always last to be picked up from aftercare, because her mom works 12-hour shifts at the local hospital three days a week. She wears the same scuffed pink rain boots almost every day, even when it hasn’t rained in two weeks, and she’s quick to grab things and quick to yell when things don’t go her way. Most of the parents I know have quietly steered their kids away from her. When Lila first started asking for Mia to come over, I hesitated. I’d already seen her grab Lila’s sparkly birthday hair clip at a class party and hide it in her pocket, and I’d stood by awkwardly while Lila asked for it back over and over.
After the party, I pulled Lila aside and asked her if she wanted to stop playing with Mia. She blinked at me like I’d asked why she didn’t stop breathing. “Mia sat with me at lunch when everyone else was talking about the movie I didn’t get to go see,” she said. “She doesn’t think my lisp is silly.” That stopped me cold. I’d forgotten that Lila still gets teased sometimes about the lisp she’s working on in speech therapy. I’d never heard her mention that Mia was the one who didn’t tease her.
I started paying closer attention when they played, instead of just listening to what other parents said. Last month, I sat on a bench nearby while they built a sandcastle for 45 minutes. Mia kept knocking the whole thing down right when they got the top flag on, and I tensed up, waiting for Lila to storm off crying like most kids would. Instead, Lila just wiped sand off her jeans and said, “Okay, this time we’ll build the walls thicker before we add the flag.” Mia grinned, and it was the biggest, loosest smile I’d ever seen on her. I realized no one else stays to rebuild anymore. They just leave when she knocks it down, because they already think she’s just being a jerk.
I used to automatically ask Lila “Is Mia being nice to you?” when she got home from school, which is a useless question. It implies that if there’s any conflict at all, the answer is no, and that means the friendship is bad. Now I ask two specific questions instead: “What’s the funniest thing you two did today?” and “Does anything feel hard when you play with her?” The first one lets her tell me about the good parts, which almost always outweigh the messy parts. The second one lets her bring up a problem if she has one, without me pushing my own judgment on her. Last week, she told me “It makes me sad when she says my drawing is stupid,” and we talked about what she could say back, instead of me telling her to stop playing with Mia. She practiced saying “That hurts my feelings, I don’t like when you say that” that night at dinner, and she used it the next day. Mia said sorry, and they drew a new picture together.
I also don’t step in to fix their small fights anymore. Before, if I saw them arguing over who got to push the swing, I’d walk over and suggest a rigid turn order. Now I just lean against the fence and wait, unless someone is physically hurt or Lila comes to me for help. Nine times out of ten, they work something out I never would have thought of. Last month, they argued over who got to be the princess in their game, and ended up both being princesses who lived in separate castles and visited each other every day. That’s way more creative than any solution I’d have come up with.
I did worry at first that Lila would pick up bad habits from Mia, that she’d start grabbing things or yelling more. That’s the big fear all of us have, right? That the “difficult” kid will rub off on ours. But so far, the only thing I’ve seen Lila pick up is how to speak up for herself, and how to be okay with people who aren’t perfect. Once, she grabbed a cookie from her brother without asking, and I reminded her that wasn’t okay, and she immediately apologized and gave him half. She hasn’t suddenly turned into a mean kid. She just knows that people can do messy things and still be worth being friends with.
Last week, I had Mia over for a snack after school while we waited for her mom to get off shift. She ate three peanut butter crackers, declined my offer of a fourth, and told me “My mom says I shouldn’t take more than people offer, because we can’t always pay people back.” It made my chest hurt a little, because Mia isn’t bossy or bad. She’s just a kid who’s had to learn to fend for herself a lot earlier than most of the other kids in class.
The other mom at the gate asked me again if I wasn’t worried. I told her I was, at first. But right now, it’s working. Sometimes Mia still takes things and forgets to give them back. Sometimes she yells when she doesn’t get her way. Lila still comes home sometimes annoyed with her, but she always asks when she can play with her again. I don’t know if they’ll be friends next year, or if they’ll drift apart as they get older. That’s just how kid friendships go. But for right now, I’m not going to step in and break it up. It’s messy, it’s not perfect, but it’s teaching both of them more than any perfectly smooth playdate with the “ideal” friend ever could.
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