My daughter's best friend is too clingy!

Q. My 10 year old daughter has had a best friend for over a year now. However, she is starting to find her a bit clingy. She still likes her but she wants to spread her wings a bit and is not sure how to do this without upsetting her. Any advice?

A. The intensity of ‘best friendships’ can be a double-edged sword – a source of tremendous happiness, but also the cause of real anxiety when things cool off a bit, or the two friends mature at different rates, and therefore begin to want different things.

Quite understandably, your daughter wants to be really kind in separating a bit, and it would certainly be kinder if the impetus for this separation isn’t seen as coming from her. You can do a lot to help mastermind this, and she will benefit from your help. Start looking at times when they meet outside school, and think about cutting these down. There may be all sorts of reasons which you can find to need your daughter at home more, or out with you more often – family always takes precedence over friendships, after all. If your daughter is able to say to her friend, for example, that she is sorry she can’t see her after school on eg Thursdays now because you want her to do something else, then you will start to break the dependence.

Talk to your daughter’s school, as well, as they will be able, unobtrusively, to engineer things so that your daughter and her friend are not always together, and are put in different groups and perhaps do different activities, so that they spend more and more time with others. Together, these strategies, with everyone working diplomatically in the background, will ease their separation and yet should mean that they can remain really good friends – the ideal outcome.