Coping with girls' bullying

Girls’ bullying is very different from the way in which boys bully.

Girls tend to worry far more about relationships than boys do and it is important not to be dismissive of this. Encourage your daughter to keep things in perspective and not to overreact to everything that happens within her friendship group but appreciate that she can be made truly miserable by the group dynamics within her social circle.

You can help her by:

• Listening to her concerns
• Helping her to develop the strategies to cope with them. She must develop strategies for herself – you can’t sort out such problems for her. As she grows up she will need the skills to deal with relationships of all kinds, some of them confrontational and threatening.
• Encourage her to talk to you about what is happening and how she is feeling. If the problems involve groups at school, persuade her that you need to talk to the school staff about the issue so that they are aware and can work with you to support her.

Girls will include or exclude each other, depending on friendship fluctuations and loyalties. Technology gives them new ways of doing this – texting, email, instant messaging, internet chatrooms and websites offer excellent opportunities for manipulative girls to talk to and about each other and to inflict pain in increasingly imaginative ways. Monitoring and policing are not the answer, but encouraging responsible and discriminating use of technology is.

We need to listen to and help to educate our children rather than simply hoping to protect them and cushion them from the realities of human interaction.

It is important that you help your daughter realise that

• you cannot make people be friends with you
• friendships are two-way
• friendships must be worked at to thrive.

Having said that, she should never have to accept being made unhappy, being isolated or being frightened.

So it’s all about communication – with your daughter, with her friends and with the school if the social group in question is a school group. Hard though it is, in some situations girls need to be persuaded to move away from social groupings which are negative and unhealthy and to find a new friendship group where individuals treat each other more kindly.

If your daughter feels friendless encourage her to reach out to someone else she feels may also be lonely. Suggest she tries the ‘Would you like to come to lunch with me?’ line rather than always asking ‘Can I come to lunch with you?’