5 minute read
Ten-ager friendships
’ten-age‘ FRIENDSHIPS
At ten, we know how girls are pigeonholing themselves into what they think they should be. Whether they see themselves as academic or not, whether they are interested in boys, puberty is a reality, friendship fights are underway, and the influence of social media is impacting. With heightened pressure from what they see in the media, in movies and on TV, our girls are leaving childhood behind well before they hit their teens. Not surprisingly, emotions can be heightened and relationships can be fraught. So many parents struggle to understand the pressures our girls are under and how to deal with their emotional volatility.
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Aisha just wants one good friend at school, someone to sit with and talk to at lunch. ‘I find it hard to make friends because I am so worried about if they like me or not,’ she says. Francesca is equally anxious. ‘I’m hard to talk to,’ she says. Mei can identify. For her, finding and keeping friends is the toughest part about being ten. ‘Some of them turn out to be using you,’ she says. ‘Real friends are hard to discover.’ These concerns can often be exacerbated when girls move from their primary school to a middle or senior school at around this age. ‘I find it hard to meet anyone because I am new and everyone has known each other for a long time,’ says Ruby. ‘I feel like I don’t fit in.’ Aanya’s concern is slightly different. ‘It’s easy to make friends but hard to find the perfect friend for life,’ she says. Lily doesn’t want to stand out. ‘I like to stick in a big group at my school, and at home I never go out and play with others because of my anxiety.’
Why is friendship so difficult to navigate at ten?
Why do so many of our girls not know how to make friends, or keep friends? Why do they want to find that best friend for life, at ten, and change so much of who they are, simply to fit in? How do we teach them not to exclude others, and to value kindness and forgiveness when one of their peers makes a mistake? And why is there so much drama – with girls and not boys – around friendship? Those questions didn’t begin as mine, and if there was a single issue that sat above others, where both girls and their parents struggled, this is it. ‘Why do some girls become so unkind and nasty?’ one mother asks. Another has a story to tell: ‘Last year my daughter learnt the hard way that if you behave badly towards a friend and hurt their feelings then they may just walk away from the friendship instead of finding ways of forgiveness. The other parents told their daughter to walk away because “a good friend wouldn’t behave that way” and that there would be no forgiveness for the mistake my daughter made. I found there is a lot of information available about walking away but not much about forgiveness and how it can play a role in healing friendships for our girls.’ A third mother says, ‘All she wants is to be loved, and I believe it’s why she gets so frustrated and upset, because it doesn’t come easily to her and she assumes reasons, like she has hairier legs or isn’t pretty.’ And this from a fourth mother: ‘She is very worried and concerned about what others think, but I also think she is fairly intolerant of things herself and she is slow to forgive and forget.’ From a fifth mother: ‘She loves the idea of having friends but struggles to cross over from “being friendly” to actually being real friends.’ The problem for girls is not in recognising the attributes of a good friend but in cultivating and keeping friendships.
The girls themselves put kindness as the number one characteristic they want in a ten-year-old buddy.
That is to be celebrated. So too is the fact that they put ‘being funny’ strongly in second place. Together, those two qualities were
mentioned by more than half of all ten-year-olds. The third most common attribute ten-year-old girls nominate in a good friendship is wanting someone who is ‘not a bully’, or ‘doesn’t share rude things about you even if they’re made up’, or ‘keeps a secret’, or ‘doesn’t spread rumours’. Put those concerns under one umbrella and you have something close to what author and teens educator Rebecca Sparrow calls ‘drama cyclones’. Sparrow says she spends weeks each year with this cohort, teaching them how to weather friendship storms. A few years ago she would have given the same talk to Year 9 girls. Avoiding those drama cyclones should sit at the top of any friendship tips list we give our girls. So should an understanding of the fact that friendships are developed over time, and that we don’t ‘own’ friends. Girls need to be encouraged to allow peers to move between groups, and to have the courage to do that themselves. We as parents don’t befriend every person we meet, and girls need to understand that. They don’t need to be friends with everyone in their cohort, but they need be friendly – and understand that difference. Along the way, they will make mistakes and need reminding that the kindness and forgiveness they seek in others ought to reside in them too. Principal Toni Riordan says the reason why the age of ten is so significant for friendships is that, up until that age, a girl’s world has largely revolved around her home, her parents, her siblings and her pets. But at ten she becomes more outwardlooking, and ‘friendships really start to count’. Girls are looking for others who will match the love they have for family, and tensions will inevitably arise. ‘Fitting in’ is the verb I most frequently heard during this project, and friendship is the challenge tenyear-olds nominate as their most difficult. This is an edited extract from Ten-ager by Madonna King. Ten-ager takes our girls’ dreams and worries, wants and fears and puts them to the experts, in the hope it helps parents guide their daughter into adolescence. It gives our daughters a voice, to tell what they want us to know. Published by Hachette Australia, RRP $32.99. Out now at all good book stores.
