8 year old daughter so unhappy at school - Please help

clairehi

Polly I hope it goes well at DDs get-together this weekend. Could you invite the other mums to stop and have a cup of tea and a chat when they pick up?(or on second thought this may work better if you have just one child on a play date) If you can find one or two of them that you get on with this may help you and DD break into the groups. I think you are right to try again - are your other kids still at this school?

Personally I recognise a lot on this thread as a working mum of school age kids. (Age 8 and 10) I do feel its been harder for my kids as I am not there at the school gate to get to know other mum, set up play dates etc. Although they do have play dates and we do socialise with other mums/kids in the hols, I feel like I am doing a lot of the running all the time...I feel like I am always on the edge of friendship groups of mums and they are popping in and out of each others houses having coffee or chatting at the school gate while Im at work. Maybe thats me being paranoid,though

galvanizersbaby

clairehi wrote: »

Polly I hope it goes well at DDs get-together this weekend. Could you invite the other mums to stop and have a cup of tea and a chat when they pick up?(or on second thought this may work better if you have just one child on a play date) If you can find one or two of them that you get on with this may help you and DD break into the groups. I think you are right to try again - are your other kids still at this school?

Personally I recognise a lot on this thread as a working mum of school age kids. (Age 8 and 10) I do feel its been harder for my kids as I am not there at the school gate to get to know other mum, set up play dates etc. Although they do have play dates and we do socialise with other mums/kids in the hols, I feel like I am doing a lot of the running all the time...I feel like I am always on the edge of friendship groups of mums and they are popping in and out of each others houses having coffee or chatting at the school gate while Im at work. Maybe thats me being paranoid,though

Possibly I've often wondered what other mum's are doing - when I'm off to work after school drop off there are a lot of Mum's hanging about the school gates chatting so they may be arranging a meet up later - but equally there are quite a few like me going off to work so at our school I am not so much in the minority.
Some of the mums work at the same building as me (though they are part time so already knew them before my children started school).
Also a night out was arranged to which I was invited (I couldn't make it but was nice to be included) - perhaps I'm luckier than most full time working mum's.
Would just like to be more involved with the school rather than the mum's on a personal basis but even if I didn't have to go to work I couldn't see myself spending my time having a lot of coffee with the other mums.

POPPYOSCAR

I don't know if this helps at all but my daughter would come home from primary in tears and saying she was so unhappy.Girls who were her friend would not be her friend the next day and gangs of girls would get together and be horrible to her.one girl even wrote her a letter saying that she did want to be her friend but not to tell anybody.She would get unkind text messages on her phone as well.I wanted to confront the parents and the school but she begged me not to and as she was leaving to go to secondary that year I left it.
The upshot of this is that when she and the other girls went to secondary school they all made different friends anyway.it has also taught her a lesson and now she is not as trusting and does not suffer fools gladly and does not get taken for a ride.She is much stronger for it.

Polly

Well, happy to report that the get-together went well and everyone appeared to have a great time. It was really interesting to observe all the different types ie the bossy one, the tale-teller, the tearful one and lastly, a little peacemaker who just wants everyone to get along. As my daughter was so happy with the fun being at her house, I wasn't able to tell which category she falls into when she's at school so no particular revelations there. It did give me much more insight into how difficult it must be managing such a diverse group of personalities and made me glad I'm not a teacher!! The coming weeks will tell whether or not it's made any difference to the atmosphere at school but I'm hopeful that it will have helped somewhat. The school are now aware that there's a problem and I'll be expecting them to be proactive in improving things and for my part, I'll continue to try to help my daughter build relationships within this little group. Some of the little girls were just so sweet (especially the little peacemaker) that I'd just love her to be friends with them.

Brighton_belle

that's great news Polly, thanks for updating us. Hope it is the begining of a better time for her/ them & the little peace maker.

mrcow

Really pleased it went well. How nice for your daughter to be hosting too - must have been a change having a house full of girls!

Give it two weeks and invite one of them over for tea & a play after school xxxx