Mean Girls

Now that my 5 year old daughter is in kindergarten, it is interesting to reflect on her days in daycare. What I didn’t realize going into daycare is that there are mean girls and boys there. It starts early and much earlier than I expected since when I was going up, the bullying and clique of kids didn’t start happening until later in elementary school.

There were some mean girls that did not treat my daughter very well on some occasions. These girls are actually considered close friends during those daycare days and it was hard to watch my daughter come home sad at times and talk about what happened. Some of the girls would just ignore my daughter when she would ask to play and generally I think she would be fine with it if it were strangers. The fact that it was girls she played with daily that would all of a sudden turn on her and shut her out was making her really sad (and confused).

There were also days where those same girls would say mean things to her. One of the girls she is closest with told her she was ugly when she was about 3 years old. Fast forward to about 5 and they were really close friends and made up after that rough start. This same girl would then go on to tell her recently that her art was ugly, that her clothes were weird, and some other hurtful things. My daughter would sometimes just walk away and other times she would still keep trying to play with them.

For a period of time, I had to try and teach my daughter about self worth. You can’t let people tell you what to think and do. You can’t let people tell you how to see yourself. You need to love yourself and be kind to yourself. It took many conversations for my daughter to turn a corner and grow thick skin. It also took a bit of role playing where I would pretend to be the mean girl and she would need to respond. Sometimes I would push and push and my little fighter would learn how to push back (all verbally!). We would go through scenarios and she would get to practice responding in a safe space because it’s easy to say you would do the right things if it’s not happening now, it it’s harder if you are in the situation and trying to think of the right responses. With repetition, she eventually built a tough backbone and developed new friendships with other kids (mostly a group of boys that loved Power Rangers and would play fight bad guys). She also made up a game called power ball where you would run and the group would chase her before passing the power ball to another friend to continue the game. Once she made a new group of friends, she went back to enjoying daycare with a new sense of self worth and a tougher skin.

I’m glad my daughter had this experience in daycare looking back. It taught her a lot about how to go through adversity and deal with these situations in the right way. She also asked me why those kids would say hurtful things and I taught her that sometimes, people say hurtful things to make themselves feel better. So when they said her art was ugly, it was because they needed her to see that her art was ugly so that they could feel better about her own art. When my daughter thought about it, she agreed. Especially when I pointed out all the cool stuff she made - earrings, a chandelier, necklaces, a camera, and other amazing things all out of paper. Teaching her these things and having her tell those mean girls that she loved her art and she didn’t care what they said because their opinion didn’t matter made me proud. What made me even prouder was when those mean girls asked her to make them a paper camera. Checkmate.