Dr. Sarah (00:02):

Ever wonder what psychologists moms talk about when we get together, whether we’re consulting one another about a challenging case or one of our own kids, or just leaning on each other when parenting feels hard, because trust me, even when we do this for a living, it’s still hard. Joining me each week in these special Thursday shows are two of my closest friends, both moms, both psychologists, they’re the people I call when I need a sounding board. These are our unfiltered answers to your parenting questions. We’re letting you in on the conversations the three of us usually have behind closed doors. This is Securely Attached: Beyond the Sessions.

(00:41):

Welcome. We are here on the Securely Attached podcast. We have Dr. Rebecca Hershberg here to answer listener questions with us for our Beyond the Sessions segment. How are you? So good to see you.

Dr. Rebecca (00:54):

Well thanks. So good to see you. Always.

Dr. Sarah (00:57):

You ready for a listener question?

Dr. Rebecca (00:59):

What do we got today? Bring it on. Dr. Sarah Bren.

Dr. Sarah (01:02):

Alright, Dr. Rebecca Hershberg. We are going to be talking about navigating peer social dynamics today. One of my favorite topics. Okay, so this mother wrote in a question. She says that my five and a half year old daughter gets very attached to friends. Only wants to play with that one girl mimics her behaviors, et cetera. As the parent, I recognize that her behavior can come across as very intense. I try and tell her that there are so many other nice girls in her class, but she only has eyes for this one girl. It’s like a very intense friend crush. I worry about this becoming a pattern she develops over time and the social ramifications of hanging onto one friend, especially given that the girls she tends to cling to are much more outgoing, more social with other girls their age and independent than my sweet reserved daughter. How do I address this behavior? I guess it’s a twofold question because I would also like to know how to steer her towards girls who may be more her speed. So there’s a lot of layers to this question. I’m wondering if we want to unpack it a little bit.

Dr. Rebecca (02:09):

Yeah, I mean, I have so much empathy for this mom. It just be so great if we could pick all of our kids’ friends and how they not only we could pick the people and then pick how they are with them. I just want to highlight that. I don’t even want to say that temptation, but that urge, that desire, it comes from such a pure place. It’s like things might get tricky for my kid and I don’t want them to.

Dr. Sarah (02:42):

And I want to protect them. I want to protect her from the pain of maybe being rejected by a friend, of being dumped by a friend of feeling lonely. All of these are things that parents want to protect their kids from.

Dr. Rebecca (02:57):

And if I could just fix all it, do all of it, then they would just have beautiful, happy, easy relationships. And wouldn’t that be great? And I get that and it would be great, although you could argue philosophically that it wouldn’t be great, but it’s not necessarily worth discussing. It’s not possible.

Dr. Sarah (03:17):

Not possible. And I would even argue, I don’t think it is healthy. I know I don’t think it’s going to set. It’s not our kids up for, yeah, it’s not going to set our kids up for the kind of resilience that they’re going to need to learn how to access.

Dr. Rebecca (03:33):

And I think are seeing this the same way, which is with such empathy and compassion for this mom and simultaneously a gentle urging that we got to let this kid do her thing. She’s drawn to who she’s drawn to and that’s okay. And one thing I would certainly recommend is to take your cues a little bit from teachers who are around her and do the teachers view anything problematic about this friendship? My experience is that teachers have a much higher threshold because they have so much familiarity with five-year-olds and what happens with five-year-old social dynamics that they really only alert parents when there is something that’s concerning and not just kids feeling it out and exploring with relationships. And so I think this is a different question if a teacher has raised a flag, otherwise, I would say to let these things play out at most, I think we can make sort of gentle observations. I notice that whenever I say let’s have a play date, you always want to play with Jennifer. And your kid might say, yeah, I want to play with Jennifer. But your kid might say, well, yeah, because no one else wants to play with me. And then you have information about what’s going on. I mean, I think at these ages, just observing social dynamics and making really neutral comments is a much better approach to helping our kids develop their own social awareness and attunement than trying to steer the bus in a perhaps more assertive way.

Dr. Sarah (05:24):

And I hear this mom, I hear this mom really focusing a lot on the future. She’s worrying about this becoming a pattern over time and what’s it going to happen in the future if she’s not developing other relationships? And I would really encourage this mom to come back to right now because your daughter’s five and a half years old, which means she’s only just entered the world of peer relationships for real, right? I mean, kids are doing parallel play until what, four or five a lot of times. And so interest in peers is very new actually. She might’ve played with friends, but the way in which she played with friends internally was probably experienced a little bit differently than it has in the last maybe year, year and a half, two years or so, I’d say for her developmentally I’m guessing side. And so she’s new to this and it actually is probably helpful for her to try some things out, see what works, see what doesn’t.

(06:27):

But she’s got a long glorious road ahead of her, of navigating peer relationships. And also don’t forget, assuming she’s hanging out with other kids her age, they’re brand new to this. So this mom is saying like, oh, these girls are perhaps more social than her or more independent or more outgoing than her. But it’s like these are other five and a half year olds who haven’t probably developed fully into the way that they’re going to engage socially and most skillfully as they get older. So every year these kids are all going to grow up together and build their skills together and it will be clunky for a while, a while on all ends. It’s hard to watch his parent.

Dr. Rebecca (07:13):

I think that’s such a great point. And there’s this fear. We know as adults all the different unhealthy and maladaptive types of relationships that there are out there. And so we see these little hints of them when kids are younger and we project all of our own stuff onto them like, oh my gosh, she’s going to be totally steamrolled by her romantic partner and only one. And it’s like, this is just, we don’t have to put any of that. I hear that a lot with my kid is so bossy or my kid is always the one who’s bossed around and never the boss. And there’s this implication that it’s like, and so I’m worried about them when they get older. And the whole point of being a kid at this age is that it’s all a giant laboratory to play around with different pieces of it, play around with different roles.

(08:01):

Nothing is static right now. Your child has a friend crush on this particular person and perhaps it’s been, it sounds like a couple times this has happened, but that doesn’t mean that that’s always going to be the roles that are in place. They’re going to then play around with another role and another role. And what happens if I become friends with a more shy person and I’m the outgoing one? And what happens? How does that feel? And letting them, again, it’s like they’re doing so much learning and so much growing as they experiment with these relationships. And we don’t want to interrupt that too much. It’s so important.

Dr. Sarah (08:41):

We don’t want to interrupt it. And we also don’t want to entrench them because I think one of the things that can happen, unfortunately, and also probably unintendedly, is when a parent does fast forward the tape too much and get worried about an outcome that hasn’t yet occurred, they can get really anxious and they can really put a lot of attention on that for the child instead of modeling for the child a sense of flexibility and curiosity. And let’s see what happens. Let’s, when we bring that energy to our kids’ peer relationships, we are showing them this is how it feels. Oh, today you’re feeling really into Jessica. Maybe tomorrow you’ll feel differently. We’ll have to wait and see. And that’s kind of the attitude that I would encourage this mom to try to bring to some of these situations. Whether her daughter is coming to her or she’s just observing things to be like, how interesting.

(09:41):

I wonder what will happen. I wonder what next week will look like or next month. But that air of nonchalance a little bit is kind of important for our kids to feel coming out of us because if we are internally really worried about something becoming a problem, whether it doesn’t matter how good you think you are hiding that from your kid, they are going to feel it a little bit. And that anxiety is, especially if it’s not named, can be very contagious in a weird sort of amorphous way. And we really don’t want to imbue that kind of anxiety in our kids’ relationships. We can create a self-fulfilling prophecy. We just don’t really need to be influencing.

Dr. Rebecca (10:31):

Yeah, I think that’s very true. And I think again, that parents with the best of intentions can sometimes just come on too strong with their desires for their kids to play with particular kids or not play with other kids. And what you want ideally is to create a situation where your kids are open with you about their social choices. They’re open with you about their feelings in certain friendships. I’ve had parents come to me and say, I don’t want my kid playing with this kid because this kid is always a little bit mean to her or mean to him. Certainly if that reaches an extreme level, and I can think of only one case that I’ve had where that was the case and it really was important that we cut this friendship off, but most of the time it’s you want, there can be something really intoxicating about playing with someone who may not be that nice to you, maybe helps you feel like you’re in with the cool crowd or all these things that we think don’t start till middle school or high school and that we want our kids to talk to us about when they go through it.

(11:41):

The seeds of that can be planted much earlier and we have to let our kids play it out and we have to be the person that they come to to talk to about it without judgment. Just imagine being that mom. I can about it like the mom who says to my kid, well then it sounds like they’re not good enough to be your friend anyway. If they’re not nice to you, then they don’t deserve to be your friend. It’s like, that’s so not useful. Your kid walks away and the only thing they feel is, I guess I’m not going to talk to mom anymore because she doesn’t understand.

Dr. Sarah (12:15):

Right. It’s like the grownup version of that is when your friend tells you they’re breaking up with their boyfriend and you’re like, yeah, you should break up with ’em. And then guess what? They don’t break up and then they don’t want to talk to you anymore about it.

Dr. Rebecca (12:28):

Or you come to your friend and you’re saying, I’m dating someone who’s kind of, I don’t know what word I’m allowed to use on this show. I’m dating someone who’s kind of a jerk and I kind of like it and I don’t, and I do and I don’t. And it’s confusing. And you want a friend who’s going to echo that back to you and understand the nuance of it and the complication. I mean, sort of like you were saying before, peer relationships are so complicated and this is just the very, very beginning.

Dr. Sarah (12:57):

Mhmm.

Dr. Rebecca (12:57):

And so being a mirror to your kids observing, maybe making little comments of observation, it is just so incredibly valuable. It’s the one area that I would say, it’s funny because hearing myself talking and I’m like, oh no, but Sarah said not to flash forward the tape. And I think that’s true in certain ways, but also the tape that I’m always fast forwarding in my head is what kind of a relationship do I want with my kid when they’re older, when they’re much less likely to come to talk to me when they’re teenagers or when I want to be someone that even if they’re going through something that they think I couldn’t possibly understand in a million years, I want them to think that I might try to understand it and that I might be curious about it and nonjudgmental about it and loving about it. And that starts now.

Dr. Sarah (13:47):

And I also think, yeah, and there are things we can to that point. So how do we build that now? What can we actually say to, I know what I’m not supposed to say, but what should I be saying? And one thing I’m like, if you need a lens or a framework, she’d be filtering your commentary through the question I’d want you to be asking yourself, is what I’m saying, helping them to feel better or helping them to reflect on how they feel if what you’re saying is a balm to just make them feel better in the moment. It might not be serving the larger purpose, but if you are telling them, oh, I’ve noticed, like you were saying Rebecca, observing, I’ve noticed you always want to have a play date with Jessica.

(14:42):

How do you feel when you’re with Jessica? Or are there any other friends in your class that help you feel the same way you feel when you’re with Jessica or, but this idea of is the question, does the function of the question allow your child to reflect on what their experience is and talk to you about it? Because ultimately you do really have a kid who’s hanging out with someone that you don’t really love and they’re not feeling good when they’re with them, instead of telling them, don’t hang out with that friend. Help them get there themself. Right? And it might be that it takes them a very long time and maybe even some pain to get there themselves, but we want them to know, oh, I don’t feel good when someone treats me this way. Or I feel really good when this person pays attention to me and when they don’t pay attention to me, I feel really lonely, or I feel really rejected.

(15:34):

We want to help them understand that and maybe be able to tolerate those feelings or make a choice that helps them to feel better. But those are all big, high level, sophisticated social skills and self-awareness skills that we’re just planting the seed at five and a half years old. But the questions that you can be asking can be maybe in the service of helping them build that, what we call reflective functioning. How do I know how I feel and why I might feel that way, and I know how another person might feel and be curious about why they feel that way. That’s reflective functioning, and that’s a really good skill. That’s going to be a pretty protective factor when it comes to healthy peer relationships developing those over time.

Dr. Rebecca (16:19):

I think that’s perfectly said, a great guiding frame to use, and especially in this particular question with this particular parent where the answer would be neither because the kid actually isn’t feeling bad when you said, is it a balm for feeling better? The kid actually seems to be doing okay, so then that’s a third option, which is like, or is this more about my own anxiety and my own anxiety, not necessarily to fix it for my kid now, but to fix it for my child in some long-term big picture way, in which case still perhaps not a great path.

Dr. Sarah (16:59):

And trust. Trust that your kid can handle this and saying that to them and showing that to them. She might have pain, she might get rejected by somebody, and that’s, she can handle feeling that. I believe that you are a strong kid and it’s a tough feeling. You can handle that feeling. How can I be here for you while you feel that feeling like sit next to our kids when they’re having a tough time, rather than trying to pull them out of whatever it is they’re experiencing. They need a partner and not a rescuer.

Dr. Rebecca (17:42):

I do wish this mom luck though, because it is tough to see our kids engaging in social behaviors that we know probably won’t turn out the way that will lead to endless happiness, and we have to tolerate that. We can feel this way.

Dr. Sarah (17:58):

Yeah, totally. All right. Well, if you found this episode helpful and I really hope that you did, please consider leaving a rating and a review wherever you listen to your podcast. It is so helpful for the show, and it’s a way that we can keep showing up for you every single week and answering your amazing questions. So we will talk to you all very soon. Thanks, Rebecca.

Dr. Rebecca (18:24):

Thank you.

Dr. Sarah (18:26):

Thank you so much for listening. As you can hear, parenting is not one size fits all. It’s nuanced and it’s complicated. So I really hope that this series where we’re answering your questions really helps you to cut through some of the noise and find out what works best for you and your unique child. If you have a burning parenting question, something you’re struggling to navigate or a topic you really want us to shed light on or share research about, we want to know, go to drsarahbren.com/question to send in anything that you want, Rebecca, Emily, and me to answer in Securely Attached: Beyond the Sessions. That’s drsarahbren.com/question. And check back for a brand new securely attached next Tuesday. And until then, don’t be a stranger.