387. Q&A: My child was left out by her friends. Now what?

Dr. Sarah Bren (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):

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Securely Attached Beyond the Sessions. With Valentine’s Day having just passed, I thought this would be a really good time to bring back an older episode that continues to resonate with so many families, featuring a question from a mom whose daughter was left out by her friends on Valentine’s Day last year.

(01:02):

But while this question makes it a timely conversation, the truth is that navigating social situations as our kids get older and more independent can be really complicated for parents. They’re not sure always where to step in, when to let them figure it out on their own. And of course, we want to protect them from being hurt, even when we know we really have no control over that. So in this episode, we talk about that in between space, how to understand what your child may actually need in moments of social pain, how to support them without taking over, and how to tolerate the discomfort that can come with not having a clear or immediate solution. So now without further ado, here is my conversation with Dr. Rebecca Hershberg.

(01:46):

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Beyond the Sessions segment of the Securely Attached podcast. And we are going to be answering your listener questions. I have Dr. Rebecca Hershberg here. So welcome.

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (02:00):

Hello. Thank you. Hi. Always awesome to be here.

Dr. Sarah Bren (02:03):

I know. I’m excited. I have a question for you. Are you ready?

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (02:08):

I’m ready.

Dr. Sarah Bren (02:09):

Okay. Hi, Dr. Sarah. My eighth grader school does candy grams for Valentine’s Day. Basically, you can buy little bags of candy for your friends. My daughter has two close friends and three of them have a little posse. The other two girls sent candy to each other, but not to my daughter. She was embarrassed and hurt when they were handed out in front of the whole class. But while she was pretty open with me about how it made her feel, she said that she was just going to ignore it and didn’t plan to talk to her friends about why they didn’t send her one. I’m not sure what type of advice I should give her, that she should confront them? Hope it just blows over if she ignores it. Can you please let me know how you think I should handle this situation? Thank you. It’s tough.

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (02:57):

I mean, I can’t with the schools and the Valentine’s Day.

Dr. Sarah Bren (03:01):

That was my thought. I was like, why are schools just like … And I’m not one to be like, everybody needs a trophy and we have to protect every single child from ever feeling left out. But I also am like…

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (03:13):

But you also don’t have to do the thing that’s going to elicit the thing.

Dr. Sarah Bren (03:17):

I know. This is not related to this question, but I have to even put it here because it pissed me off so much. But one of my older teens who I’d see for therapy was telling me that one of the … They’re getting their college app acceptance letters in, and one of the teachers is putting everybody … As a celebratory thing, the intention’s good. The teacher’s putting up everybody’s acceptance letters on the wall of the classroom and I’m like, “Why are that is just so cringey? I can’t.”

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (03:48):

Cringy, you’re clearly learning.

Dr. Sarah Bren (03:49):

Oh yeah. I don’t even thing that’s the word anymore.

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (03:53):

Cringe. You’re allowed to say cringey. No cringe.

Dr. Sarah Bren (03:54):

Yeah. I think I said it wrong, but I was cringing. I was like, that teacher is like, again, best intention, but not kind of holding a lens of the child.

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (04:08):

Right. No reflective function.

Dr. Sarah Bren (04:09):

No reflective function. What is it going to feel like for the kid that isn’t going to get a letter to go up on that wall or isn’t liking the letter for them?

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (04:18):

And also even when you say best of intentions, I just feel like there has to be a limit to how much that’s an excuse for this particular thing. I mean, I get very harsh about that.

Dr. Sarah Bren (04:32):

Bringing it back to the candigram thing, because all of this applies to this, that’s why I made me even think of it, but it just feels ripe for really like triangulation and like leaving kids out.

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (04:48):

It just feels like the cost is so much higher than the benefit. Like maybe one person’s going to feel a little bit good that they get some candy grams from their crush, but for every person that happens to, 15 people are going to feel like … Sorry, I don’t know if I can say that on the podcast, but I just feel like that ratio is not a great ratio.

Dr. Sarah Bren (05:12):

Right. And so to this mom who wrote in, I first just want to say like, we’re going to get to our thoughts on how do you handle it because I think there’s much more to this question than just like- Of course. … we’re focusing on, but I do genuinely first things first. I would maybe bring it up with your school PTA or maybe the college or the school counselor or bring it to someone’s attention maybe that this could be revised, this tradition could be revised to be a little bit more inclusive and a little less alienating or just, I don’t know. Kids have it tough enough right now with bullying and social connection and loneliness epidemic. Can we just maybe try to help them a little bit by not having these.

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (06:00):

Where we can, right? Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Sarah Bren (06:02):

So one, perhaps talk to the school because I actually do not, this is not a psychologist approved activity.

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (06:11):

You can play the school this podcast episode. And I think we can answer the rest of the question as if it were about being left out in any other capacity. Absolutely. I mean, like I hear the word, I forget what actual word it was, but it was like trio or threesome or three.

Dr. Sarah Bren (06:28):

A posse. There’s three of them and they have a little posse.

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (06:29):

I heard the word three and I’m like, oh God. Yeah. Three is just such a hard number. I remember from my own elementary school days, I remember from college, I remember like my own kids. Three is just, it’s really hard for kids who are learning social relationships and in eighth grade you are still doing that, even though it’s in a different way. Yeah, but they’re getting more sophisticated.

Dr. Sarah Bren (06:57):

I think envy and jealousy and like that stuff has to come online more.

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (07:03):

And a threesome just …

Dr. Sarah Bren (07:06):

There’s nowhere to run. There’s nowhere to turn to.

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (07:09):

There’s nowhere to turn. And also there’s this incredible temptation of joining with one. There’s something intoxicating about like, if I am with this one, we can gossip about the other one and I can feel even better about myself and I can feel more included and more … I just think a trio is just, it’s for kids who are, again, in an eighth grade way, struggling with envy, struggling with insecurity, struggling with impulse control in their own adolescent way, like the temptation. It’s just tough. And I do think one thing that I would say, not the main point perhaps, but to be able to say to your daughter is just like, “Three is hard.” Just to kind of put the universality of three out there, I think, in an empathic, compassionate way.

Dr. Sarah Bren (08:01):

And to speak even specifically, because this mom was saying she’s not sure what type of advice to give, guide my child to confront them or just ignore it. I think actually what you’re saying right here is the advice I would give a mom in this situation is actually not to give advice, but to name how hard it feels when this happens and just be willing to sit with your child in this sadness or anger or confusion without necessarily directing them to do A, B or C, unless they’re specifically asking you to help them, in which case you could sort of collaboratively problem solve. But I think there’s some real power in naming the conflict, naming the tricky thing and saying, “This is really hard,” and not actually solving it.

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (09:01):

Yeah. And in some ways to recognize how lucky you are that your daughter’s coming to you with this, one of the lines I heard was she was so open, right? She was so open with me and it’s so easy to think as a parent like, “Oh, well, they’re being open with me. They must be asking me for my advice.” They’re being open with me.

Dr. Sarah Bren (09:20):

But this kid already had plan. She just could ignore it and didn’t plan to talk to her friends.

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (09:25):

And I think the best thing we can do, and you already said this, but just to phrase it a different way, is just approach that with openness. She’s got a plan. She has to live her life. If she asks you … I mean, at most you might say … I’m just trying to think if there’s a scenario in which I might say, “Huh, what do you think might come of that plan?” Or like, “Is that the only plan you can think of? Is that the only plan you can think of? What might some other plans be? ” And then you can pick one, you know what I mean? Yeah. Just to help generate perhaps some cognitive flexibility around … She may be saying that that’s the plan because that’s the only thing she can think of. It doesn’t even occur to her that there’s five other ways or the only other way she can think of is to say like, “That was really hard for me and she would never do that.

(10:13):

So this is where she’s viewing it in a binary way.” So I think it can be helpful to sometimes help kids think outside the box more flexibly and generate … Just for the sake of argument, I’m just curious, were there other things you thought of doing that you decided not to do or is that just the obvious one? And then constantly, of course, you’re taking your cue from your kid.

(10:34):

And maybe it’ll be a blatant cue like, “Mom, stop talking,” which I’ve gotten. And sometimes it may just be that she kind of shuts down a little and you can say like, “Okay, sounds like you don’t really want to talk about it and you’ve got your plan. So awesome. I’m so glad you talked to me about this and I get it. It’s really, really hard.

Dr. Sarah Bren (10:53):

I also wondered too, when I think about kids who have a plan to not … It’s one thing to just freeze in the moment and not say something versus, “Okay, I’ve decided I’m really going to let this go or let this blow over.” If you notice that you have a kid who tends to avoid conflict as a kind of chronic pattern, relationships, again, not in the heat of this particular moment when your child is bringing this acute pain point to you necessarily and is not interested in perhaps fleshing it out with you more, but outside of this moment, helping to talk with them about these patterns of avoiding conflict or trying to find a safer in that for your child, like something that your child could tolerate more than this particularly like very painful and very vulnerable moment of being rejected by a friend, but maybe you could find another way in which this pattern is showing up in a safer relationship, like maybe with you or their sibling or whatever, you notice them constantly avoiding conflict.

(12:06):

There’s a difference between being a kid who can say, “I can really let this go, ” versus a kid who’s saying, “I’m going to hold this in because I don’t really trust that it will go well to try to resolve it. ” And I think that there’s just something slightly different about that.

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (12:26):

Yeah. And also again, and I think the more you have … I agree with everything you just said and the more that we have these open and kind of non-judgmental and non-directing conversations with our kids, the more we learn about the social life at their school and who the players are. And they often know … It’s like your kid may be making choices that are really smart for what your kids’ goals are, or maybe a lot more thoughtful. Sometimes we can put our grownup … I just know that there are parents who say to their kids like, “Well, then you wouldn’t want to be friends with them anyway.” Well, they may not react well. Well, then you wouldn’t want to be friends with them anyway. It’s like, “Well, no, I actually do because when I look at the other options, they’re the best of the life.” I think there’s reason to sometimes trust in our kids’ approaches, even if we don’t naturally think that they’re going to be adaptive in the long run in a particular situation.

(13:23):

So I think it ties in very well to what you said about noticing patterns and being aware of our kids’ patterns and if they’re patterns that we want to point out to them or be aware of. But there’s other times that it may be so clear to us that this isn’t how we would act, but we’re grownups. We already learned all the lessons.

Dr. Sarah Bren (13:44):

Yeah. It’s been a while since we’ve been in eighth grade and the rules have also probably changed a lot since we were in eighth grade, but some of them are probably the same. And I think the idea, and this goes back to the whole, like the context of this question being kind of like about what I would particularly personally consider to be not the greatest choice on the school’s part for having an activity like this, but in general, there’s all kinds of things that are embedded in the social culture at this age, whether it’s school sanctioned or not, that create social currency. And something like sending a candigram to one friend and not the other is a form of leaning into and maybe trying to amplify one’s social currency. And that’s a real thing that eighth graders and kids, perhaps even younger, but definitely older, really contend with a lot.

(14:37):

And I think as parents, we have to remember that like while we want to think of our kids as these like really little precious, delicate kids who we want to protect from a lot of this stuff, and like when they were really young, like would never, the kind of like yucky complexity that comes with relationships, it was just so … We all got to be happy and naive. And the reality is, is that like relationships get very tricky and complicated and can get very yucky at this age. Not all of them, but a lot of moments can feel that way and that it’s kind of this like unspoken … We don’t really talk about this much, but it’s a pretty normal part of development for things to get pretty gnarly in some of these relationships. I’m not saying it’s all okay, I’m just trying to normalize that it does happen.

(15:25):

And I don’t think our kids are going to be free from being at least exposed to it, if not very much a victim or a perpetrator of it in their lifetime, because this is kind of the trying it on phase of more mature relationships. There’s like, there’s some yuckier political, social games that get played and it is really part of development too.

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (15:58):

Yeah. I think that’s right. And then, you know, the only other thing I’ll add is that next year, you may know in advance what the school does for Halloween. I mean, Halloween, maybe Halloween too, but for Valentine’s Day in ninth grade, and you can have a conversation with your kid beforehand, right? Or your kid may have a little sibling and you know, eighth grade is the year of candy grams, we’re going to have to talk about that. When we learn kind of what are the … There’s so many things that happen day to day when kids hit this age that, as you said, we don’t know. We don’t know the details. We don’t know the forms of social currency. There’s so many opportunities both in real life and online now, but sometimes parents still do get an email that’s like, “Don’t forget to send your kids with some money.

(16:43):

Valentine’s Day is Candy Gram Day and you can talk to your kid in advance What’s your plan for Candy Grams and have you and your friends talk to Candy Graham, but talked about Candy Grams or like what it’ll be … Again, like we’ve talked about coping ahead, like what’s it going to be like? ” I dated a guy in ninth grade for about a month when I was in ninth grade, he was in 11th grade. I was obsessed, obsessed. I can’t even tell you how many times I called his answer to me.

Dr. Sarah Bren (17:10):

You were cool. Dang.

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (17:12):

I knew he was away on vacation. Anyway, he ended things with me after probably getting the 70,000 hangups on his answering machine while he was on vacation. But anyway, that was winter vacation and then Valentine’s Day was February and he was with somebody else and they were selling roses at our school and I saw her walking with roses from him and I could tune back into that pain right now. It was devastating and I got through it. I mean, I don’t know, we can cut out this whole story if we want to, but I just think that like Valentine’s Day and kids and eighth grade, ninth grade, 10th grade, like it’s a tale as old as time and it’s brutal.

Dr. Sarah Bren (18:02):

And it’s like every holiday’s got something.

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (18:05):

Yeah. And then you get through it. And on the one hand, did my school do anything terrible by selling roses? You know what? Maybe they weren’t even selling roses. Maybe he went out during free period and got roses. I don’t even remember, but the fact is like …

Dr. Sarah Bren (18:22):

But it’s not protectable is like I think the point, right? Yes, I do think some schools can have blind spots and they can stand to look at them. But again, we’re talking about holidays. I have so many stories of kids that I’ve worked with where it’s Halloween and they’re all grouping together to have their costume group and somebody’s getting left out very much on purpose, right? It’s not always so innocent. It’s always … Again, there is social currency, there’s power, this is a developmentally … Look at Inside Out, the movie, the Inside Out Two. It’s not by chance that the new characters introduced an Inside Out II and the main character hits adolescence is envy on we, anxiety and embarrassment.

(19:21):

Those are feelings that are really coming online at this time and get played out in this, especially the envy, right? We become much more aware of what other people have and don’t have, and it can activate some territorialness in kids that can end up looking like active exclusion of somebody to create more social power or create more social currency for themselves. And it’s an unfortunate … Like I was saying, this is what some of the yuckiness of this time period really is driven by, that it is … It can get really, really, really icky and to a point where adults really do need to be aware of and be ready to step in. But I think to some degree there’s a normal, developmentally appropriate, albeit very yucky, grappling with these more complex social dynamics among kids who are … Some have very few skills and they tend to be easier targets and other kids are really sophisticated at this and they can really like grab onto some powerful social exchange behaviors and use it to their advantage.

(20:29):

And again, I would say like those kids, like these two close friends that are exchanging candigrams with one another and leaving out this mom’s child, I don’t think that they’re probably like horrible mean girls and that behavior can be intoxicating and alluring and it’s also developmentally appropriate to be curious about that kind of power and that kind of exclusionary way of being.

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (21:01):

And you just have to hold space for your kid. Again, your kid came to tell you about it, which is beautiful. And I think the most important piece at this age is that she’s still coming. She’s not going home and closing her door and silking about it by herself or thinking that actually this probably happened because there’s something wrong with her and therefore she can’t possibly admit it because her mom will then know there’s something wrong with her. I mean, and by the way, if you are a listener who has a kid that the same thing happened to when they did come home and closed their door, that doesn’t mean you did anything wrong or that your kid is unhealthy. I just, in this particular story, let’s move the emphasis from what can I advise my kid to, wow, what am I doing that makes my child feel so safe to come to me and tell me these awful, awful things per an eighth grader’s perspective that are happening?

Dr. Sarah Bren (21:55):

Yeah. So I think to answer the specific question, which is, can you let me know how you think I should handle this situation is I’d really focus on your relationship with your daughter and your daughter’s ability to feel safe coming to you and how to continue to nurture that because you’re her safe haven when she has to deal with these kinds of challenging dynamics, which some can be mitigated and some can’t be. And so knowing that we can’t protect them from this, the far better thing to focus on is how do I be that secure base that they know they can return to and process it? Or even if they don’t want to talk at all about it and they do come home and go right into their room, can I still be that parent that’s there for them?

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (22:42):

Absolutely. I think that’s the take home.

Dr. Sarah Bren (22:43):

Because they feel it.

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (22:44):

100%, 100%.

Dr. Sarah Bren (22:47):

Yeah. So happy Valentine’s Day in the honor of Valentine’s Day love, go be a secure base for your kid and just offset some of this stuff, I think is more important than fixing it for them.

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (23:01):

Absolutely.

Dr. Sarah Bren (23:04):

Well, thanks, Rebecca. This was wonderful. I appreciate your insights, always.

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (23:09):

Absolutely. As always, I’m off to get myself some roses.

Dr. Sarah Bren (23:13):

Yeah. Yeah. Let’s go get ourselves some roses and candigrams.

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (23:15):

I can buy them for myself now. Exactly. Exactly. Ooh, candy. Let’s end with that. Candy.

Dr. Sarah Bren (23:22):

All right. Now I’m hungry.

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (23:23):

All right.

Dr. Sarah Bren (23:24):

See you guys soon.

Dr. Rebecca Hershberg (23:25):

So long.

Dr. Sarah Bren (23:27):

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.