Compared to other girls their age, my daughters have had relatively few playdates. As twins, people often remark that they "have each other" and while this glosses over the times when "having" your sister means pinning her to the floor and beating the shit out of her, the point is well taken. Living with your best friend means you simply aren't driven to seek out friends or have other girls over to your house, because there is already a girl in your house. She sleeps in your bedroom, wears your clothes, and is always there--sometimes right in your face--but loneliness is seldom a problem. For my girls, the entire day is one long playdate.
The other reason my kids haven't had a lot of playdates is because the girl culture at their elementary school is cut throat, often vicious, and largely unmonitored by adults. While students are evaluated within an inch of their lives in the classroom, once recess and lunch begin, the giant eye of Sauron vanishes. I don't mean to suggest that teachers are evil--it's constant TESTING and assessment that attempts to suck every kid into the darkest depths of Mordor. Most teachers use recess and lunch to grade papers (if they're lucky); others catch up on the massive amounts of paperwork that come with being an educator. In order to do their job--educate--they have to fight everything in the system that prevents them from actually teaching kids, which includes a mind numbing amount of busy work. Thankfully, they are well paid and respected by society. Oh wait...they're not?
Teachers are a subject for another day, though. What I want to write about now is the girl culture that develops when students are left basically alone to "play." Some of it is benign, of course, but in my experience it can become pretty psychologically vicious. It is not that girls are mean, exactly, but because they aren't encouraged to express themselves physically, they find other ways of taking out their frustrations. Some girls who have very little control over their home environments come to school and attempt to exercise control there, and the mother of all control mechanisms is friendship. It is far more complicated than popular v. unpopular kids, though these lines in the sand are drawn. Rather, it is about who is friends with whom--more specifically, who is BEST friends with whom, and most importantly, who is your BFF (Best Friends Forever). It's a hell of a lot of pressure for 8 year olds. The girls my daughters played with consistently tried to sabotage their bond, playing them off against one another, threatening not to be friends with one unless she shunned the other, called one "the nice one" or "the smart one," reliably generating enough angst to take us through to dinner and beyond. Though there are obvious (and sometimes similar) problems with boy culture, the scene at this school made me actively encourage my girls to befriend boys. Whatever other shit they were up to, the boys didn't seem to be jockeying for each other's BFF status, or spending a lot of time talking, period.
At any rate, the few playdates my girls have had simply exported this nastiness to another environment. Too many afternoons ending in tears made me shy about calling up other parents to set up a date. After all, my girls "had each other." They weren't lonely, they weren't asking to play at other kids' houses. It seemed easier to avoid the whole issue. We found one friend who was reliably kind--a friend that I'd adopt into my home, actually, were she not beloved by her large, loud, friendly family--and we focused on her for about a year. No tears, lots of giggles and laughter. The girl scene was crazy and cupcake-fueled, but ultimately positive. Whenever hurt feelings were an issue, the girls were able (with the help of a grown up) to work things out.
Now that we've moved to another city and left this amazing friend behind, I will admit that I am worried. What will the girl culture be like here? Will the girls be able to make new friends that won't use their twin bond against them?
So far, so good. Last night, the girls had a playdate with the daughter of two old friends of ours. After some initial shyness, within minutes they were throwing mud at each other and screaming with laughter. While the adults chatted, the kids whispered, told secrets, giggled, and generally exhibited all the same behaviors that the "mean girls" on the playground always did--but they weren't excluding or shaming anybody. Some of their jokes were inappropriate and there was some open defiance of parents. Shocking, I know. But it was all part of their small community of three, which was so rock solid by the end of the evening that they schemed together in the bathroom for ways to convince us to allow them another playdate the next day.
I'm not sure what the moral of the story is, other than that playdates for our kids seem to go better when we are close friends with the other girl's parents. But I will say that girl culture is complex--like anything else, it can either be leveraged for dark purposes, or harnessed in the service of good, joyful, community feeling. For parent (of girls OR boys), and especially parents of tweens, how do you navigate the swamp that is the proto-adolescent social scene? What "rules" of interaction do you have for your kids, and what kinds of things (negative or positive) do they report from their playdates?
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