“It’s like junior high in here,” the lead teacher in my daughter’s daycare laughed.
I’m glad she could find it funny because I wasn’t laughing. I thought I had a half dozen years before I had to deal with this. Well, at least, I harbored that vain hope.
My daughter’s little coterie of 3-year-old girls have discovered a new social currency: “You can come over to my house to play.” Or, an incantation with a different sort of potency: “You can’t come over to my house to play.”
Most powerful of all: “Sophie and Emma can come over to my house to play, but you can’t.” Never mind that, to my knowledge, none of these girls has ever been to any of the others’ houses to play. Our families are scattered throughout the metro area, and most of our interaction is limited to smiles and comments in the hall about “how big they’re all getting!”
The exact content of the taunts is immaterial: Our girls have discovered the power of exclusion and the exhausting race to exclude before you are the excluded. The behavior really is limited to the girls in the room for now, according to the teachers. The boys are still happily bouncing off each other and figuring out how to take the toys apart.
That is, except for one sweet boy we’ll call Max. He tried to join in the imaginary round of social calls and was told by none other than the apple of my eye that he couldn’t come over to her house to play because he’s a boy. When Max dejectedly returned to the Barbie table, she sidled up to him and allowed as maybe she could make an exception just for him.
Two lessons I’ve taken from all this:
1. I’m so glad I have daycare teachers who love to share funny little narratives about my kids’ lives at school.
2. I have to be just as vigilant about my daughter ending up on the giving end of a bullying scenario as on the receiving end. Who knew? I’d reckon that most of us parents remember all those times we were picked on or left out – and have conveniently forgotten the times when we did the picking.
Julie Burton shares some tips for parents of girls in actual junior high and middle school in Girl Swirl, on page 36. She also talks about our responsibility as parents to take bullying seriously because, well, it’s only “cute” when they’re 3.
