Playground politics and social anxiety

We need to talk about Ava, I said to Tom at the beginning of school term, when my usually confident girl dissolved into tears as I returned her to the reception door on her first day back to school. I’ve never had a refusal from the moment she skipped in aged three and coped with full days from four, she’s always been happy to leave me, unlike her brother, who just didn’t get it until he was near enough six.

Social refusal? Well, there have been moments of it. Like, when she was a baby and would stay close during monkey music; and as a toddler, rarely jumped to her feet in spontaneous dance like the other, more boisterous kids. She never got on with Diddi Dance either, as a non-dress wearing tomboy, but I kinda felt the same way about the £5 classes – an expensive excuse for mothers to indulge their inner princess with their tutued toddlers than anything that was going to bring out my three year old’s inner prima ballerina, so we just stopped going. As time has worn on, and Ava becomes ever more lanky-legged, she’s also become more and more introverted, losing the breezy happiness that always made her such an easy to manage little one.

Like Jonah, and to a certain extent, like me, Ava has pretty fixed ideas about what she wants from a friend. Loyal and perhaps a little commandeering, so far, no one in her class has come up to scratch. It’s tough being the oldest in your year. A September baby, she’s always preferred hanging out with Jonah’s rough and tumble mates, and there’s definitely a bit of her that’s frustrated with her class mates for being, dare I say it? –  just a bit too babyish.

Pretty and easy going, I was less worried about her fitting in and finding friends than awkward and grumpy Jonah, who dished out more than his fair share of black eyes and bite marks back in his pre-school days.

I was pleased when, in nursery, she hooked up with a couple of nice-enough girls and seemed to become a threesome, but as Reception dawned and the catchment area shrunk, these two girls didn’t make the final cut. Ava didn’t seem that fazed, and it’s character building to have to make new friends, isn’t it?

Soon enough, she was talking about a little boy, Jacob, she’d started to play with regularly – it made sense that she’d prefer the company of a straight forward, easy going lad to the social minefield that mars friendships with groups of girls. They had a couple of play dates and we met his parents. But then, he got bored of playing cats and found a boy mate to hang out with, leaving Ava cut adrift.

First, she wouldn’t go into school unless she had Jonah at her side, making his early morning capoeira classes a logistic nightmare. Then, there were a couple of parties at which she wouldn’t settle – I’d been so used to her wandering confidently off on her own that it felt like a backwards step to have her clinging to me and making me promise not to leave.

Perhaps we over estimated her and were too keen to make her stand on her own two feet. I get impatient with parents who hover around their kids, and dislike a towering room of adults getting in the way of hip height kids at a party. I’d always opted to leave, preferring parents to bugger off and leave their offspring to it whenever I host a do, so I don’t have to worry about chatting to them and making cups of tea when I’m trying to do party games. But even at her own parties, she started to find it all a bit too much. To the girls she’d once been friends with, she was cool towards when they came over to play. She complained they wouldn’t play her games, and got upset when they played with her toys.

I tried to explain that people won’t always do what you what them to do, but even as I said it, I realised it wasn’t going to help much.

I don’t want to project my own playground anxieties on my daughter – and they are myriad – but I never quite managed to work out group dynamics, and I was definitely thought of as bossy at school. Some people just don’t know how to give and take, and I don’t mean that negatively. It’s just the way they are.

Today’s party – and to be honest I was surprised when she brought home an invitation last week –  from a child I didn’t know, precipitated tears, and when drawn she said that girls in her class weren’t playing with her any more. My heart sank, but I insisted we go along.

It was a bright, crisp day, and once out of the house our moods improved, despite being nearly an hour late. For once, I didn’t feel so nervous facing a group of parents I didn’t know, despite having spent a morning generally feeling uncomfortable in my own skin. I didn’t crave a fag to avoid the entertainer, or refuse a glass of château cardboard despite the fact it wasn’t yet one o’clock. I didn’t feel the need to rush out as soon as I’d dropped Ava off because I only get one weekend and I don’t want to spent it doing the hokey coke.

I stayed for cake, and pugface John Milton provided a convenient icebreaker rather than simply being a nuisance. Ava even stood up and told a joke. But when asked what she did for a living by the ever entertaining entertainer, she said she mainly played on her DS. Something else for me to think about addressing.

Maybe it was my attitude as much as hers, but she had a nice time. Perhaps, when it boils down to it, my anxieties have been rubbing off onto my daughter, and my increasing withdrawal from the world is making hers more blinkered.

We need to set a good example to our girls, and one of them is how to cope in groups because dynamics don’t always come easy. But I certainly got the feeling that the party girl was thrilled to see her, so maybe it’s Ava’s feeling she’s a bit too cool for school that’s building up walls rather than the other way around.  I know for a fact that I’ve been guilty of social exclusion of my own making because sometimes joining in seems more difficult than imagining no one likes you.