My Daughter's Best Friend is a Brat
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My daughter’s best friend is a brat. There, I said it.
“Tess,” age nine, has that Alpha-Tot je ne sais quoi. She looks like an American Girl Doll. She executes flawless handsprings across the playground, constructs elaborate dioramas, and outpaces her peers in every subject.
Despite her many gifts, Tess is one of the nastiest children I have ever met. She hijacks playdates by sulking, sneering, sobbing, criticizing, and threatening to de-friend my daughter Franny if she doesn’t get her way. Franny is a sweet-natured, accommodating kid—easy prey for a manipulatrex like Tess—and frantically acquiesces to her BFF’s theatrical demands.
Tess’s tirades make it necessary for me to intercede several times during a playdate. I’ve tried every Child-Whisperer technique I can think of. Reflecting her feelings. Asking her how she would feel if Franny treated her the way she treated Franny. Telling her firmly her behavior is unacceptable. Nothing works. Each of my directives is met with crossed arms and the dismissive eye-roll of a child who simply doesn’t view adults as authority figures.
I’ve tried to extricate Franny from Tess’s mean-girl talons by explaining to her how true friends act. They care about your feelings. They take turns. They don’t give ultimatums. They don’t leave you feeling like a soggy, wrung-out dishtowel after you play together. Yet, as entrenched as Tess is in her bratty behavior, Franny is equally frozen in her kiddie codependency: “Tess can’t help it, Mom;” “She needs another chance;” “She’s not always mean to me.”
And there’s this wrinkle: I’m friendly with Tess’s mom, “Claire.” We clicked the first day of our daughters’ kindergarten year. We’re both full-time working mothers. We have the same sense of humor. We’ve even shared clothes on occasion. The only thing I don’t like about Claire is that she likes her kid.
All right, I suppose that’s understandable, but this isn’t: she’s oblivious to the fact that her kid is a diva who is disliked by most of the other school parents—all of whom breathed a collective sigh of relief when Tess switched schools this past fall. With the girls in separate schools, I’ve been able to dodge the Tess bullet for the past few months. But the other day, when Franny and I began planning her 10th birthday celebration—what will be her first-ever slumber party—she looked at me with big, beseeching eyes and said: “Are you gonna let me invite Tess, Mom?”
I envisioned a gaggle of girls piled into our house, doing slumber-party things—camped out in the TV room with bowls of popcorn, watching a movie; nestled in sleeping bags, giggling late into the night—and this is what I saw: Tess parked in front of the flat-screen, refusing to watch the movie Franny had chosen.
Tess shrieking at another girl who dared lay her sleeping bag next to Franny. Franny bursting into tears from the pressure of trying to make Tess happy. Me dumping a bowl of popcorn over Tess’s head.
If Tess comes to the slumber party, it’s a slippery slope back to regular playdates. Am I a terrible mother if I tell Franny she can’t invite one of her best friends? What if Claire hears through the mommy grapevine that her kid isn’t invited? Am I unreasonable to expect a child in my home to be nice to my kid and treat me, the adult, with respect?
What should I do? Do I let Franny invite Tess to the slumber party and hope for the best? Or do I put my foot down and squash the dysfunctional friendship for good?
Pauline Gaines is the pseudonym of a blogger who writes about divorce, blended families, and challenging children at Perils of Divorced Pauline.
