Second guessing parenting

I tend to be a hands off parent with regard to my children's navigation of their social circles. I will make suggestions and encouragements, but rarely will I be 'that' parent who intervenes with teachers, leaders, and peers' parents. I want my children to learn how to advocate for themselves.

For the most part, I think this policy has served my children well. But there is one instance, which regularly haunts me, where I wonder if I did the right thing.

CE had a friend who quickly turned suffocating, demanding all her time and attention, almost the very air she breathed. I watched as this 'friend' overtook every social occasion, demanding all the attention, executive control, over all interactions. CE seemed far more tolerant than I would have been. CE's teacher seemed far more tolerant of what seemed outright plagiarism and even cheating by this little girl in classroom situations. I stayed out of it. Then things turned sour, where if CE wasn't compliant, the little girl turned vindictive and mean, saying hurtful, cruel and untrue things whenever CE would deign to open her mouth. In the midst of this, we had been searching for a new school environment for our kids, the public school for which we were zoned was, to put it mildly, NOT a good fit. We found a new charter school that would fit out needs. It was farther than I wanted to drive the children, but we knew a new school would be opening in a year around the corner for us, so the commute was a temporary one. The decision was completely educational, but a pleasant side benefit was that CE's demanding, controlling and mean 'friend' would not be making the move to the new school. Relief was in sight.

The mother began to say angry things about me, that I was purposefully taking her daughter's best friend away from her. The daughter accelerated her campaign of mean, gossipy behavior in every situation in which the two girls found themselves. CE could avoid the situations, to a certain extent, at school, but at church, at Activity Days, there was nowhere for her to go. I repeated my mantra of 'you need to be friendly to everyone, but not everyone is your friend.' I advised CE that if everything she said elicited mean, spiteful and untrue comments from the other little girl, that she needed to be quiet. She cried and begged me to be allowed not to go to Activity Days, even to her primary class. I taught that church may not always be a comfortable place, a place replete with friends, but that we don't go to church for purely social reasons. I persisted. I did not let the teachers or leaders know what was up. I didn't want to stir up anything, especially since DH was the bishop.

Time passed. The new school environment was a blessed breath of fresh air for all of the kids. CE was able to forge better, healthier relationships with other girls and I thought we had safely weathered the nastiness that had become all interactions with this family. But what I didn't know was that my policy of silence, of forbearance, had left a vacuum which the other mother filled with her version of the facts where CE was mean, selfish, hurtful and that I was a horror on earth. The primary teacher, seeing only CE's largely silent behavior in church (in order not to provoke the meanness that seemed always to accompany her words), assumed that CE was giving the other girl the silent treatment, that she really was all that the girl and her mother said she was. I didn't know any of this for several years, not until the primary teacher turned YW president shared a story of how mean she had perceived CE to be. How that was the perception of my daughter she had carried into YW, how that perception had led her to attribute other unkindnesses to CE that made no sense, but for her skewed vision of my daughter, because of my hands off approach.

Maybe I did the right thing, in saying nothing. Maybe it would only have been worse, had I entered the fray. I will never know, not really. But I mourn for the hurts that my daughter endured. Not just for the difficulties with this one little friend turned frenemy, but for the years of distance and disapproval from a leader who was supposed to see the whole picture but didn't, perhaps couldn't, because I didn't give her the full story.

CE is a strong young woman now, poised to take on adulthood and all the new challenges and opportunities that will afford her. This frustrating experience is in the past; it is a wry lesson to have learned for both of us. She still loved her time in YW, felt very fondly toward the rest of her leaders who could see her with clearer eyes.

My general position is still the same. I really do think hands off is best most of the time. There have been other times, where I have given counsel and stayed out of the fray, where hard lessons have been learned and, sadly, where my counsel has made its way to unforgiving ears. Life seems a continual test in which we learn who our friends are, who is trustworthy, and how, in the face of painful lessons, to be friendly anyway. And where, regardless of the parenting choices I make, I will second guess them.