Manipulative Behavior

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My five year old daughter's girl friends play politics and manipulate one another. I don't notice this sort of behavior as much from boys.
The boys tend to just hit when they are mad rather than plot and scheme ways to get back at each other. I also notice that none of the parents reprimand the girls for doing this yet they will scold those who hit. I think that hurting one's feelings and manipulating can be much worse than hitting.

Most parents seem to pretend or maybe they really are oblivious to this manipulation. It's as if these subtle undercurrents have some sort of taboo regarding talking about them. I think we are doing our children a disservice by pretending that this sort of behavior is okay just because it is so subtle.
Kiddie politics is no more petty than kids slapping one another over a toy, yet so many parents think that calling out kids behaving badly in playground politics is beneath.

Why do parents overlook manipulative behavior in children. Even psychologists say that it is best to ignore the child when he/she says things like,
"I hate you mommy because you won't let me do such and such..."

I disagree. I think we should call them out on it and tell them that their words and actions can hurt just as much as hitting. I'm don't actually care when my daughter manipulates me in this way but I'm just saying that if I ignore it and just say, "Well I love you but you still can do this or that."
That is weak and she'll probably still try to manipulate others. It's weak because it fails to recognize a core issue with females in particular, and that is manipulation. It's not a very good characteristic to nurture.

If my teachers in school had followed your suggestion of calling kids on manipulative behavior instead of pretending not to notice it, my childhood would have been much less traumatic.

I was physically abused by my peers on only a few occasions (punched, slapped, kicked), but I was emotionally and psychologically abused by them on a daily basis. I dreaded every day going to school, because I knew that the girls in my class would find another way to tease me, humiliate me, and be mean to me.

Unfortunately, I have always been too slow to react to this kind of psychological abuse, and no matter how hard I try, I have never been able to prepare myself for how to respond to people's mean behavior. At school, I would try to ignore it for as long as possible, and then I would explode and yell at the people making fun of me, telling them to stop it. Then, since I was the one making the loudest racket, I would be the one told to calm down. When I explained that I was yelling because Jessica, Angie, Laura, Kathryn, etc. were being mean to me, I was told that I should just ignore them. Nothing was ever done to stop their behavior.

I left school extremely traumatized and unable to trust other people my age. It has taken me years to be able to interact with other people my own age and without being constantly worried that they are going to use me for their own amusement and then discard me. This has led people to say that I am aloof, that I think I am too good for them, that if I were really interested in being friends with them I would share personal information with them. The problem is that every time I used to share personal information with other people in school, no matter how trivial, it would be used against me. I've worn glasses since I was five, and when I told my classmates that I was going to get braces, they called me a "four eyed train track" for months. When I would talk about my special interest (at the time, horses), they would walk behind me chanting, "Horse freak, horse freak."

The fact that my teachers expected me to just ignore my classmates behavior still rankles me. The problem was that because I was a small, overweight, clumsy child with a slight stutter, a tick, a habit of constantly clearing my throat and blowing my nose, ankles that would constantly sprain, a propensity for talking endlessly about my special interests, and a lazy left eye that compounded the fact that I couldn't make eye contact, my teachers simply had less tolerance for me than for the lanky, coordinated, pretty girls that would torment me.

It is a dirty little secret that some teachers are less willing to intervene on behalf of a student that they view as being unattractive and weird. I've seen this from the other side as a music teacher at a summer camp where I was the only one who stood up for a quite possibly Aspie girl when both the students and the other staff were making fun of her.

My 6th grade teacher told my parents that I was a "difficult" child, despite the fact that I was the most academically gifted person in my class (at age 12, I wrote a 30 page paper on the Holocaust, conducting original research by interviewing a Yugoslavian concentration camp survivor). To this day, I don't know what "difficult" means -- I didn't sneak off with the boys and attempt to seduce them; I didn't initiate cat fights with the other girls; I didn't tease or hit anybody. The worst that could be said of me was that I didn't know how to play the social games that my peers excelled in. Maybe that's what my teacher meant by "difficult": socially inept. I don't know.

Anyway, all of this rant (thank you for reading if you've gotten this far) is to say that I, too, wish more were done to call people on psychological abuse so that it is as big of a "no-no" as physical abuse.

Does anybody have any ideas for how to counter psychological bullying? I am still as clueless at how to stop it at 29 as I was when I was 9.

~ Caterina

I did martial arts and the way I walked/stood changed a bit, I got bullied less because (I think) I visually looked more confident and so less lightly to give them satisfaction. Apart from that I can't think about how to deal with psychological abuse.

I know some schools teach anti-bulling skills and have a no bulling policy, the whole ignore it thing has been proven to not work but to say no in an assertive manner has been said to work in some situations. I don't know if it would work that way for adults and I don't know if it would work for adults to go to an anti-bulling course but it would be worth a try.

Yea.. like they say, boys beat the crap out of each other, girls tease each other 'till they develop eating disorders.. Hasn't it always been like that?

I'm all for putting a stop to this sort of behavoir. It hurts much longer then a slap to be called names or to have your apearce picked to bits everyday as a child. We need to sit our kids down and tell them this isn't exceptable behavoir that it's harmful , unkind and will be dealt with in our homes with puntive actions. It needs to be adressed at PTA meetings how many little girls every year harm themselfs do to this abuse? Cutting themselfs, pulling out there own hair or in worse cases take there owns lives. Girls have just as much vaule as boys and we need to make our schools aware that we aren't going to take this sort of behavoir lightly anymore.

Boys also are bullied in this manner, it is not just a girl child issue, all children need to know that this kind of behaviour is wrong. Also kids need to be educated to try stop this behaviour in others, bystanders permit bullies when they do nothing (I saw a psycoligist on Opera say this).

My heart goes out to those posters here who have been bullied.

Teaching children that manipulating is just as bad as hitting will not only protect the bullied, but it could also help develop character in the bullies.
People will manipulate if they can, it's human nature. People probably would use physical abuse to get there way too but society just doesn't allow that.

When kids (particularly boys) are taught not to hit, they learn the lesson of controlling your emotions. Since girls get away with manipulating they are not as good at controlling their emotions. Instead they learn how to shield them and use covert ways to get what they want later. In this way their emotions become more grandiose and they allow things to get blown out of proportion. It's only later when their own emotions backfire on them that they are forced to get a better grip on them. It seems like this ignorant behavior can be nipped in the bud but since it is so subtle it grows and festers into bigger and numerous wounds.

Interesting conversation.

Yes, boys can do the same, but in my observation they don't use manipulative words nearly as often as young girls. Boys are very obvious in their bullying and aggression; girls are not. I have never seen a boy known for his bullying become a teacher favorite, but I see it all the time with the girls. Which means, basically, that the teachers have no clue what these girls are doing, or they wouldn't dream of giving them life skills awards for being "helpful" to others and so on.

My son is my AS child and he is 12. We've been able to confront and deal with any abuse - physical or emotional - he's gotten at school because it was pretty much always in plain sight. That is how boys work. Or maybe he just is clueless when it gets too subtle; but, seriously, in all the conversations I've had with the boys he goes to school with, I've never heard a clue.

My daughter is my NT child and she is 8. The other parents and I are completely stunned by what we hear is going on. All our daughters are starting to complain that they have no friends. The situations my daughter tells me about are extremely subtle, yet she is well aware they are meant to hurt. I've heard some of these things in the backseat of our car while driving her friends; I have to interfere quite a lot, asking questions and explaining why what they are suggesting isn't acceptable in my eyes. It really is very different from my experience with boys at that age. The girls are quite busy intentionally praticing emotional game work.

Though it does happen with boys as well. I just wanted to make sure that it was known that while girls do tend to emotionally abuse and boys tend to physically abuse, the reverse can happen.

The only way one could get rid of psychological bullying that they are experiencing in school. is to wait it out and graduate...that seems like the only way, as was in my case.

The female bullying and manipulation is hard to detect and hard to enforce and hard to prove.As someone entering the legal field, I know for a fact that SLANDER is hard to prove since there is no hard evidence and in most cases, the only witnesses are friends of the bully who would lie in court and discredit the victim.If the bullies WROTE libelous things about the victim such as internet bullying, the victim could save the messages and they could be used in court.

SLANDER is illegal and is also a tort.If your daughter were to tape record the slander, you would have a cause of action to bring it to court and get justice.