Reply to Preschoolers and "mean girl" behavior

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[quote=Anonymous]Well, just don't do what I did, because I somehow taught my 4 year old to be mean like this.

I saw that she was getting possessive and upset over the whole "best friend" idea, so I told her that "friends are people who are nice to each other and have fun playing together. People can have lots of friends, and everyone in your class can all be each other's friends." Sounded right to me, but it backfired.

At a playdate DD and her friend "Larla" were playing some sort of pretend game, and both wanted the same princess dress (note, we have a ton of random dress up clothes so there were many to choose from). My DD says "Larla, you're not my friend if you don't let me have my favorite dress". I intervened in the moment and talked about the importance of sharing politely, neither kid ended up wearing that dress.

After Larla went home I talked to DD about how what she said was unkind to Larla and it wasn't very nice to only be friends when we're getting what we want. When we're frustrated with our friends, we should talk about how we're feeling and try to solve the problem fairly so both people are happy. Etc. Then, we had this snippet of conversation (slightly paraphrased, to correct grammar):

DD: Mommy, friends are people it's fun to play with, right?
Clueless me: Right.
DD: Well, I don't have fun if I can't be the prettiest princess. So Larla wasn't my friend anymore if she took the dress!
Me:  :shock:. I eventually pointed out that it seemed like she had plenty of fun without that dress and she sort of agreed, but still  :shock:

Great... I have created a manipulative [i]and spoiled[/i] child. This will be fun to fix...[/quote]

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