Reply to WWYD? Struggling to help my devastated teen DD whose friends/teammates pranked her.

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Reply to "WWYD? Struggling to help my devastated teen DD whose friends/teammates pranked her."

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think your DD handled it in the best possible way. This will probably end up being a powerful learning experience for her and she will be a much stronger woman as a result. I hope the best for you both going forward.[/quote]

+1. You talk a lot about your own thought processes in your update, [b]but what led your daughter to change her mind? [/b]How did she decide what to say?

This was absolutely the best possible solution and resolution, particularly because she did it on her own.

Second best would have been you talking to the other adults about what happened, in the context of figuring out where the poison is that allowed it.[/quote]

OP here.  In retrospect, I think it was going through something like the 5 stages of grief.  She passed through various stages as she processed what happened from extreme sadness that she had missed out to anger at the cruelty of the prank.  Somewhere upthread I talked about a heart-to-heart that we had and about how at that point, from urging on this thread, I told her I would not call the prank a prank any longer because it was a form of bullying.  It took her a while longer to endorse that conclusion and a while after that to see all of the actors through the lens of the power dynamics I spoke of in my update and particularly how she thought those dynamics made the teammates feel immune from any possible retribution.  Despite the unfairness that that made her feel, she remained firm that she did not want to report what happened and did not want to quit though, you may recall, she did agree to remain vigilant about team interactions.  Well, sometime after that, she came home one night after practice and told me that she had been paired up in a drill with two other girls, one of whom was in on the prank and the other who was the actual prankster (the Arranger-Parent's DD).  The Prankster apparently gave her a fake smile and encouraged her and the other girl doing the drill to do a great job to really show off for the rest of the teammates and the coach.  This was the straw that broke the camel's back for my DD and caused her to confront the locker room later.  She wanted it clear that fake smiles and enthusiasm on the field would not negate the cruelty and she wouldn't be a party to fake team spirit in front of the coach.  This is the confrontation that ended in her telling them she was committed to the team but had lost respect for the teammates who had perpetrated the prank.  She utterly strides in and out of practice now.  As other PPs have said, I would not have had the wherewithal either at that age.  But, really, it was the result of a lot of dialogue and I am both not ashamed and a little ashamed to admit that I needed the aid of the responders on this board to help me talk to her about it.  But she worked her way to these conclusions and then acted on her own.[/quote]

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