Social Development

I don't work so hard anymore, so I spend a lot more time with her. She wants to be a bit like Dad, but I think it's not… I think it's a lot more than that I think she just wants to be strong and independent. She refuses to wear anything… she, she calls pink, "Ugh," and "Urr". She likes… she wears shorts as much as she can. She only wanted to wear school trousers to school. Her first question about school was, "Can I wear shorts?" Um she doesn't want to wear a skirt, she doesn't like pink, she doesn't like dresses. And first, the real indication of this I think was in a local park when we were going down the slide and she was wearing a dress or something she was about two and it sort of got caught on her and I said, "The best way to go down the slide is in trousers or shorts." And from then on - I don't think it was necessarily that moment but, she has always wanted to do that.

At school I think she's found peer group stuff a little more challenging. She's not been used to that volume of girls before and I think girls a bit, can be a bit more socially challenging than boys. I think she's got used to having these brothers around who are kind of quite straight forward, and and neighbours there's quite a lot of there's mostly boy neighbours actually, male neighbours. So, sometimes she'll come home and say: "Oh, nobody likes me," or, "nobody plays with me," which I don't think is actually true. Like you know, the teachers haven't brought up anything and that sometimes she seems very happy but I think she finds those sorts of female relationships a little bit trickier at the moment.

I suppose this is a very normal thing, but thinking about who your child's interacting with and what sort of habits they are going to pick up from other children, and what other children are going to say to them, are they going to get picked on? So, any instances where someone might have pushed him or said something horrible to him, and then I've had to think of what, what would be a sensible thing to tell him to how to cope with that. So, I've really had to sort of think about, "Okay, what is, what is age appropriate? What would be better for him?" Whilst I don't want, you know, if he gets picked on, I don't want him to, I don't want, I don't want to say to him, "Oh just ignore them.' I want, I want to be able to say, "Ok, you need to say 'no' and go and find an adult," that sort of thing. I've really had to think about what the sort of best options for him would be. It's interesting, I know that that's a very normal part of you know school life, unfortunately, and it is just something that we've got to deal with as he goes through