Dear Parents, Guardians and Carers,

Last week our grade five and six students participated in the Traralgon District Winter Round Robin, representing our school with pride and had an enjoyable day. We are very proud of them. Thank you to the many parents and helpers who volunteered their time to coach or umpire on the day. Your help was greatly appreciated. Quite a few of our teams made finals in their sports with the boys soccer team winning through to the Regional finals.

What You Need To Know About Girls And Their Frenemies

The following information is adapted from an article from the Santa Maria college in Western Australia. It explains the challenges parents and teachers face in dealing with relational aggression. 

Relational aggression is the psychologist’s name for what the rest of us call ‘mean girls’ behaviour.  It is a pattern of behaviour typically played out by school age girls, but it is not exclusive to them, boys and adults can also experience it. 

Chances are, you’ve experienced relational aggression. You know it when it happens to you. It’s an emotional slap in the face and you often feel a sense of shame and confusion. What distinguishes relational aggression from just being mean, is that it focuses on damaging a person’s sense of social place. It can be explained as using relationships as weapons. It may include:

• Exclusion
• Gossip
• The silent treatment
• Belittling (Often hidden behind the expression ‘just joking’)
• Conditional friendship

The first four are self-explanatory, but ‘conditional friendship’ is more difficult. The child knows there are unspoken rules about behaviour and ‘going along’ with the group. It is why many lovely girls behave very poorly. Inclusion is incredibly important to their developing psyche and they will do anything to remain within the inner circle.

Why does it happen?

Part of being an adolescent is finding your place in social networks. Your peers become incredibly important and there is less focus on parents and significant adults. As a result, impressing and belonging become very important. Traditionally boys have achieved this pecking order with physical strength and humour. Girls use their communication and interpersonal skills.

Girls learn from a very young age that when you create exclusion you create inclusion. And if you can knock someone else off balance emotionally, it defines you as balanced. It is an interesting, if not disturbing, phenomena to watch in a school yard. From the cliques of socially elite ‘it’ girls to the mixed mob of outsiders, there is a power dynamic constantly at play. None of this has anything to do with friendship. Hence the creation of the term ‘frenemies’.

This is not to say that girls don’t have genuine friendships, they do. Some kids are lucky enough and emotionally literate enough to enjoy relationships with genuine understanding, and empathy. They support one another and spend time sharing common interests. In my experience these kids are usually involved in a lot of sport, have varied interests and are exposed to a lot of different people of varying ages. The focus is on participating and being involved. However, even these kids come face to face with relational aggression from time to time.

How can parents help?

It isn’t all hopeless. This is learned behaviour and learned behaviour can often be unlearned. But there are commitments that need to be made by parents. We need to:

1. Make friendship cool. Modelling by adults is the most powerful way of doing that. Talk about the great qualities of your friends to your kids. Too often we niggle at our friends’ weaknesses instead of verbally celebrating their greatness.
2. Explicitly teach kindness, compassion and empathy. We know kids have the capacity for these qualities. They are often evident at home or with people of different ages, but they are not being engaged in their relationships with peers.
3. Explicitly teach emotional intelligence. Help kids recognise who is loyal and who is safe. Talk to them about relational aggression. They should be able to recognise it and name it.
4. Teach kids to be:                 

• Upstanders –These are people who stand up for victims. It’s been proven that if you can stand up to a bully for 8 seconds, they are likely to back down. Some kids are stronger than others. We need to make it cool to be strong and able to defend others.
• Distracters – It is important that kids be able to recognise when a mean moment is coming and distract participants away from it. It’s a skill that adults eventually learn themselves, but if kids are given instruction on how to do this it can be learnt more quickly.
• Supporters – Kids can be encouraged to do something as small as make eye contact with a victim while aggression is happening. That shows the victim that the behaviour is seen and acknowledged. It makes the victim seen and acknowledged. They aren’t alone.

5. Carefully manage on-line activity. A lot of relational aggression happens out of school hours, in cyberspace. Kids need a break from their friendship groups.
6. Create opportunities for children to meet lots of new people outside of school and get to know them well. I love sport for this reason and many more. Team mates are people you have to understand and communicate with. Assumptions about people get tested.
7.  Please…. Never say, “That’s just girls”, or “boys will be boys” for that matter. We can be better than that. Or at least we can try. 

   Food on the yard

   A key element of our anaphylaxis management plan is banning food from being eaten on the school grounds. During the school day time is allocated for the students to eat their snack and lunch in their classrooms so that these areas can be cleaned and kept free from contaminants. 

   The same rule applies to the times before and after school - food is not to be consumed inside the school ground. Thank you for your assistance with this matter.

   Caritas India COVID 19 Appeal

   Bishop Greg has asked that our Parishes take up a collection to go towards helping the dreadful situation which Covid-19 has brought to that country. To support this we have  set up a fundraising section on CDFpay for anyone wanting to donate to this appeal to support the work being done in India by Caritas. All donations will be forwarded to the Parish next week. 

   Kind regards

   Jodie