I don't know how prevalent this is; as I said, the parent who recced it to me says she saw it happening in their public elementary school.
We definitely saw the Queen Bee stuff start at elementary school, super early.
Daughter (L, now 18), had the toughest time in elementary school actually -- not, I hasten to say, all that tough, but in K or first grade (neither of us can remember which, but I think it was K) she was closest friends with a girl who was friends with another girl who would orchestrate all this "love triangle" stuff you read about -- "you can't be my friend if you're her friend" -- and there was a lot of angst and on-again/off-again friendship with the tug-of-war girl. There was drama, and the teacher got involved, and the girl caught in the middle would write apologetic notes to L for excluding her, and then it would all start again. This kept going on for most of the year, IIRC, even though we kept telling L to just... be friends with people who wouldn't treat her like that -- and she did have other friends who were OK, but kept getting drawn back into the love triangle drama. Then the next year L and the tug-of-war girl were in different classes, and everything was fine.
There was a second bout of drama at the end of middle school, but it was a bit different. L had the same group of close friends from third grade on -- they called themselves the Magnet Gang. They started middle school together, but at the end of the first year of middle school (sixth grade) the Magnet Gang girl whom L was closest to, who was sort of the linchpin of the whole thing, ended up having to transfer schools. I don't know if it was related to that or would've happened regardless, but the other founding member of the Magnet Gang turned really mean -- L wouldn't tell me what her specific problem was, but she said that this girl for example made fun of another girl in their friends group who had not started going through puberty yet and was very sensitive about her height and lack of chest -- and basically drove away everyone else. L found a new group to be friends with, but continues to seriously resent the mean girl to this day.
Then in high school she had a semester or so of floundering to find the right friends group. Only one of her middle school friends ended up at the same high school, and they did stay close, but didn't have any classes or lunch together, so they couldn't actually hang out AT school. At first L made friends with a group of girls who seemed prone to drama, but after the first semester she met some muh more interesting folks, who liked reading and were interested in history (including the one I occasionally talk about in my LJ as Awesome Friend Ali). AFA was a theater person, as was L's middle school friend, and through them she ended up becoming part of the "theater kids" crowd, despite not being ever involved with theater herself. Ironically, the "drama kids" were pretty drama free, at least when it came to friendship -- there was some relationship drama.
With my son (O, now 16), there was very little drama in elementary school for him speicfically -- starting on the first day of K, while we were waiting for teachers to show up, all the boys coalesced into a blob and commenced merrily chasing each other. But there was a Queen Bee girl in their kindergarten class who would make disparaging remarks about how other girls dressed (to the enormous embarrassment of her parents, who were not like that at all). Elementary school was relatively drama free, although O drifted apart from one of his best friends from K, who grew up into an annoying kid, and there was stupid stuff like the boys playing rough and accidentally breaking each other's things or hurting each other -- but it just seemed like dumb stuff, not bullying.
In the first year of middle school there WAS some drama for him -- one of his closest friends from elementary school suddenly gave him the cold shoulder, and although O didn't say much about this -- he is not one to talk about emotions -- he was definitely hurt. But he quickly found a different group of friends, some kids not from his elementary school, and some elementary school friends that he just got closer with -- and most of them are still his friends now that he's in high school.
High school has been entirely free of friend drama so far, and O's gang (orchestra kids, mostly) interact in an interesting mix of sarcasm and support. We were traveling for O's birthday, as usual, and he woke up to elaborate Instagram wall posts, with, like slide shows and edits and videos full of inside jokes. I don't know about showing emotional pain -- O is private about that, so it's not like I can tell if he's suppressing it in front of his friends vs his normal baseline -- but I've been pleasantly surprised by how non-stereotypical-masculine O's group of friends is. And he has several close friends who are girls who share his interests (comic books, fencing).
These were all public schools btw -- neighborhood elementary school with ~450 kids, the middle school it feeds into with ~1200 kids from a bunch of different elementary schools, and the city's academic magnet high school (~2800 people). And it may be relevant that the demographics are probably a bit different than a lot of other American schools, too: the elementary school they went to is 80+% Asian (mostly Chinese-American), with a lot of first and second generation immigrants; the middle school and magnet high school are also ~65% Asian.
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Date: 2019-09-15 11:06 pm (UTC)We definitely saw the Queen Bee stuff start at elementary school, super early.
Daughter (L, now 18), had the toughest time in elementary school actually -- not, I hasten to say, all that tough, but in K or first grade (neither of us can remember which, but I think it was K) she was closest friends with a girl who was friends with another girl who would orchestrate all this "love triangle" stuff you read about -- "you can't be my friend if you're her friend" -- and there was a lot of angst and on-again/off-again friendship with the tug-of-war girl. There was drama, and the teacher got involved, and the girl caught in the middle would write apologetic notes to L for excluding her, and then it would all start again. This kept going on for most of the year, IIRC, even though we kept telling L to just... be friends with people who wouldn't treat her like that -- and she did have other friends who were OK, but kept getting drawn back into the love triangle drama. Then the next year L and the tug-of-war girl were in different classes, and everything was fine.
There was a second bout of drama at the end of middle school, but it was a bit different. L had the same group of close friends from third grade on -- they called themselves the Magnet Gang. They started middle school together, but at the end of the first year of middle school (sixth grade) the Magnet Gang girl whom L was closest to, who was sort of the linchpin of the whole thing, ended up having to transfer schools. I don't know if it was related to that or would've happened regardless, but the other founding member of the Magnet Gang turned really mean -- L wouldn't tell me what her specific problem was, but she said that this girl for example made fun of another girl in their friends group who had not started going through puberty yet and was very sensitive about her height and lack of chest -- and basically drove away everyone else. L found a new group to be friends with, but continues to seriously resent the mean girl to this day.
Then in high school she had a semester or so of floundering to find the right friends group. Only one of her middle school friends ended up at the same high school, and they did stay close, but didn't have any classes or lunch together, so they couldn't actually hang out AT school. At first L made friends with a group of girls who seemed prone to drama, but after the first semester she met some muh more interesting folks, who liked reading and were interested in history (including the one I occasionally talk about in my LJ as Awesome Friend Ali). AFA was a theater person, as was L's middle school friend, and through them she ended up becoming part of the "theater kids" crowd, despite not being ever involved with theater herself. Ironically, the "drama kids" were pretty drama free, at least when it came to friendship -- there was some relationship drama.
With my son (O, now 16), there was very little drama in elementary school for him speicfically -- starting on the first day of K, while we were waiting for teachers to show up, all the boys coalesced into a blob and commenced merrily chasing each other. But there was a Queen Bee girl in their kindergarten class who would make disparaging remarks about how other girls dressed (to the enormous embarrassment of her parents, who were not like that at all). Elementary school was relatively drama free, although O drifted apart from one of his best friends from K, who grew up into an annoying kid, and there was stupid stuff like the boys playing rough and accidentally breaking each other's things or hurting each other -- but it just seemed like dumb stuff, not bullying.
In the first year of middle school there WAS some drama for him -- one of his closest friends from elementary school suddenly gave him the cold shoulder, and although O didn't say much about this -- he is not one to talk about emotions -- he was definitely hurt. But he quickly found a different group of friends, some kids not from his elementary school, and some elementary school friends that he just got closer with -- and most of them are still his friends now that he's in high school.
High school has been entirely free of friend drama so far, and O's gang (orchestra kids, mostly) interact in an interesting mix of sarcasm and support. We were traveling for O's birthday, as usual, and he woke up to elaborate Instagram wall posts, with, like slide shows and edits and videos full of inside jokes. I don't know about showing emotional pain -- O is private about that, so it's not like I can tell if he's suppressing it in front of his friends vs his normal baseline -- but I've been pleasantly surprised by how non-stereotypical-masculine O's group of friends is. And he has several close friends who are girls who share his interests (comic books, fencing).
These were all public schools btw -- neighborhood elementary school with ~450 kids, the middle school it feeds into with ~1200 kids from a bunch of different elementary schools, and the city's academic magnet high school (~2800 people). And it may be relevant that the demographics are probably a bit different than a lot of other American schools, too: the elementary school they went to is 80+% Asian (mostly Chinese-American), with a lot of first and second generation immigrants; the middle school and magnet high school are also ~65% Asian.