Am I wrong for telling my daughter to not be friends with someone at school?
My 8 year old has a “best friend” that shes been having issues with this school year.
This friend has:
broken my daughter’s things on purpose, one time she wrote on my daughters water bottle something mean about her grandmother trying to be funny, it was permanent marker so I had to throw the bottle away. She says mean things to her, made possessive comments about other friends, joked about “breaking someone’s bones”, she started throwing small rocks at my daughter’s legs one day because she made her upset. One time, she even asked my daughter to ask me for more money so my daughter could buy her a slushie. My kid comes home from school saying words that are not nice and when asked where she learned that from, the girl’s name always comes up. My last straw was that she recently made an inappropriate comment about “biting another girl’s chest,” which my daughter reported to the teacher.
My daughter DID tell the teacher (which I praised), but then later on she got upset at this girl and called her stupid. So now I’m trying to navigate teaching my daughter that reporting unsafe/inappropriate comments to adults is correct, correcting her for being mean back and helping her understand that someone can be fun to play with but still not be a healthy friend
I don’t want to villainize the other child but I did talk to my daughters teacher to ask her to not put them together in class and I did ask my daughter to try and make new friends and not follow this girl’s lead. She understood that I did not want her being friends with this girl.
I also don’t want her learning that friendship means accepting being insulted, manipulated, or constantly hurt.
How would you handle this at this age? Did i overreact? She has told me she wants to be her friend because no one else wants to hang out with this kid and she doesnt want her to be alone.