When Friendship Doesn’t Feel Like Friendship

Some children come into your child’s life and take up all the space.

They don’t shout or throw punches. Often, they’re liked, even admired.

But slowly and almost imperceptibly, something changes.

Your child begins to shrink.

They start saying less, doubting more. Their world gets smaller. Their joy dulls at the edges.

When you ask what’s wrong, the answers are fragmented, with a text, a shift in tone, a weird look after school.

Nothing you can take to a teacher.

Nothing that fits into the tidy box marked “bullying.”

So it gets called “friendship issues.”

But in your gut, you know it’s something else.

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How it plays out

I’ve watched it happen more than once.

A girl, let’s call her Jane, builds quiet influence in a group.

She doesn’t need to be loud. She’s strategic. She understands social power early.

Jane creates alliances through secrets.

She tells one friend the other has said something cruel.

She deliberately invites you to a special show, just to win loyalty.

She shames a teammate in a group chat for losing the game with no apology, no self-awareness.

And somehow, she’s still there at the sleepovers, on the team, in every chat.

The others see it. They flinch. But they stay close because challenging Jane comes at a cost.

And no one wants to be the next one out.

School thinks they're all just fine, getting along great. Even puts them together on trips and in class. Because the behaviours are too subtle to name and the chance of losing the rest of your friends is too scary.

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So is this a disorder?

This behaviour doesn’t have a name that people are comfortable with (that I have been able to find yet).

Maybe we could call it controlling behaviour, but even that doesn’t quite capture the atmosphere it creates. That unsettling sense of being manipulated. Wondering if your other friends don't like you, when in your heart you know that's not true. The slow erosion of self. The way others begin to manage themselves around her.

These are children who test control early and who learn to mimic closeness but never risk vulnerability.

They use friendship as leverage, not relationship.

It doesn’t mean they’re damaged beyond repair, but it does mean they need to be seen clearly.

Because we will all work with a Jane someday.

We’ll leave meetings with that same sense of disorientation.

Wondering if we were too sensitive replaying conversations that didn’t quite make sense and feeling quietly like we’ve just been made smaller.

It starts young. And if we dismiss it as “just kids figuring it out,” we miss the opportunity to teach something essential

to them, and to the ones they hurt.

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So what do we say to our kids?

We say:

“If it feels off, trust that feeling.”

“You don’t have to accept being treated that way, even if everyone else does.”

“You can step away and I’ll be right here when you do.”

"Friends don't make you feel bad on purpose"

We don’t need to label anyone too early.

But we do need language and clarity and to acknowledge there is often no amount of trying to see the other perspective, wasting hours of emotional labour trying to adapt to Jane.

Because children who learn to override their instincts for the sake of inclusion grow into adults who do the same, in boardrooms, in relationships, in life.

Helping them see what’s happening isn’t dramatic it’s protective and I'd bet you'd wished you'd spotted Jane earlier too.

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-Layla