Reason to be afraid # 17 - When your child's teacher calls in the middle of the day

It's about 3:45pm and I'm still at work. My cell phone rings. Usually I let it ring and go to voice mail, I'm at work after all, but yesterday for some reason I answered.

I didn't look at the caller id, wouldn't have recognized the number anyway, and was very surprised to hear that it was my daughters teacher on the other end of the line.

On a school day. At 3:45 in the afternoon. THIS CAN'T BE GOOD.

She wanted to make sure we had reviewed her report card which came home in her book bag Friday. I said we had. Hadn't I returned the envelope with her on Monday? Yes, I did, she just wanted to make sure we really looked at it.

OK. Where's this going?

Our daughter is a very intelligent little girl. Since she was old enough to talk and understand what we were saying to her we have more or less treated her as a miniature adult rather than a child. Instead of immediately punishing her when she's done wrong we talk with her, rationalize her punishment and make sure she understands that whatever that behavior was will not be tolerated and that if it continues so will the punishment. It works for us.

She's a very good reader. Very good with math concepts. A very talented artist. She's actually at the level on most subjects that they would expect from a beginning 3rd grader, and she's in 1st grade.

The problem is, she's an only child, and as an only child her "gets along well with others" skills are, well, non-existent. She had problems with this in kindergarten as well, and we thought we had taken care of the problem. Apparently not.

She's not hitting, shoving or hurting other kids - which is an improvement from last year - and she's started to hang with a new group of little friends, which I think is where THIS problem lies. She's started with the name calling.

I don't like it. Not at all. The other girls she's been hanging around have older, much older, brothers and sisters who are apparently teaching them some pretty naughty things. And, since this is what these girls hear day in and day out, they don't really understand that it isn't nice and shouldn't be said. And of course, my daughter has no clue. The other girls are laughing so it must be funny.

We're going to work this out. She's a good kid, she really really is. And she doesn't ever mean to hurt anybody, she just hasn't acquired good judgment yet. She was so upset that her teacher called and talked to me about this that she cried and moped around all night long. She must have apologized to me a million times. And each time I told her that I wasn't the one she needed to apologize to, that she needs to tell the kids whose feelings she's hurt that she was wrong and she needs to tell her teacher that it won't happen anymore and follow through with that.