For Fraught Preteen Years, A Class on Being a Friend

Counselor at Alexandria School Works With Girls

Counselor Amy Dunne gets a knock on her office door at Park Lawn Elementary School in Alexandria several times a day. She greets a pair of girls coming in on Important Business. They have Issues. They need Privacy, Please.

She surrenders her room, with its cozy couch, to the ponytailed pre-adolescents, and their dramas unfold: How could you pretend you didn't see me in the hallway? Or: Why did you invite Celia to your slumber party and not me? There's the inevitable "That hurt my feelings" and the occasional "I'm sorry." On a good day, they leave the room Best Friends Forever. Again.

Many of the girls are graduates of "Chicks and Cliques," a course Dunne designed to curb the gossiping, rumor-spreading and snubbing that's endemic to girls. She helps them figure out how to talk through their problems, then she lets them borrow her office to use their new skills.

"Girls can be really mean to each other," said Dunne, who has counseled countless tearful tweens. "There's constant competition between who's better, prettier, who has more stuff."

In the affluent McLean elementary school where she used to work, girls judged one another on whether they had a new Louis Vuitton bag. At Park Lawn, the cool girls wear Converse Chuck Taylor high-tops.

"We think kids only have these issues when they are in middle school, but that's when they really blow up," said Dunne. "It's important to teach them to stand up for themselves and to handle the situations now."

Research has found that girls as young as 4 give each other the silent treatment. "When you are 5, you say, 'I don't want to be your friend anymore,' and you poke someone," said Rosalind Wiseman of the District, author of the best-selling "Queen Bees and Wannabes," a parents' guide to understanding their daughters' friendships and social hierarchies.

Chicks and Cliques runs daily during the two-week break between sessions at the year-round school. It generated so much interest that Dunne designed a course for boys.

Dunne teaches the 10- and 11-year-olds how to choose good friends (ideally, girls their own age and those who are more into Nancy Drew and less into drugs and alcohol), how to roll with it when their best friend saves a place for someone else in line, and how to think critically about what popularity means.

In her most recent class, in January, student Cynthia Mendez wrote that there were two kinds of popular girls at school.

One "makes you [feel] good about yourself," she penciled onto the lined pages of her notebook, covered in hand-colored flowers. The other "makes you feel small, unimportant and desperate. She uses her mean power to hurt others."

At Cynthia's age, it's not just the most popular girls who can inflict pain, but all the fickle friends who claim new allegiances every day or withhold prized cafeteria seats from certain pals.