If you have a pack of little boys, you are have any number of games and other activities that can be kicked off. It is not to say that little boys are better or that they never fight, but they fight less than girls of the same age. That is not necessarily true either. It might not be that they fight less, just that they fight differently. A little boy can duke it out with a pal, get up, brush the dirt from his clothes and then resume the game. A little girl harbors a grudge and those grudge borne battles can get real epic, real fast.

Until they reach a certain age (an age that changes for each group of women) girls play best when they are kept to very small groups- as in two. A group of three little girls will only be able to play without battling for a very short period. Very quickly into the play date, one of the girls will become the odd one out, the third wheel. While individually these girls all like one another, in this setting, in this moment, one of the girls is not going to feel welcomed or loved and soon, there may be tears.

In each of the groups of friends will be the one, the binder or the link that connects all of the girls to one another in some way. The link is the hardest role to play because she is the one who everyone gets jealous of, the one they fight over. By default, this will be the one that ends up feeling the most of the negativity because whenever there is fighting, all of the ugly messages go back and forth through her.

My nine year old daughter announced that two of her friends were battling today in school and that because of this battle they all had to endure a twenty minute lecture about friends and friendship. It basically came down to Girl A being angry that my daughter had spent the night at Girl B's house over the weekend. The girls all got into a bickering match during their lunch period and then spent the following hour tattling on one another. The teacher finally had had enough and the lecture commenced.

This is no angel child by any means but she has learned how it feels to be the third one in a group. After being inseparable from the little girl next door, she was usurped by a third girl. Now those two girls are inseparable and menace my daughter. If they had been boys, they could have beat each other up and moved on by now.