When I was about 8/9 years old I was told by a friend of mine I couldn’t play with them any more. Their mother didn’t approve of it for some reason.
One year later I asked my mom if she ever knew why this was the case. She said that other mother thought I wasn’t good enough for her child. But that after a while that mother said she may be okay with it now.
But my mother said she didn’t like that idea. That this friendship would be all reliant on that mother’s “generosity”. And I didn’t feel the need to object to that. My mom’s reasoning made perfect sense to me, even on age 10. This was not the way you treat friendships fairly from a parents perspective, I realised. (There is a little more to this story though, but this is all I care to share.)
I still feel like that was a mature thing I did. Because I was not a child that took ‘no’ very well at that age. So what are your childhood experiences where, now upon looking back, you feel you handled it maturely?
When I was in secondary school I had to fill out a form over the summer to be allowed to leave early for some school activities. The form required a coach or teacher’s signature. Since it was the summer, I had no contact with any faculty so I had my parents call the coach who told me to sign the form for him, which I did and I turned it in. Unfortunately, that coach left before the beginning of the year so when school started I was called to the principal’s office and accused of forging his signature. I told the principal the coach told me to, so it wasn’t a forgery, I was signing on his behalf, and I even put that on the form. He ended up calling the coach and he even confirmed but at that point he didn’t want to back down and still denied the request.
After I left the two older ladies that ran the office found me and told me they just approved it after he left for the day and he would never know. They were super nice and told me they were proud of me for sticking up for myself. As a barely out of primary school kid it was really intimidating to be yelled at by an adult but I felt so vindicated when they recognized the inequity of the situation and helped me.
That principal ended up only lasting a year too.