Ethical dilemna re teen inclusion

She should speak with the teacher about her concerns and her experience. I have two high schoolers, and every time they have asked for something they wanted, they have gotten it in a school context. Obviously these have been reasonable requests but to me, wanting to not be in the same group all year with a student she has conflict with (or however she would characterize it to the teacher). is reasonable to raise.

I am unclear on the ethical dilemma. We all have to learn to work with people we don’t particularly like or appreciate. If this kid has done nothing to be offensive then she needs to be kind and respectful. This isn’t “sucking it up”, it’s dealing with what is. If this kid leaves the group or she does what happens next? What does she learn? 

Sometimes it's helpful to look at these parenting dilemmas from the point of view of adults in the workplace. Problems like this come up all the time in the workplace: an irritating colleague, or a clueless stinky guy. It can really affect the quality of work that gets done. When I've been in this situation at work, it's the manager who handles it, not the individual employees. In other words, the teacher.  Part of the teacher's responsibility is to make sure that the classroom environment is conducive to learning and getting work done. It's very possible that other students are bothered by this too.  The stinky annoying guy will benefit too. He will always need to be able to work with other students, and later, work colleagues.  He is at a disadvantage if he is unintentionally offending his classmates to the point that they don't want to work with him. High school is a good time to learn how to collaborate with others and the teacher can help with this. So your daughter should speak with her teacher.  Most teens would have a hard time bringing up something like this with their teacher. It's hard for grown-ups to do, too!   Maybe you could help her practice what to say to the teacher. She needs to be clear about what outcome she is looking for, and state her case in neutral language. Good luck!!

I can see this issue from both sides.  As a child in a small town on the other coast, it was common for mothers to know which kids were being excluded and to make us include them in projects, birthday parties and sleepovers etc.  I remember my friends and I finding this to be a drag and we often worried about our own social capital because we know other kids can be mean if you are known to associate with "one of those" kids.  However, I can report that in the fullness of time I not only endured no harm from that but also ended up in a friend group that had an identity around kindness and inclusion.  We learned how to get along with a lot of different kinds of people and sometimes we had difficult but important conversations with our outcast peers that the adults were not able to have.  We coached some girls to wash their hair more often and gave them deodorant that their parents were somehow not providing.  Teens are amazing and resourceful and can sometimes do what adults cannot. Also, we ended up finding unexpected delight in unusual kids and their perspectives. We also learned skills for enduring and working with bores, eccentrics, and the socially clueless, that we could spend time with people we did not like and live to tell the tale.

I think the thinking has shifted tremendously and somehow there is perceived harm to asking our kids to endure the company of other difficult kids.  (I'm holding as separate the issue of underfunded schools pairing lower functioning kids with higher functioning kids and shifting the burden of instruction to bright kids --- that always seems wrong to me.)  I'm now parenting a neurodivergent kid who has been eccentric since late elementary school.  They have no friends in our school system now.  It has literally been years since they were invited to any party or anything and at one point the hurt drove them to attempt suicide.  I so get not wanting to stress out our kids and being mindful our our kids' capacities --- I make similar parenting choices myself all the time.  That said, when everyone makes that choice all the time, some kids get left entirely isolated and/or in the disability ghetto, even here in a part of the world that wants to be known for its inclusivity.  My hope is that as parents and as community we can have more nuanced conversations about difficulty, annoyance or discomfort vs harm.  I know my friends and I grew up to be more socially fluent in more spaces due to the choices our mothers made. And yet now here in the Bay Area my emotional strategy has been to entirely give up hope that my kid will ever be included.  My experience is that inclusion as a value is alive and well in the abstract but close to zero in real life when the cost of inclusion might be any kind of discomfort. 

I think that as your kid moves forward in life, she's going to have to interact with people who are annoying. At work, she's not going ot have a choice about working with colleagues that may not be her first choice. I think learning to cope with this kid will help her develop life skills. But also you or she should have a discrete word w/ the teacher. Maybe there's something going on in this kid's home life that needs investigating.

It’s probably up to a combination of your daughter, the team and the teacher. 

I teach college kids in a discipline where almost all of their coursework is hands-on group projects. So I have seen this dilemma from the teacher's perspective MANY times. And I feel for your daughter. I think there is a middle ground between asking your daughter to "suck it up" and taking steps to exclude the annoying student. 

I absolutely think your child should go to their teacher to ask for advice on this. But I suggest framing it as a request for advice rather than a demand for the teacher to reshuffle groups. If nothing else, at least that will assure the teacher is aware of this dynamic (if they aren't already!) 

A couple things that might help your daughter... as a teacher, I am often trying to help my students learn collaboration skills during their group projects. So it's less about the project content and more about building the collaboration muscles they will need in life, the workplace, etc. Working with difficult people or even people we dislike is a fact of life for almost all of us, so sometimes it can help students if they reframe the experience as being about learning how to do that. So yes, it's partially about getting the work done. But it's also about learning about group dynamics and the best ways to manage working with a variety of people. 

Second, I ask my students to consider that every personality trait is annoying and unhelpful in some contexts and extremely valuable in other contexts. One way to manage working with difficult people is to step back, notice the things you find annoying about that person, and then try to imagine a situation where that annoying trait might be useful. Is there a way to channel the annoying behavior into an arena or task where it will actually come in handy? As an example, some students are incredibly detail oriented. When having big free-ranging brainstorming sessions, their behavior will be really annoying because they will nitpick everything to death and make everyone feel like their ideas are stupid and destined for failure. Of course their group mates hate that! But that detail oriented kid is really, really great at doing the proofreading or fact-checking or other formatting busywork that some big thinkers find mind-numbingly boring later down the line. And that is valuable. So maybe you could sit and talk with your daughter about what this person is like and try to come up with ways that the difficult person could be redirected into roles/tasks that are actually productive. That might not cut down on the grating personality, but it does soothe the pain if the annoying person is at least making a valuable contribution to the work. 

And then if your daughter puts some sincere effort into this and none of it works, consider circling back to the teacher again to ask for help. 

(As an aside, I think it's kind of nuts that there's something that requires students to be in the same group for the entire year. That's a big ask that I never put on my students, for exactly this reason! We do multiple projects and regularly reshuffle groups. Everyone should learn to work with the difficult kid, but nobody should be saddled with that kid for 100% of the time, IMO.)

Good luck to your daughter! Please know that I think this is actually important work, and she may not be happy with how this feels right now (it totally sucks!), but this is a valuable life skill and people who are good at this genuinely make the world a better place.  

I like the idea of your kid learning how to get the support from the school adults.  Most of the other responses directed you to the teacher.  Your daughter probably also has access to a counselor through the school as well that could help her navigate the situation.  

  Encourage her to set reasonable boundaries that balance kindness to her peer and her need to complete her work.  Also normalize the fact that group.assignments are often fraught with interpersonal challenges.  This type of problem will happen again school and in life. You can't fix it for her.

A middle option is for your child to latch herself onto another group.  Then she is not excluding the other kid but she doesn't have to work with him.  

Another thing to consider is that your daughter’s account of the situation may not be a neutral one. In my time volunteering in schools, I often noticed socially adept girls were generally also adept at knowing how to present conflicts to adults in ways that put them in the best light. It is possibly your daughter and her friends just don’t want to be burdened with trying to get along with a dorky kid. But that dorky kid might have autism or some kind of family distress. Being accepted in this work group —or not— may be hugely meaningful in his life. In the long run, figuring out how to manage group work with this boy, rather than harnessing adult intervention to exclude him, may be better for your daughter’s  development as a kind and tolerant person. It will also be useful in later work life, where we can’t always avoid people who annoy us. I used to be skeptical of the emphasis on group work because my kid was the bright, responsible type who always seemed to be slowed down by it. But over time I began to see the interpersonal skills she was learning from it, especially from groups with difficult kids in the mix. I realized these skills were more valuable than the specific content of any of the projects. One idea to help your daughter is to suggest she imagine she’s watching this situation unfold in a movie where this boy is an underdog  main character, with a sympathetic back story explaining his hygiene and social awkwardness. What kind of characters would she and her friends be? Would the audience be on their side? 

Sorry she is going through this.

The hygiene and personality issues are fairly distinct and should probably be dealt with differently. 

For the hygiene, it probably helps to discuss it with him privately first. If he really does smell and the rest of the group feels the same, they can then all discuss it with him in as gentle and supportive way possible. 

In terms of his personality,  I think this is probably something we all deal with still as adults. I know that I do. If it  really is grating, she should feel OK minimizing contact with him. Even when they are in a group together, interactions can be kept to an as-needed basis. 

Being a part of a community involves “tolerating” annoying people.  Our community at large today needs to tolerate or even include people that are different than us.  What I would be worried about is grades- will this kid bring down or cause more work on other kids?  Your daughter should approach the teacher about checking in with the group to be sure the kid can contribute- perhaps in unexpected and creative ways.  Collaborating with folk different than us is good- if there are too many distractions that’s different.  This is where the teacher comes in… 

Coach your daughter so she won’t  sound “judgy” as you mention.  Mentioning body odor sounds a little petty- this is something that everyone faces at some point in their workplace.  Focus on functioning and everyone’s engagement, even those who are different.  

As a parent you can approach the school and say you are concerned about the child/ that they may not have what they need?  Proper hygiene is a health issue.  If everyone approaches this with kindness and problem solving mode - the kid may even thrive. 

I commend you for your problem  solving by reaching out here…