The Prime Directive

Star Trek's Prime Directive is a law that forces the Federation to not interfere in societies that are starting up and have not achieved some specific level of technology yet.  I have a similar sort of thing with Pinkie Pie where I won't directly interfere with her friendships and social groups.  I want to give her general advice and then let her figure stuff out on her own.

This came up recently when she was involved in a Minecraft group.  There are tons of Minecraft servers out there, and they seem to come paired with voice chat groups where people chat constantly while playing the game.  Minecraft seems like a fine thing for Pinkie Pie to be doing as entertainment as it involves a lot of creativity and thinking, but sometimes the social scene is not ideal.

Pinkie Pie was in voice chat and I was near her doing some chores, overhearing only her side of the conversation.  Initially it was innocuous, but she began to get more and more upset and agitated, eventually starting to plead for the people in her chat to stop fighting.  She began to have an extreme emotional reaction, crying over and over that they were upsetting her, that they needed to stop, begging them to cease their fighting.

Listening to her be so upset that she was wailing and grovelling in an attempt to get other people to stop their conflict was so upsetting for me. 

My emotions were swirling and I struggled to stay out of the mess.  I wanted to just grab the mic away from her and yell at them to shut the hell up, and I wanted to yell at her to leave the damn server if it is making her so upset.

You don't have to put up with friends screaming at each other all day.  You can move on!  MOVE ON!

I didn't yell at anybody, but I knew this had to stop.  Even if she could cope with it, I can't, and for her sake I hope she never feels like this is the sort of 'friendship' she needs to accept.

I totally understand why this is a struggle for her.  She is making friends online, and when you find people you like it is tough to just drop them when the situation turns toxic.  This is a good lesson though - begging people to stop being awful to each other isn't productive.  If that is the environment, you need to find the people you like, tell them you would like to continue playing with them but this environment has got to go, and then leave without a backward glance.  There are places in the world that aren't full of this sort of aggravation and you need to find them.

Thankfully Pinkie Pie eventually figured it out on her own, as I had hoped.  She told her friends on the server she was leaving, and they left together to find someplace else to play.  They ditched the people they hated, and while the new place has its own struggles, they have never resulted in the mess I saw in the first one.

I suppose I should be glad that my technique (assuming you think 'do nothing' is a technique) worked.  She moved on, and she learned.

But DAMN sitting there listening to my kid beg for other people to stop hurting her was hard to do without leaping in to stop it.  Having your emotions be so easily wound up by someone else's issues is the cost of being a parent, I guess.