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?