Mean Girls

I have a bone to pick with all the mean girls out there.  The more I research, the more I realize that there are not a lot of tools around to educate our daughters about being secure, about dealing with insecurity and dealing with mean girls.   How do we teach our daughters to have confidence that is NOT dependent on other people?  How do we teach them to not be one of the mean girls, to love each other instead of tearing each other apart?  Hopefully, we are teaching be example, but is that enough?

Let’s face it, we have all had a laugh about the movies that have these gorgeous girls acting mean, and trivial, but this is an actual growing problem.  My husband, a high school teacher, has told me on numerous occasions that the girls are getting in more fist fights than the boys nowadays.  These fights are on top of the mortifying level of emotional damage that girls inflict upon each other.

What has caused this drastic change?  What are WE as parents doing differently, and what can we do to make our girls not only nice girls, but the girls that can help stop the meanness?

When did we get to the point where our entire self worth is based on other people?  What they say, what they do, and how we fit into that.  I can pinpoint exactly where I started to feel this.  I was 14, still at an emotional in between.  Adolescence had hit in full force as I was dealing with all the changes that come along with it, hormones, new boobs, hormones, peer pressure, hormones.  Did I mention, all the crazy hormones shooting through my body?   I was at the beach with my best friend, and we had just finished a swim, after lying out in the sun for awhile.  There was this really cute guy, Rob, who was 16 and a few of his friends hanging out with us. My best friend had a HUGE crush on him.  We were all sitting, goofing off and talking.    Rob was asking my friend to go to a party with him later at another hang out spot in the neighborhood.  (Consequently, we knew we couldn’t go, but she said yes anyways.)   Rob went on to say that I was not invited because I was both “fat and ugly.”   I said nothing, she said nothing.  His friends laughed at my expense and I walked off.  I went back down the sand, gathered my stuff with as much confidence as I could muster, walked past them into the street, and walked home.   Once I was out of their sight I cried the entire way home.

Why should his opinion have affected me so much?  I knew I was not fat. At this point I think the jury was still out on whether or not I thought I was beautiful, but I at least knew I was non-ugly.  A term I hate to use because of its negative connotations, but I was 14, I had a lot to learn.  I still do.

I know you are thinking, why the uproar now?  You are 29, well adjusted.  Phebe, my older daughter, came home from school a few days ago to inform me that one of her “friends” had called her fat, and boring.  Not only did she say it right to Phebe’s face, but she also tried to rally the other children into saying the same things.  I had a very upset, and distraught child.  

Phebe never ever thought she was fat before this, in fact, it was not something she ever voiced concern about.   But one day, one opinion, is enough to make her question everything she was so confident in.

Phebe and I did have a talk about how some kids have to make other kids feel bad so that they feel good about themselves.  And that this concept is absurd, but unfortunately common.

This blog is going out to the parents of meangirls, to the mean girls themselves, and to anyone who has been affected by this epidemic.  The time has come to take a stand.  Who is going to stand with me?