What little we know about girls' relationships is based mostly on studies of white, middle-class girls. Indeed, most of the stories in this book come from that part of society. The rich diversity of female relationships found among other races, ethnicities, and class backgrounds has often been overlooked.
That the girls who engage in direct conflict may have little real social power is a sad irony, to say the least. The assertiveness shown by some minority girls may reflect not self-confidence but their vulnerability in the larger society. Their voices indeed challenge the picture of indirect aggression painted in other chapters of this book. Yet in many instances their forthrightness stems from the girls' sense that they can make themselves heard only by using physical force or dangerous speech. Because it is linked to their marginalization, their directness cannot serve as a model for overcoming girls' sense of powerlessness.
Dealing effectively with that feeling of powerlessness is essential to fighting the loss of girls' authentic selves. What we can learn about assertive girls would be undeniably useful in developing concrete strategies to fight the loss of girls' authentic selves. The more we know about these girls, the more we honor their voices, the closer we will get to developing concrete strategies to combat female bullying in all its forms.
Chapter Nine
parents speak
Suzanne Cohen was preparing for an emergency conference with her six-year-old daughter's teacher when she was suddenly uneasy. Standing before the classroom's closed door, poised to discuss the abusive behavior of her daughter's classmate, "I realized that I was about to describe this child [as] extremely manipulative, competitive, and underhanded. And to say that about a six-year-old girl—you sound like a lunatic!"
She is right. A system that refuses to classify these behaviors as genuine aggression will look askance at complaints of indirect, social, and relational aggression. As a result, parents who confront girl bullying face an experience that, in its own way, can be as upsetting as their daughters'. In the absence of a public language to talk about bullying, it's hard to avoid inflammatory words like "liar," "sneaky," or "manipulator." As their daughters fear going public and facing retaliation, parents are afraid of being designated "hysterical" or "overinvested" by the school. And where girls must overcome the embarrassment of low social status, parents may quietly worry over the role their errors might have played in their daughter's experience.
The attempt of parents to tone down their demands on teachers is one of the most powerful subtexts in this chapter of the story of girl bullying. Sitting with four mothers who meet regularly to chat at a Washington coffee shop, I asked them to explain.
"As a parent, you're aware of the incredible amount of power the teacher has over your child's life," Ellen said. "You don't want to jeopardize that relationship in any way." Her friends nodded. Added Christine, "I think parents worry that teachers will take things out on their children because of how a parent acts." Because complaining about alternative aggressions is often perceived as overreacting to everyday school behavior, many mothers harbor a fear of becoming the classroom's "hysterical mother." The need to remain calm and dispassionate, they emphasized, is key.
Perhaps more than any other event in a child's life, bullying forces the question every parent struggles with: How much should I intercede on my child's behalf? While the answer to this question should depend on the child—is she ready to fend for herself? is she being prematurely exposed to danger?—too often the answer is determined by the anticipated response. Will other parents take offense? Will the school be responsive, or worse, punitive? With most schools strapped to accomplish the most basic extracurricular objectives, getting somewhere with a busy teacher can be an uphill battle.
Parents seeking justice for their daughters face cultural and personal obstacles. Most daunting is the fact that alternative aggressions are ignored or rarely considered a legitimate social problem. More often, school officials downplay the problem or blame the target. Many parents described daughters being sent to psychological counseling for treatment when there was nothing wrong with them, encouraged to get costly social skills training when it was the aggressor who in fact needed the help, or ignored because the aggressor was stealthy and it came down to a case of she-said, she-said. Not surprisingly, plenty of parents opt for silence.
Shame is also a reality. The discovery that your daughter struggles socially is painful; finding out she's not to blame is hardly a consolation. Every family handles it differently. It took no small courage for Linda to confide the shame that felt to her both searing and ridiculous. "There was this nagging piece, and I never went to this place," she told me. "This is even hard to say but I thought it sometimes. As much as everything I said to [my daughter] did not reflect this, deep down I thought, 'My kid isn't popular? She isn't one of the cool kids?' Even though I know that's not what I really want. But you want your kid to be wonderful." It took Suzanne Cohen great courage to overcome her instinct to block the whole incident out. As she waited for the teacher, she recalled, "I secretly harbored this fantasy that someone would turn around and say, 'Why can't Hannah stand up for herself? Why don't you teach her how to stand up for herself? Why is she letting this happen?'" Although these feelings are common to anyone coping with a child's misfortune, shame weighs more heavily when most people regard the problem as a trivial phase in child development.
When a child is found to be learning disabled, there is a specialist. The child's parent suspects the problem, often using accessible literature, and expresses her concern to a knowledgeable official. The parent is reassured her child's situation is neither her fault nor that unusual. In time, her child may receive specialized attention to provide her with tools to accommodate her different needs and perform to the best of her abilities.
When a child is the target of alternative aggressions, there is often nobody to help. Without rules to refer to or a language to narrate a child's pain, parents know the cards are stacked against them from the get-go. As Suzanne explained, "If I made too much of a fuss about her social issues, you know, it would be like, 'Well what's wrong with your kid if she can't deal with her issues? Why doesn't she just walk away and get over this?' And I was embarrassed—I was embarrassed to appear the way I felt."
Silence is a second skin for American families. We put our best foot forward and draw the curtains in times of trouble. From across the yard we quietly blame parents for their children's plight. Middle-class families in particular are committed to keeping children's social, emotional, and learning problems secret, especially psychological pain. One mother, confiding the pressure to stay silent about her daughter's problems, put it simply: "We're afraid our kids aren't perfect. And that it reflects our mothering abilities. That we're home too much or not home enough. It reflects on us."
With ever more opportunities to showcase children, parents compete vigorously to project an image of social bliss and indomitable health. They stack trophies and throw glamorous birthday parties. Sharing the experience of despair engendered by girl bullying is for many parents impossible. Margaret Kaplan explained, "If I go to this person and tell them this is what's happening, who are they going to tell? How many people are going to know? How distorted will it become? Will it be, 'Oh, the Kaplans: They're having problems. We're not. We're all perfect. We have this idyllic lifestyle.'" Despite her deft organizing of parents to demand extra art classes, Susan Sussman gave a bitter laugh when I suggested a group to combat alternative aggressions. "There is no way I am going to organize a group around my daughter's experience of cruelty," she said.
Susan Patterson said the smallest incidents can become the subject of lunchtime conversations in Ridgewood. At forty-one, with her daughter bullied by a close friend, she was resolved to lock the town out of her private life. She closed down at even the thought of coming forward, brushing me off with a bitterness that seems to contain a lifetime of disappointments. "This town talks about everybody," she seethed. "They can't hardly wait to ge
t up in the morning and find out who's getting divorced, who's sleeping with who. I mean, that's just the way life has been here forever." She pushed fiercely for her daughter to handle her bully on her own. "I wanted her to be an independent woman. I kept thinking, this is not as bad as it is. I didn't want to think it was as bad as it was. But it was really, really bad."
Parents are bit players in the national conversation on bullying. Our attention is fastened on the aggressors, their targets, and silent peers. Critics have faulted television and movies for stoking the culture of peer violence. The role of parents, however, is often reduced to bitter epilogues of disasters: parents who did too little, too late, or who did nothing at all.
In this chapter, I present five mothers talking about their girls' experiences with bullying and explore what teachers face in responding to them. Each parent has a unique story, and like her daughter, brings her own set of personal memories and beliefs to the episode. The stories illustrate parents' influence over their daughters' social choices. They reveal how a culture that silences and invalidates female aggression affects the way parents respond to their children's pain.
blame
Patricia runs a small child-care facility in Ridgewood. When I visited her at the end of the day, she was wearing a long, untucked collared shirt over rumpled khaki pants. Her tall sturdy frame suggested an ability to fix just about anything, from a shoelace to a lawn mower. Her voice was surprisingly gentle and low, and her eyes drifted across the playroom to where a lone child played quietly, awaiting her mother. We are both tall women, and as we plunked down to talk on tiny chairs at a round table, our knees popped halfway up to our chests. She grinned and shrugged, reddening slightly.
Patricia never expected that four years after moving here with Ben and their daughter, people in town would still treat them as though they'd just unloaded their truck. When Ben was hired as a senior pharmacist, an impressive promotion so early in his career, he had promptly moved the family to Ridgewood midway through Hope's third-grade year.
When Hope started school after the winter holidays, her sudden appearance troubled her peers. She was met with quick skepticism by the other girls and deemed a threat to existing cliques. What began as a brief shunning stretched into a yearlong hazing. Hope knew she was being challenged because she had not grown up in town, but the longer she lived in Ridgewood, the easier it became to blame herself.
By fifth grade Hope had fallen in with a group of girls from the church who attended choir and Sunday school. At school, the clique leader often asked Hope to go somewhere else for the day or made rude comments about Hope's looks or personality. When Patricia asked her daughter why she stayed friends with them, Hope insisted it was better when they were at church together.
One day in sixth grade, one of the girls informed Hope that the group did not want to be her friend anymore. For several weeks afterward, they refused to acknowledge her existence. "She was just left," Patricia said, her eyes filling with tears. "Every day after school, she'd come home crying. 'They don't like me today. They don't want to be my friend anymore. What do I do? Why don't they like me? What's wrong with me? Why can't I be friends? Why don't they want to be friends with me?' What do you say?" she asked pleadingly.
"What did you do?" I asked.
"Well, it was a very emotional time," Patricia said, clearing her throat, her shaken voice righting itself. She leaned back in the chair and stretched her long legs. "I'm sure a lot of it had to do with her growing up, you know, her period starting and all that stuff, a lot of emotions come with that, too." Listening to her, I wondered if Patricia was edging away from the center of her child's pain, ascribing it to the "legitimate" factors affecting child development.
Patricia asked her daughter if there was any truth to her clique's critical remarks. "I asked if there were some things within herself that she'd like to change." Hope tried to come up with a couple of ideas, then retorted that she didn't know what else she could do. I asked Patricia if she thought Hope should have changed herself.
"Hope has a very outgoing personality," Patricia explained, sounding almost apologetic. "She's very bubbly. And she can be silly. I guess I don't know the right word for her personality. But I think she could get on people's nerves. It might really rattle them. And they might get tired of it. She felt like she could calm down a little bit, you know, not be so boisterous or outspoken." In the absence of an explanation for her daughter's torment, Patricia could do little but suspect it was Hope's fault. She begged Hope to find other friends. Hope refused. She said they were her only friends.
Patricia tried to comfort her daughter by asking her to pray. "Even though it's very hard right now, we know that God can use this to bring good in your life somewhere. You may not see it today or tomorrow." She paused. "I'm trying not to cry."
We sat in silence.
"I wanted to go to those girls and say, 'Do you realize what you're doing!' I wanted to go and tell their mothers, you know, but then you stop and think, 'Okay, I'm hearing one side.' I trust Hope and I believe that she's honest with me, but you don't want always to think that my child will never do anything wrong.
"If it had turned into something where I thought Hope was really suffering or going into a depression, or you know, having really physical or health problems, I probably would have done things a little differently," Patricia said. "A lot of it I felt like, this is just part of life. You have to learn how to deal with people who don't always treat you fairly." And here, Patricia expressed society's approach to bullying through her parenting philosophy, even as she sat before me, shoulders slumped in a small chair, brushing tears away, questioning her own words.
When I asked what she would have done differently, she sighed and looked at me squarely. "I wish I had gone ahead and tried to get those mothers together and sat down with them for coffee or something," she said. "You know, in a nonthreatening way. I would never want them to think that I was saying my child is better. If we had worked though all that then, it might have helped them now. Their support system might have been stronger now."
Patricia's fear of angering other parents stifled her defense of Hope and helped her rationalize Hope's torment. For most mothers I spoke with, the fear of another parent's anger played an uncommonly large role in their response. The first unwritten rule of parenting, I learned, is that no one wants to be told how to raise their child; the second is that criticizing another person's child puts you in peril. Many people interpret criticism of their child's behavior as a veiled attack on their parenting, and they become defensive, sometimes irrationally so. Most parents of targets simply say they just "don't go there."
Mothers especially may harbor fears about engaging in direct conflict. In smaller communities, the social costs of confrontation rise. Mothers may work together, volunteer at school or church, run into each other often, even be friends. Fathers might be current or hoped-for clients. It may be difficult to approach another parent without some aftershocks that reverberate beyond the girls' universe.
At times, bully-target dynamics can spring up between mothers of warring girls, kicking into gear a second tier of indirect aggression and anger. Parents of aggressors are naturally protective of their daughters, and especially when their girls aggress in total secret, often challenge the accusation. The approaching mother, already timid, can be silenced and bullied herself.
Jill's experience of bullying brought back a flood of memories for her mother, who was suddenly dropped by her best friends in junior high. For Faye, watching what happened to Jill proved her theory that mean girls are universal and unavoidable. Jill had changed profoundly since being alternately ignored and attended to by her best friend. "She used to be the happiest kid," Faye told me. "She was so happy-go-lucky. She used to float and it was wonderful." Then around first grade, Jill became increasingly shy. When her first best friend dropped her "like a ton of bricks," her self-esteem shrank. Now that Jill's new best friend in fifth grade was treating her nicely only in pr
ivate, Faye was not going to interfere. There was no sense, she'd concluded, in protecting your child from this. It's everywhere.
This time, the bully was the daughter of Faye's friend. This woman was, according to Faye, powerful, controlling, and socially connected. Because of that, her daughter had many friends. "We have had discussions [about the girls' friendship]," she said, "but you can't tell someone that your daughter is being a bitch." Since Jill had seen trouble in more than one friendship, Faye believed Jill's low self-esteem was to blame for her victimization. "If you don't feel good about yourself and people know it, and people know that this person doesn't like you, then no one else is going to like you."
When I asked her if she'd thought of pursuing her daughter's plight with the school, she balked. "Other mothers might have called the other mother and said, 'What's going on?' And it never occurred to me to do that. It never did. And now I say to myself, 'Should I have called?' Should I have, you know, found out what went on, you see, because my mom was really not involved at all. There were a lot of other issues in her life and this was not something she could clearly see as a problem. And then I think, you know, on a scale from one to ten you have people dying from cancer. This really is not a problem. You know, she will grow up and she will find her good friend. And she'll be okay."
After minutes of trying to minimize her daughter's ordeal, Faye abruptly gave herself over to hopelessness. "She'll have this for the rest of her life. We all do," she said simply.
fear
On an icy February morning, I was inching down a backed-up street in Washington, D.C., heading for a lunch interview with the wife of a friend I hadn't seen in many years. Trawling for parking in an underground garage, I remembered that Melissa was bringing along her mother, who was visiting from upstate New York.
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