A parent's insistence that her daughter would never be rude or mean to another child may actually end up making her rude or mean to another child. Research shows that when parents ignore alternative aggression, their children are more likely to engage in it. It makes perfect sense: when parents do not discourage the behavior, girls are free to act that way to get what they want.
For example, many preschool girls use relational aggression constantly. They disinvite their parents from birthday parties or say they "won't love you anymore" when they are upset. When girls threaten to withdraw friendship, even at the age of three, it is the equivalent of biting or kicking. When the behavior is not disciplined, the child learns it is an acceptable strategy to get what she wants or express negative feelings.84
Parents may not take alternative aggressions seriously because, like their daughters, they live in a culture that has defined the behavior as a rite of passage or "girls being girls." Others simply do not want to see anything "wrong" in their children.
Many parents are stumped by how to deal with their daughters' psychological aggression at home. The answers are closer than you think. Begin by taking stock of how you respond to more obvious or conventional acts of aggression, like hitting or name-calling. Without being conscious of it, you probably use a protocol for disciplining your daughter: perhaps you tell her to stop, explain why she shouldn't do it, foster empathy for the target, and name some consequences. You'll need a similar intervention plan for the behavior that challenges you now.
When you observe your daughter engaging in alternative aggressions, activate your protocol. As an example, imagine a girl who rolls her eyes at her sister and ignores her at dinner. Here's how you could handle it:
"Jennifer, it is not okay for you to ignore your sister." (Stop the behavior.)
"Ignoring someone is not an appropriate way to express yourself when you are upset. And when you roll your eyes, you're sending a nasty message, even if you're not speaking." (Name the behavior.)
"How do you think your sister feels when she tries to speak to you and you pretend she's not there?" (Foster empathy for the target.)
"You need to find another way to express yourself. Even if you're angry, I expect you to be respectful toward your sister and acknowledge her." (Suggest an alternative.)
"If you can't change the way you're acting right now, you will have to eat dinner later or in your room." (Create a consequence.)
"I know you're capable of more than this." (Communicate positive expectations.)
If the phone rings and it's your daughter's school calling with news that she has been involved in bullying, get all the information you can. Do not inform the caller that your daughter "would never do" what they are calling to inform you she did. Do not downplay or interpret the incident as "kids being kids"; if the school took the time to call you, it's likely more than that. Instead, apologize and thank the school for calling.
Ask your daughter, who may have beaten the school to the punch with her own story, to respond to the school's description of her behavior. If she patently denies it, let her know that you will follow up either way. If there is evidence of her guilt, tell her she will be punished more severely for lying to you. Give her another chance to revise her story. Ask her what the other person would say if she was asked to tell her side of the story. Refusing to "let it go" is not about signaling distrust of your daughter. It sends a larger message to her that you are vigilant about her behavior toward others. It also affirms your respect for her school's authority.
Call the school for an appointment if possible. It is always better to speak face to face about these issues than by phone. Do not begin e-mail correspondence on the subject. Electronic conversation about any sensitive matter can be easily misinterpreted.
Perhaps you are not sure if your daughter is acting aggressively at all. It's not easy, but there are ways to find out. First, just ask: talk to her school counselor, teachers, coaches, and other adults who see her in different contexts. Let them know you are sincerely open to their feedback. Second, start hanging around your daughter when she's with her friends. If they are in the kitchen, do the dishes quietly. If they are watching TV, straighten up the room. Drive carpool: kids have this weird ability to forget an adult is driving them, and they will say all kinds of things in the back seat. I once met a mother who asked me if it was okay to slam on the brakes when she heard her daughter and her friends sniping about their peers. I said it was at least a start.
Joking aside, you are entitled to let the girls who sit in your car or eat in your home know how you feel about gossip and other aggressive behavior. Be sparing, though: your daughter's embarrassment could derail the teachable moment. Save your strongest feelings for a private time with her.
when it isn't bullying
Is every time a child feels socially rejected a moment of victimization? What makes a girl the "odd girl out"?
In a world without bullying, there will always be exclusion. Exclusion will happen naturally as relationships grow more intimate. Exclusion does not necessarily constitute bullying, even when we account for alternative aggressions. It would be wrong to read this book as an argument against exclusion.
Every case of exclusion is as unique as the child in question and must be evaluated on its own terms. If a child is being left out here and there, or from a certain group, then she is being left out here and there, or from a certain group—nothing more and nothing less. If she is failing to forge close relationships with others, it bears further investigation before deciding she's been bullied. If her exclusion bothers her or her parents, interrogate the disappointment. The desire to see a child become popular can color the way we view her social universe, can make the everyday rise and fall of friendship look like something else. If the child needs help with social skills, she should get it, but it's not other children's responsibility to compensate for what another girl lacks.
That girls sometimes use relationship as a weapon does not mean that every time a relationship is not offered, the girl is behaving aggressively. We must distinguish between intentional acts of meanness and the reality of children's social order. Like exclusion, popularity will outlast us all, and to cry foul at it will only make a parent appear overinvested and ignorant.
To expect girls to play nice with everyone, despite what they may really want, is to enforce upon them precisely what we are trying to stop: a "tyranny of the nice and kind"85 that will stifle girls' voices, shuttle them into idealized, alienating relationships, and impress upon them the belief that their own needs should be subverted to others' at any cost. A common situation is one girl who silently trails after another, copying her behavior and appearance as though to absorb by osmosis what she is unable to take independently for herself. The followed girl is annoyed and embarrassed. Is she obligated to spend time with the follower, who has done nothing but hover quietly? I don't think so.
Only when a child has been shunned by most of her peers or suddenly dropped by the friends she once had does exclusion look less like social ordering and more like relational aggression. And even then, discipline may not be appropriate. This isn't to say that when one child lets go of a friendship with another to get popular, she isn't being mean. She is. But could someone have "made" me talk to Anne? Probably not. There will always be cases where we have to let girls negotiate their own social lives. What we can do is provide them with as much emotional support as possible, and let them know that life will get easier.
"I'd love to hear my daughter come up with some really strong responses," one mother told me. "I don't want to see her be weak. We want our children to be stronger than we were." In spite of this, most parents find themselves at the doorstep of the age-old question, At what point do we let our children fight their own battles, and when is it time to intervene? I always tell parents to trust their gut. If after a few days of unrest your daughter's behavior begins to change—if her eating and sleeping patterns shift, if she grows quiet, if the phone stops ringi
ng or vibrating—something is wrong and she needs you. When parents ask me what the right thing is to do, I ask them to imagine doing nothing at all: Is the school aware of what is happening? Will someone there step in when things go too far? Does the school take these behaviors seriously?
The hidden culture of girls' aggression subsists on silence and isolation. As Mary Pipher has written, "We need to politicize, not pathologize, families." Part of this means that in order to fight the forces that prey on children outside our homes, we must first step forward to publicly acknowledge our questions and fears within them. For it is not just the girls who think they are suffering alone when they are bullied. So do parents. When families don't talk, parents can't learn from one another and it becomes easier to blame themselves for their children's problems. Blaming parents means we focus less on our daughters' peer cultures. It prevents us from realizing collectively as a society that there are systemic and social patterns to be resisted and corrected.
for girls especially (but not only):
everyday truth telling and conflict
Girls have a critical role to play in changing the culture of their cliques and friendships. After all, most of us hate this way of life. I can't count the number of girls who told me they'd rather be beaten up than ignored or cut down spiritually by their peers. We need to abandon the belief that doing this is natural or unavoidable. It isn't. We can change.
It's like riding in the passenger seat of a car when you're young. You hardly ever pay attention to what the driver's doing. You don't have to. But one day, you get your learner's permit and switch seats. You're going all the same routes, only this time you have to relearn each part of the way. All the turns someone made for you, you now have to make yourself. You have to make sure the wheels don't jump the curb, that you come to a complete stop, that you check your blind spot.
It's the same thing with our relationships: we have to get in the driver's seats and relearn healthier ways of taking the twists and turns. We don't have to give in to the autopilot urge to tell someone else we're angry instead of the person who made us angry in the first place.
The biggest reason we don't talk to each other is because we're afraid we'll lose the friendship with the person we're confronting, or worse, that the person we're talking to will turn everyone against us. The fear throws up a wall that prevents us from speaking our hearts and minds to each other. As we also know, it also leads to a ton of gossip, rumor spreading, and resentment that mushroom into other kinds of nastiness.
AN EXERCISE FOR GIRLS:
THROW THE GEARS OF
OUR CULTURE INTO REVERSE
"I hate the fact that you have to go through all this stuff," Shelley said to me at Starbucks one afternoon. "You can't tell someone you're mad at them, you have no idea what's going on, you're kind of like lost. Or you end up having problems with six people when you're mad at only one person."
It doesn't have to be this way. If we talk openly with our friends about our fears of losing each other, we often discover they share the same feelings. One thing I noticed in my many conversations with groups of girls was the mixture of relief and surprise on their faces when they found their friends felt the same way. Over the three years I researched and wrote this book, I went through some pretty dramatic changes as a person. I suddenly became conscious of how often I avoided being directly angry with people, how much I held things in and acted cold or quiet while my resentment grew. When I had my fight with Jenny, I discovered what can happen when you share hidden feelings of jealousy and competition with a friend. I'm no expert, but for what it's worth, why not try this:
Get your closest friends together, or just one friend, and make time to talk. Get comfortable in a quiet space, however you choose to do that.
Talk about your fears of conflict. Ask each other, "When I make you angry or upset, do you tell me about it?" If not, talk about what you do instead of talking about it.
Talk about what happens when you hold your feelings inside or hide them. Is the buildup of emotion better than dealing immediately with what's happened? Explore specific situations. They can be resolved or ongoing, but think of a time when you feared speaking up. Was it when Joanna made that comment about your shorts, then said she was joking, but you felt pretty sure she wasn't? Was it when Leigh ignored you in front of the guy she liked? Try talking about it to each other and keeping the promise to respect each other's anger, to own the anger as a part of your friendship.
Look yourself in the eye and see the face of your own aggression. Talk about times you have felt angry, mean, competitive, or jealous. They can include feelings you've felt in your life or toward each other. Like my roommate Jenny and I, put it out on the table. Show your cards. Stop hiding and start owning your feelings, and see just how little damage they will wreak on your life once you do. See what a relief it is not to be perfect.
If some or all of your friends say they're afraid of losing each other or being ganged up on, make some promises. Say you won't do that. Say you won't use phones and computers as a substitute for real conversations. Say you'll be there no matter what. Say you'll work it out somehow. Say that you feel that way, too, if you do. This is nothing more than a commitment of friendship, something we're all used to making with each other. It's not that different from promising to keep a secret, or be best friends, or save a seat. We're good at this.
If you want to, talk about how girls are socialized to not be angry and aggressive and to not tell each other the truth. If you're into girl power, this is ground zero. This is taking your voices and your relationships back from the forces that would divide you from each other. When girls shut each other down, they seal the fate of their own socialization. They tell each other that anger is indeed wrong, that they do not deserve to feel it.
Comfort each other. Reassure your friends that their feelings are important, that conflicts bring you closer together, that you want each other to talk about stuff, because all of you know just how much it sucks when you have to keep it in and feel resentful and angry.
In a healthy immune system, the body can tell the difference between the cells it needs to survive and the foreign ones that threaten it. When our immune systems malfunction, our bodies mistake healthy cells for dangerous ones and start to attack. As a result, we actually weaken ourselves. Sadly, this is how many of us are taught to approach conflict: as a foreign event that threatens our very constitution. But that fear, so absurdly false, ends up breaking us down from the inside. It turns us against each other. It makes our fights much, much worse than they really have to be. To strengthen ourselves, we have to learn to recognize aggression as a healthy part of our relationships and lives, something that makes us stronger and more honest individuals.
After spending weeks talking about fears of confrontation with one group of girls, one student began speaking about anger that had been brewing toward a friend. "I decided to go up to that person and I really had to have a lot of courage to do that, and when I told the person, I was like, 'Oh, what if she's not going to be my friend anymore, and she's going to hate me? I'll lose one of my best friends.' And after I told her, she told me some of the things that I was kind of doing that were mean and annoying her. And we solved our problems and then we're like still best friends. It's not always what you think is going to happen."
BULLYING: WHEN YOU'RE IN REAL TROUBLE
"If you could go back in time and talk to yourself at the moment when you were most upset, what would you say?" This was the question I asked every woman and girl I spoke with who was bullied. I wouldn't have written this book if a small piece of me wasn't still eight years old, standing in the darkened community center theater listening to the fading giggles and footsteps running away from me. I guess I wanted to know what I could have done, what someone might have told me. So I asked.
1. get help.
Try not to do this alone. Find someone who can support you. Eleven-year-old Dina advised, "If something goes wrong and you can't stand up for yo
urself, then you should make friends with someone you can trust [who can] be on your side. If you don't have a friend, then go to your parent because parents should know what's going on. Maybe they've been through it so they'll know. They can call the school and say what's going on. You shouldn't just stand in the corner and try to deal with it by yourself."
Susie Johnston, also eleven, said she regrets not telling her parents how bad it was for her. "I was afraid to tell my parents because I was afraid they'd call the kids' parents and that would make things worse. I didn't tell them everything," she said. "And I just wish I had sometimes, because if I had maybe I could have gotten out of the school earlier." Once she switched to her new school, she made more friends than she'd ever thought possible.
Talk to a teacher. There may be someone who gets it, who understands how bad this is. Perhaps she'll talk with you after school or at lunchtime. Can she arrange for you to go to the art room or the library at lunch?
Haley said, "You should talk to friends who've either been through this or who are your very true friends, and that's very helpful." One of the worst things about getting bullied is that you feel so alone. Sometimes you feel like you're the only person in the world who's been through it. If you've read any part of this book, you know that's not true. But it does help to see someone in the flesh who gets it, who knows, and that, according to many girls, can make you feel a lot better.
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