TWO
Joining a New Tribe
My office at Laurel School, which resides in a majestic 1920s Tudor building, is known as the “Harry Potter office” because, like Harry’s bedroom at the Dursleys’, it’s tucked under a staircase. In the deep and narrow space beneath the school’s glorious main stairs there’s enough room for my desk where the ceiling slopes down, two chairs that face each other, and a small bench for my bag and papers. I cherish my cozy space and would never lobby for a different one. The best thing about my office: it’s in the center of the building but almost completely hidden. Not every girl who meets with me wants the whole school to know, and my location allows girls to slip discreetly down the stairs to find me. The second best thing about my office: it sits above a closet that houses the sound system for a gymnasium used by the elementary school and staffed by inventive teachers who occasionally play music during gym class. This means that the throbbing disco beat of “Car Wash” often comes up through my floor and lightens the mood when I’m meeting with students.
I was working at my desk—without a disco beat—when Joelle, a spritely, affable ninth grader, peeked around my door and asked, “Can I talk to you about something?” Adopting the hunched-over stance that lets me get up from my desk without banging my head, I said, “You bet” and moved from behind my desk to the chair where I sit when I’ve got a visitor. Joelle settled in across from me.
“What’s up?” I asked, eager to make it clear that she was welcome without an appointment.
“I think that it’s time for me to give up soccer, but I really can’t decide. I’ve played since I was five, but I’m not sure there’s enough time for it anymore. I’m really getting into speech and debate, and I’m doing okay with the high school workload, but I don’t want to fall behind. Practice is harder than it used to be so I’m coming home really tired, and between soccer and speech meets, my weekends are pretty much gone. I’m worrying so much about whether I should quit soccer that it’s messing with my sleep.”
I said, “It sounds like you’re ready to move on. What’s getting in the way of quitting soccer?”
As only a teenage girl can do, Joelle shot me a look that managed to communicate two things at once: “Are you actually serious that you don’t know what the issue is?” and “I can see that you’re trying to help, so I’ll forgive your ignorance.”
She said, “My closest friends are on the team.”
Instantly, I understood the “How could you not know?” element of the look she’d given me. If she quit soccer, she would be all but cut off from her friends, and that was reason enough to stay on the team. Having distanced herself from her close relationship with her parents, Joelle was already making terrific headway on the second developmental strand we’ll consider—the work of joining a new tribe. Before adolescence, most girls are happily grounded within their families and have their most intimate relationships with their parents and siblings. By the end of adolescence, we expect that girls will loosen their close ties to their families and strengthen their connections with their peers. Indeed, as girls progress along this developmental strand, they often come to count on their peer relationships as much as, if not more than, their relationships with their parents.
For some teenagers, joining a tribe turns out to be pretty easy. They find a couple of good friends who stay loyal from middle school through the end of high school or, like Joelle, they fall in with a group of girls who share their interests. But for most teens, joining a tribe raises some tough questions. Do I like my tribe? Does my tribe like me? Does my tribe represent who I am or want to be? Should I try to join a better tribe? What are the benefits and costs of belonging to my tribe? And what do I do about the tribe members I dislike?
I can’t overstate the significance of a teenager’s tribe membership. Teenagers aren’t just looking to make friends, they are replacing the family they’ve withdrawn from (or, at least, might barely acknowledge in public) with a tribe that they can feel proud to call their own. Failing this, they are left with the stomach-turning options of returning to the bosom of their family or navigating the world alone. Further, a girl’s membership in a tribe will shape—and be shaped by—her interests, her academic achievement, her social status, her sense of personal worth, and even her bent toward risk-taking behavior. Considered this way, Joelle’s dilemma makes sense. If she quits the team, she’s distanced from her tribe. On top of that, she’d be moving away from her tribe right at the start of high school—a stressful juncture that’s often eased by a secure sense of social belonging.
Given the critical importance of joining a new tribe, girls often become extremely upset when they’re at odds with their peers. Before considering how you can help your daughter manage social stress, let’s define two terms: conflict and bullying. Most of the friction between teens—and people of all other ages as well—constitutes conflict. Conflict is the common cold of human interaction: we don’t like it, we can’t cure it, and we just have to live with it. When humans spend time with other humans, we come into conflict with one another (and get colds). And as with the common cold, there are things we can do to relieve conflict and steps we can take to keep conflict from worsening.
Bullying, on the other hand, has more in common with pneumonia. Victims of bullying are exposed, over time, to negative actions by one or more peers and have difficulty defending themselves. Bullying is serious and potentially dangerous, and it needs to be treated aggressively. Just like pneumonia, bullying can cause real, lasting damage if ignored. But our culture’s preoccupation with bullying has led to its overdiagnosis. Too many unpleasant interactions among young people are now referred to as bullying, and misdiagnosis leads to improper treatment. Treating conflict as bullying is the equivalent of prescribing a full-blown course of antibiotics for the common cold. The treatment isn’t necessary, will not cure the cold, and creates new problems. Of course, treating bullying as if it were everyday conflict is the equivalent of misdiagnosing pneumonia as a common cold—left untreated, the situation can reach critical proportions.
Fortunately, conflict is much more common than bullying. But to adolescent girls, even peer conflict is deeply troubling, so most of this chapter centers on helping your daughter manage the stress and rivalry that often arise while gaining or maintaining membership in a tribe. The “When to Worry” section of this chapter addresses what you can do if your daughter becomes socially isolated, experiences bullying, or bullies others.
The Pull of Popular
Maya and I settled into a rhythm of meeting on Tuesday mornings. It wasn’t until February, after she’d been coming to see me for four months, that Maya raised a concern about Camille’s social life. Camille’s class schedule shifted after the winter break and she no longer shared a lunch period with Sara, who had been one of her closest friends since fourth grade. In the past few weeks, Maya heard Camille talk about her new friends, a group of popular girls, several of whom shared Camille’s lunch period and who, apparently, had invited her to join their table. Maya was worried about the shift in her daughter’s social life. Camille was clearly thrilled to be included by the popular girls, but Maya knew that last year, in sixth grade, the group had excluded classmates and invented snarky nicknames for some of the girls outside their circle.
Exasperated, Maya explained to me that on the Saturday night before our meeting, she and her daughter ended up in a fight because Raina, one of the new friends, sent a last-minute text inviting Camille over. Camille already had plans to go to a movie with her old friend Sara, but she begged Maya to help her make up an excuse to ditch Sara then drive her to Raina’s house. Maya refused to do either and insisted that Camille do the right thing by keeping her plans with Sara. Helpless to do otherwise, Camille glumly went to the movie with Sara while refusing to speak to Maya on the drive there or back.
Maya was appalled by her daughter’s willingness to ditch Sara. I saw her point but noted that Camille was hardly the first middle school girl to be seduced by the power of popularity. If we think about it in tribal terms, girls begin to value what popularity seems to promise: social cachet that guarantees a place in a desirable tribe. It’s no coincidence that the concept of popularity gains traction at the exact moment when girls pull away from their own families. The fear of being tribeless—distanced from one’s family yet without a peer group—cuts to the quick and leads to the idealization of popularity and the social connections that come with it. In fact, most of the social drama for which girls are known makes a great deal more sense when we appreciate that they are simply trying to secure membership in a tribe.
Researchers who study peer relationships have found that there are actually two different kinds of peer popularity. Sociometric popularity is the term used to describe well-liked teens with reputations for being kind and fun, while perceived popularity describes teens who hold a lot of social power but are disliked by many classmates. These two distinct groups emerge in studies that employ a simple peer-nomination method to examine social dynamics in school settings. Girls are given lists naming all the girls in their class (and boys are given lists naming all the boys) and asked to circle the names of the three girls they like the most, the three girls they like the least, and the girls who are considered to be popular. With this technique, researchers have found that many well-liked girls aren’t considered to be popular, and that many girls who are considered to be popular aren’t actually well liked. In fact, the disliked-but-popular girls are described by their classmates as domineering, aggressive, and stuck up, while the liked-but-unpopular girls are described as kind and trustworthy. A third group also emerges: well-liked girls who are identified by peers as being popular. They are amiable and faithful but differ from their liked-but-unpopular peers in that they aren’t easy to push around. In other words, the girls in the liked-and-popular group have found the relational sweet spot of being both friendly and assertive—a skill set girls often struggle to master and to which we’ll return soon.
So we know from the research that when teens use the term popular, they’re likely to be describing girls with perceived popularity—girls who use cruelty to gain social power. Adults would like to think that girls who are mean would be shunned by their peers, but unfortunately, the opposite tends to occur. A girl who allows herself to be mean enjoys many “friends” who are eager to stay on her good side, and she is often feared and indulged by her remaining classmates who have no interest in becoming her target. While meanness between girls sometimes involves name-calling or physical intimidation, girls are more likely to use potent but indirect forms of aggression, such as spreading rumors about another girl, excluding her, or poisoning her relationships with others. In short, mean adolescent girls maintain their power by threatening the tribal memberships their peers hold most dear.
Girls are rarely able to maintain social power indefinitely through meanness. By tenth grade, most girls feel secure enough in their friendship groups to ignore or isolate girls who continue to be nasty. Seventh graders, though, having just withdrawn from their home tribe, are particularly vulnerable. They are often willing to be mean—or put up with peers who are mean—in order to secure a new tribe. Not all seventh graders become preoccupied with securing social ties this way, but meanness generally seems to reach its peak around this time.
What’s with the seventh grade? Though we currently lack the science and technology to prove this, I suspect that, neurologically speaking, the “how to use and abuse social power” switch in the brain turns on some time around seventh grade, but the “let me think for a minute about the implications of using and abusing social power” switch doesn’t turn on until eighth grade or after. Put another way, the social dynamics of the seventh grade are perfectly captured by an old New Yorker cartoon featuring two politicians with the Capitol in the background. One says to the other, “But how do you know for sure that you’ve got power unless you abuse it?”
With these thoughts in mind, I routinely encourage parents to capitalize on opportunities to deconstruct the meaning of the term popular. As we know, when teens say that a girl is popular, they’re usually saying that she’s powerful. And when she’s powerful, it’s usually because she’s willing to be mean and everyone knows it. If your daughter mentions that a girl is popular, ask, “Is she popular or just powerful? Do kids like her, or are they scared of her?” Give your daughter a good reason to take popularity off of its pedestal.
You can also point out that when it comes to friendship, quality trumps quantity. Indeed, research finds that the happiest teens aren’t the ones who have the most friendships but the ones who have strong, supportive friendships, even if that means having a single terrific friend. Why? One explanation is that popularity brings hard work, regardless of how girls come by it. Girls who are at the center of large tribes have a lot of social connections to maintain and often run into loyalty conflicts. Consider the popular girl whose family will only let her invite two friends for a sleepover. She must think carefully about whom she’ll choose and make a plan to manage the hurt feelings of the friends she doesn’t invite. On top of that, heavy social demands can undermine what cultural anthropologists call “sustainable routines,” the predictable patterns of daily life that go a long way toward reducing stress. Popular girls have to make complex calculations before they decide whom they’ll ask to the movies or call when they’re upset. Girls with one or two good friends can lean on their small tribes and skip those calculations.
Maya and I talked it over and decided that she should put her energy behind supporting Camille’s ongoing friendship with Sara, even as Camille looked to become closer with the popular crowd. We worried that Camille might drop Sara—a loss that would be unfortunate in its own right and made that much worse if (more likely, when) her new friendships turned sour. As soon as an opportunity presented itself, Maya planned to say, “I can tell that you’re psyched about your new friends, but you seem really tense on the weekends while you wait to hear from them. Sara may not be as fun as the girls you’re getting to know, but you seemed more relaxed when you were spending time with her. Do you want to ask her to come over?” We didn’t bank on Camille dumping the popular girls and rushing back to Sara but trusted that it would be useful for Maya to offer a little values clarification: having one good old friend usually beats having many powerful new friends.
Though Maya was strongly tempted to do so, I counseled her against talking with Camille about her new crowd’s bad reputation. It is tempting to pan peers who have been unkind, but it’s best to remember that girls change quickly during the teenage years. I know parents who regret having bad-mouthed a girl who went on to develop a close, happy friendship with their daughter, so if you feel you must criticize your daughter’s friends—and sometimes you must—use your words and your tone to communicate that the girls are in a tricky situation, not that they are bad people. When we next met, Maya told me that she decided to weigh in on Camille’s new friendships while she and Camille were watching a television show in which girls talked behind one another’s backs. Without expecting a response, Maya said, “I can still remember the girls at my school who tried to fit in by pointing out who didn’t fit in. It’s not the most mature behavior, and I’m impressed that it’s not your style.” With her comment, Maya aimed to set a high bar for Camille’s behavior without directly criticizing Camille’s popular friends.
Tribal Warfare
It didn’t take long for Sara to figure out that Camille was neglecting her in order to spend time with her new friends. Hurt and insulted, Sara told several of their classmates that Camille had struggled with bedwetting late into third grade (this was true but shared in confidence). Camille found out about the gossip and referred to Sara as a “bitch” while pencil-texting—writing back and forth in a notebook—with one of her new friends during study hall. The study hall monitor saw the slur, confiscated the notebook, and called home to Maya. When Maya confronted Camille about the information from school, Camille defensively admitted what she had done but insisted that Sara had started it by telling everyone about her bedwetting.
Girls can be really punishing when a tribe member has been disloyal. Sara was understandably hurt but acted on her feelings in unacceptable ways and inspired Camille to do the same. There’s no excuse for either girl’s behavior, but there’s an explanation: as a culture, we do a terrible job of helping girls figure out what to do when they are mad. As far as girls know, they can either be a total doormat—think Cinderella—or flat-out cruel like Cinderella’s stepsisters. We rarely help girls master assertion—the art of standing up for oneself while respecting the rights of others. We send our daughters the message that “good girls” are nice all the time, and then we’re somehow surprised when girls act out in unacceptable ways. Adult women struggle with how to stand up for themselves without being called “pushy,” “bossy,” or worse. If adults struggle with it, you can bet that girls do, too.
Teaching your daughter to be assertive takes time. The first step involves acknowledging and validating her negative feelings. Maya called me after her unsuccessful effort to get Camille to own her bad behavior. We agreed that Camille’s actions were out of line, but I encouraged Maya to help Camille to separate what she was thinking and feeling from how she chose to act on her thoughts and feelings. Later that evening, Maya reopened the conversation about what had happened at school by saying, “I know that Sara really upset you—what she did would make anyone feel embarrassed and mad. You have a right to those feelings, but you can’t act on them in hurtful ways.” Teenagers benefit when adults distinguish thinking and feeling from doing because everyone has thoughts and feelings that are unpleasant. They’re a fact of life and, as we’ll see in chapter 3, “Harnessing Emotions,” psychological discomfort can help girls learn and grow. But what we think and feel should inform, not dictate, what we do.
Had Camille sought Maya’s help before she had started calling Sara names, they might have worked together to craft a dispassionate, assertive statement that Camille could say (or text) to Sara: “I’m hurt that you shared my personal problems at school. I get that you might be angry with me but you could’ve let me know in a different way.” That sounds fine, but few adults—and fewer teenagers—would actually say something like that. So be aware that even if your daughter doesn’t take your advice, or if she asks for it too late to be heeded, girls still benefit when adults suggest measured alternatives to impulsive action. Most parents find themselves building their daughter’s assertiveness skills by Monday morning quarterbacking situations that could have been better handled. (Bear in mind that you’ll only have a chance at this kind of coaching if you’ve shown your daughter that you’ll validate her feelings while keeping negative judgment to a minimum.) Talking about examples of mature, assertive behavior can help girls tone down their future reactions or come up with their own options for an appropriate response.
Even if you don’t hear from your daughter about her own struggles with aggressive behavior, you’re likely to hear about unkindness in her class. These conversations can prove to be fertile ground for helping her build assertiveness skills. If your daughter tells you that a group at school has started to exclude one of its members, you could say, “They may have a reason for not wanting to hang out with her like they used to, but they need to find a nicer way of letting her know that they’ve got an issue. What would you do if you were in their shoes?”
Be careful about how often you take advantage of these opportunities; girls clam up around adults who try to turn almost every conversation into a teachable moment. Nodding and asking genuine questions about your daughter’s view of the situation can also go a long way toward helping her develop her thinking about how she and her peers should treat one another. Long story short, the success of all of your conversations with your teenage daughter will depend as much on what you don’t say as it does on what you do say. The more you bite your tongue, the more she may be willing to share and the more impact your advice will have when you give it.
Securing a friendship group isn’t easy for girls who find themselves jockeying for social power and juggling loyalties to old and new friends. And once girls are embedded within their tribes they often face new challenges as they move along this developmental strand. They might find themselves managing the politics of the tribes they ultimately join, engaging in risky behavior to maintain their social ties, or feeling stressed by outsized obligations to care for needy friends. We’ll consider these challenges next.
Frenemies
The linguist Michael Adams refers to slang as “the people’s poetry,” and it’s hard to deny the poetry of the slang term frenemy. Teens use this word to capture a variety of conflicted relationships, including that with a peer who is lots of fun except when she’s being completely rotten. Unfortunately, the teenage social landscape isn’t simply comprised of nice girls and mean girls. Those of us who spend time with teenagers know that girls who are sometimes mean can be extremely friendly—sharing intimate secrets or being utterly selfless—when they’re not being unkind. This creates a dizzying situation for any girl who has a frenemy and can make some girls (and their parents) long for sincere enemies.
If your daughter has a frenemy, you probably won’t hear much about the friendship when things are going well. But when your daughter’s frenemy turns on her, you might learn about behavior that is surprisingly nasty. For instance, I worked with a family in my practice whose eighth-grade daughter got into trouble at school over a cheating incident. She explained to her parents that a classmate had copied answers from her social studies quiz and confirmed that this was the same classmate who had recently caused a lot of drama by taking and then posting an embarrassing photo of the girl. Feeling angry and protective, my clients were ready to call the classmate’s parents when their daughter begged them not to. She explained that she and her classmate were actually really good friends and showed her boggled parents weeks of lighthearted texts that had recently passed between them.
You might suspect that your daughter has a frenemy if you find yourself stuck in a repeating cycle where your daughter complains about a peer’s antics, you encourage her to avoid that peer, things quiet down for a while, and then you hear new complaints about what the peer has done. Most parents in this situation expect that their daughter will figure out that she should stay away from the source of her suffering and are surprised when she’s soon back to being as close with her frenemy as ever. Doing more of what already isn’t working—in this case, encouraging a girl to avoid her frenemy—tends to be a failing parenting strategy. If you find yourself in this spot, you can support your daughter by asking more about both the hot and cold currents of the frenemyship. With a fuller sense of the relationship, you are in a position to say useful things such as, “It’s really up to you whether you keep hanging out with her. If you do, be careful when she’s being nice because you know that it may not last.” Or, “We love you and hate seeing you put yourself in a position where you keep getting hurt.” Or, “It sounds like she can be fun—I see why you guys hang out so much. But real friends don’t do such mean stuff to each other.”
Though it might feel as if you’re stating the obvious, girls don’t always have a way to know that their frenemy’s behavior is completely inappropriate, especially if other girls put up with it and the frenemy herself is totally unapologetic. Teens appreciate it when parents confirm that they have a right to expect that their friends will generally be kind. And though there are occasional frenemyships between girls and boys, girls are most likely to have—and to talk with their parents about—female frenemies.
It’s unrealistic for parents to try to prevent an adolescent friendship given that they don’t actually have the power to monitor and control every aspect of a teenager’s social life. And, as tricky as a frenemy can be, it may be even trickier for girls to try to break off the friendship. Adolescent tribes are held together by complex social webs, and a girl who cuts herself off from one peer may lose several friendships, or an entire tribe, in the bargain. Often, girls decide to put up with one difficult peer in order to keep peace in their tribe. It shouldn’t be this way, but it is.
You can do a lot to help your daughter navigate a delicate situation by recognizing that she may not have an easy way out of a complicated friendship. Remember, teens don’t operate like adults. If we decide that we want to end a friendship, we can stop making lunch dates, hope not to run into our old friend at the grocery store, and apologize for being “so darn busy that it’s hard to get together” when we do. Teens see one another at school every day, whether they want to or not. If she’ll let you, strategize with your daughter about how she can politely maintain a safe distance from her frenemy, even if they’re in the same social circle.
What if you have reason to think that your own daughter mistreats her friends? One option would be to help your daughter understand that her friends won’t always go along with her behavior. If your daughter likes to tease her friends (or do other things along those lines) go ahead and say, “Honey, we know you think your teasing is funny, but we’re guessing your friends don’t think so. They might not make a big deal out of it now, but don’t be surprised if they start to pull back.”
If necessary, you can also point out that she’s having fun at the expense of her friends. When teens have fun by being mean, they are engaging in conduct that’s a remnant of early childhood. Three-year-olds specialize in having “mean fun”—gleefully doing things that they know will annoy their parents—but most children age out of this type of low-grade sadism. Given that teenagers are parting with childhood and driven by the wish to be seen as mature, parents can sometimes change behavior by pointing out its immaturity. For instance, you could say, “We know that you like to tease your friends—it may seem funny now, but it probably won’t fly in high school.” Be cautious when calling a teenager’s behavior immature. Doing so can be an effective way to help girls grow up, but it can also be received as a powerful insult. There’s no upside in insulting teens (or anyone else, for that matter), so be sure you’re coming from a warm and loving place if you try this approach.
If Your Tribe Jumped Off a Bridge…
Teenagers, even really mature and thoughtful ones, sometimes do dumb things. And the chance that your teenager will do something dumb increases when she’s with her friends. You may have suspected as much—perhaps you even remember how your own judgment evaporated around your teenage friends—and psychologists Margo Gardner and Laurence Steinberg (a leading expert in all things teenager) came up with a clever way to demonstrate this phenomenon in a research lab. They compared how young teens (ages thirteen to sixteen), young adults (ages eighteen to twenty-two), and adults over the age of twenty-four played a video game that gives points for risky driving and docks points for being overly cautious or having a collision. Everyone in the study played the video game under one of two conditions: some played alone, while others played in front of age-mates.
The study found that, across all ages, the subjects took roughly the same number of risks when they were alone. Here’s where things got interesting. With peers watching, older adults played the video game the same way they did when alone, the late teen/young adult group became quite a bit more risky when with peers than when alone, and the young teens were twice as risky when their peers watched them play. The bottom line? Compared to adults, teens are highly likely to throw caution to the wind when they are with their friends.
In technical terms, once puberty arrives, the brain’s socio-emotional network can readily outmatch its sensible cognitive control system. At the neurological level, teenagers, more than adults or children, experience social acceptance as highly rewarding. Finding themselves in emotionally charged situations with social rewards—such as when a popular peer suggests that it would be fun to smoke pot—can cause teenagers to set aside their good thinking and let their impulses take over. As Laurence Steinberg puts it, “In adolescence, then, more might not only be merrier—more may also be riskier.”
If anything keeps parents of teenagers up at night, it’s fears about safety. But in the attempt to keep their daughters safe, some parents go to extremes that don’t account for the importance of being cool in the eyes of the tribe and may actually place girls in greater danger. At one end, we find parents who think they can scare their daughter safe by threatening terrible punishments. While it may make the parents feel better to tell their daughter she’ll be shipped off to military school if she even thinks about tasting beer, such threats can backfire when good teenagers find themselves in bad situations. Teens often have fluid weekend plans, and a girl who sets out for a Saturday night thinking she’s going to a supervised get-together might find herself at a dicey party. If the party is out of control, or the girl just has a bad feeling about it, she will have to decide which of the following poses the greater threat: riding out the party to see where it goes or asking her parents to come get her. What girl would elect to humiliate herself in front of her tribe by inviting an enraged parent to yank her from the party? Of course, none of us would want our daughter to decide that it’s a better bet to stay at the party than call us for help.
At the other extreme, we find parents who aim to keep their daughter safe by becoming her best friend and perhaps even serving alcohol to minors while hosting parties at their home. Though I also disagree with this parenting choice, I understand what usually drives it. Party parents figure that if their daughter is going to do risky things when with her friends, she’ll be safer if she and her friends do those risky things right under their noses. But party parents rob their daughter of one of the best protections she has: the ability to blame her good behavior on them.
I think that the safest girls are the ones who can point to their parents’ “crazy rules” to avoid risky behavior. If a friend offers marijuana, a girl should be able to say, “I want to smoke with you, but my mom has a nose like a bloodhound. If she smells weed on me when I get home, she’ll throw me in rehab.” You may not have a bloodhound’s nose, you may have never discussed your marijuana policies with your daughter, and you may not even care if she tries it. But if you spent last weekend dancing on the tables with your daughter’s friends, she cannot plausibly use this, or any other threatening story, to get out of a bad spot while saving face with her tribe. You may have mixed feelings about a safety strategy that involves fabricated tales of your Draconian policies, but remember that it’s better for your daughter to be safe than for her friends to think you’re cool. As the video game study shows, teens get riskier, not safer, around their friends. And it’s just not realistic to expect a teen who has been offered marijuana to say, “Why thank you, but I’ll have to pass. Marijuana isn’t legal in our state, and even if it were, I’m a minor.”
You can make it possible for your daughter to blame her good behavior on you by being warm and accessible with her in the privacy of your home and utterly grown-up (even to the point of being remote) when her friends are around. Feel free to be as kind and hospitable as your daughter can stand when her friends are around, but stay firmly in your role of boring middle-aged parent so that she can paint you as the bad guy when needed. Teens sometimes push for their parents to lighten up, but they actually count on us to act like adults. In fact, I’ve learned that girls find it strange when parents act like teenagers from occasional conversations at my private practice office that go like this:
Girl: “So, Tanya’s mom said that she’d buy beer for us this weekend.”
Me: “Is that cool, or is it kinda weird?”
Girl: “It’s weird. My mom isn’t as fun as Tanya’s, but at least she doesn’t do stuff like that.”
In addition to being adult enough that your daughter can always blame her good behavior on you, be sure to talk with her about the fact that she might find herself in a bad situation and develop an agreement that you will retrieve her—no questions asked—from any circumstance at any time. She should expect to have a long conversation with you over breakfast about how she found herself at a strange party fifteen miles from home, but make it clear to her that you will never give her a reason to regret asking for your help. Consider this: some parents even arrange a code with their daughter so that if she calls to say “I forgot to turn off my flatiron” they know that she wants to be rescued and they start yelling into the phone. The girl can hold the phone away from her ear, make faces while her friends listen to the rant, and apologize that she has to go home because her mom has gone berserk. You’ll do your best parenting when you recognize your daughter’s wish to side with her tribe, even if she’s choosing not to join in with what they’re doing.
When Tribes Need Elders
For several months I had an after-school appointment in my private practice with Lana, a smart, no-nonsense eleventh grader who came to me for support during her parents’ contentious divorce. On a rainy Thursday, she stretched her legs across my couch and used one smooth motion to pull an elastic band from her wrist and whip her curly hair into a topknot. Then she said, “What we talk about is confidential, right?” to which I gave my standard reply: “Of course, unless we have reason to be concerned about your safety or worry that you might be dangerous to someone else.”
She went on to share that her friend, Cassie, had started cutting, shown Lana several cuts on her arms, and asked Lana to keep the cuts a secret. Lana felt torn. She didn’t want to break Cassie’s trust, but she was losing sleep over concerns that Cassie might continue to hurt herself. On top of that, she felt obliged to keep a close eye on Cassie when what she really wanted was a break from their stressful friendship.
Few girls will reach adulthood without knowing about the self-destructive behavior of a friend or classmate. Especially as they age, girls often ask their friends to keep their dangerous behavior a secret, but doing so puts the secret keeper in a terrible position. Teenage girls share a powerful sense of loyalty to their tribe members and are reluctant to go behind one another’s backs, as they consider it, even to seek the help of adults. At the same time, they worry intensely about one another and may try to help a friend with problems far beyond what teenagers can manage. Actually, girls sometimes try to help one another with problems that even adults can’t manage, unless that adult happens to be trained in a mental health field. I rush to point this out to girls who seem to feel that they’re failing their friend by bringing her problem my way.
When girls tell me that they have a friend who is cutting, drinking excessively, using drugs, suicidal, suffering from an eating disorder, or engaging in any other type of dangerous behavior, I start by reassuring them that they were wise to let me know, and that’s what I did with Lana. I said, “You’re right to be worried, and you’re right that Cassie needs more help than you can give—she’s lucky to have you looking out for her.” Lana’s shoulders relaxed, but her face remained serious. She knew that we still had work to do.
Next, we strategized about how Lana could make sure that Cassie’s parents—the only people who could get Cassie the help she needed—knew what was happening. Lana and I agreed that she could return to Cassie and say something such as, “I’m glad you told me you were cutting. Clearly, part of you is worried about it and I want to stick up for that part of you. Your parents need to know so that they can get you the help you deserve. What’s the best way to tell them?” We agreed that Lana could suggest two options, namely that Cassie could tell her parents and ask them to confirm to Lana that they’d been told, or Cassie could go with Lana to tell a trusted adult at school and ask that adult to inform Cassie’s parents. Not surprisingly, Lana suspected that Cassie would reject both of those options. If that happened, I encouraged her to say, “An adult needs to know what’s going on. If you don’t want to tell anyone, then I need to. I know you’ll be mad, but I care more about your safety than about having you be happy with me all of the time.”
It’s important to remember that teenagers form tribes with the express purpose of creating a group that doesn’t include adults, so going outside of their group to get help from an adult—even for life-threatening behavior—can feel like a huge betrayal. If your daughter comes to you about a friend’s problems, make a point of letting her know she’s made the right call. If you’re really worried about your daughter’s friend, you might be compelled to make what I consider to be the wrong call: the one where you immediately dial the parents of your daughter’s friend, even if your own daughter doesn’t want you to. When your daughter comes to you for help, supporting her should be your priority. Going around your daughter to act on something that she has told you in confidence will damage her willingness to trust you with sensitive information and may keep her from coming to you for help, guidance, or a reality check in the future. Barring immediate life-or-death concerns, reassure your daughter that she’s not responsible for her friend’s care and that the kindest thing she can do will be to connect her friend with an adult who can help.
I learned about the importance of respecting girls’ loyalty to one another, even when addressing dangerous behavior, while conducting research on preventing eating disorders. Traditionally, eating disorder prevention programs have focused on helping girls to manage stress, feel good about their bodies, or become critical consumers of media imagery. In general, these programs are more effective at changing what girls know about stress, body image, and the media than they are at changing how they care for their own bodies. This is a frightening reality given that eating disorders often go undetected by adults until they are severe, so my colleagues and I designed a program to encourage girls to tell an adult if they saw the early signs of an eating disorder in one of their friends.
Before testing the program with eighth and ninth graders, we met with a focus group of tenth graders at Laurel School to get feedback on the study design. After we described the plan for the study, the tenth-grade girls told us that they would be open to telling an adult if a friend showed signs of an eating disorder, except for one thing: they didn’t want to be seen as disloyal. They were fiercely committed to supporting one another and keeping one another’s secrets, and they worried that telling an adult about a troubling change in a peer’s eating would be a social transgression. With help from the tenth graders, we came up with a solution. We would give girls the option of leaving unsigned notes detailing their concerns for trusted adults at Laurel School (e.g., “Maggie has skipped lunch for the past week”). From there, the adults would find an opportunity to observe what the peers shared and—if appropriate—broach the concern with the girl and her family without mentioning the tip-off.
Ultimately, we developed a successful program that educated girls about the dangers of eating disorders and the importance of early intervention while emphasizing the anonymous mechanism by which girls could share concerns about their friends. Looking back, I’m sure that we owe the success of our approach to the candid feedback from our tenth-grade focus group. From them we learned that girls are much more likely to seek help for a suffering friend if they can count on adults to respect their tribal loyalties.
Even when girls do get help for serious problems, things don’t always get better right away. In our next session, Lana told me that Cassie had actually agreed that she needed more support than Lana could provide and, with Lana in tow, told the school counselor about her cutting. Cassie later told Lana that the counselor had referred her to a therapist in their community. Lana was relieved that her friend was getting professional help but found that her relationship with Cassie was just as stressful as before. Two or three nights a week she texted Lana to say that she was feeling very upset and on the verge of cutting. Lana had no idea how to respond. She was incredibly worried about Cassie, ill-equipped to counsel her, and resentful about losing homework time because she was feeling upset or busily trying to care for her friend.
We want girls to call on one another for support, and usually they do a great job of it. In other words, the help they provide their tribe members usually has a positive effect. For Cassie, though, Lana’s efforts didn’t help—the problem was bigger than the two of them. Should your daughter find herself in Lana’s spot, support her as she draws some boundaries in her relationship with a needy friend.
Here’s what I said to Lana when she told me about the recent texts: “Cassie’s dark feelings are like a haunted house that she carries around inside her. When she’s drawn to her haunted house, she, understandably, doesn’t want to go in alone. That’s when she sends you a text that gets you almost as upset as she is. It’s not your job to go into Cassie’s haunted house with her—that’s her therapist’s job. The next time Cassie sends you a text like that, encourage her to share her painful feelings with her therapist. If that’s not working, we can think together about how you, or Cassie, can let her parents know that Cassie’s troubles outmatch the professional support she’s getting right now.”
Girls will often set aside their own wishes to help a needy friend. But if the help doesn’t solve the problem, stand ready to offer your daughter some kind, assertive language she can use to protect herself while pointing her friend toward the right resources. A few weeks later, Lana told me that our approach had worked. When Cassie next sent a scary text, Lana asked her if she was sharing her difficult feelings with her therapist. She then sought Cassie out at school the next day to talk about an upcoming history test, intentionally not mentioning the texts from the night before. To Lana’s relief, an unspoken agreement developed between them. They were still friends, but Lana stopped being the recipient of Cassie’s awful feelings.
For the most part, the work of joining a new tribe today looks a lot like it did back when we were teenagers. But Lana and Cassie’s relationship reflects the one huge exception to this rule: your daughter will advance along this developmental strand while cultivating her social life on multiple channels. Today’s girl must build and maintain her friendships while connecting in both real and virtual ways.
Social (Media) Skills
Most parents are stupefied by how attached girls become to their phones. The best explanation I’ve heard for this comes from danah boyd,* an activist and scholar who studies the role of technology in teens’ social lives. In her words, “Teens aren’t addicted to social media. They’re addicted to each other.” If you think about it, we were also addicted to each other as teenagers, but all we had was the Pliocene-era technology of our times: the Trimline phone. Every night, I turned myself into a one-girl fire hazard by using a ridiculously long phone cord to pull the family phone into my bedroom—strapping doorways closed and blocking the hallway in the process. And what did I do on the phone? Usually, not much. I’m sure I’m not the only one who sometimes held the phone to my ear, hardly talking, while doing homework “with” the person on the other end of the line. I even remember watching television while on the phone with a friend who watched the same show at her house, sometimes commenting on what we saw, but mostly just quietly enjoying each other’s company. For most of us, being on the phone with our friends was a second choice—what we really wanted to do was hang out together. And when we could, we did.
When we compare the experience of today’s teenager with our own, two things are starkly different. First, they want to be connected, just as we did, but today’s technology allows for the kind of easy, pervasive communication that we could have only dreamed of while dozing off on our corded phones. Second, many of today’s teens spend fewer long afternoons hanging out together than we did. Families who wish to give their children every opportunity (and have the resources to do so) often keep their kids tightly booked. Girls who are doing ungodly amounts of homework, playing three sports, developing as a musician, or engaged in some other demanding combination of activities, have little downtime. We already know that too much unsupervised time can lead to trouble for teenagers, but some girls are actually so busy that it’s hard to find unstructured time with their friends.
At its best, digital technology gives teens a way to build and maintain their friendships even when they can’t be together in person. At its worst, digital technology undermines a teen’s capacity to cultivate meaningful in-person connections and actually amplifies the negative aspects of their relationships. New research finds that, when it comes to teens’ social lives, what happens online reflects what happens in real life. Girls who enjoy happy, supportive friendships in real life use their digital communications to build those friendships, and girls who are having trouble getting along in person also have trouble getting along online. Put simply, the online environment brings the possibility of tribal activity, good or bad, to every minute of a girl’s day.
Even for girls who have supportive on- and off-line relationships, research shows that intense use of digital technology can impair young girls’ social skills and interfere with their healthy, face-to-face relationships. Not surprisingly, healthy relationships depend on complex and subtle social skills that are best learned in the context of real, not virtual, interactions. For this reason, I encourage parents to ban technology (including their own) from the places where humans learn and practice social skills. This includes the dinner table, your designated family nights, and perhaps even short car rides. And this is where the many demands on girls’ time can be a good thing as girls benefit from participating in activities that suspend phone use while requiring interpersonal interaction.
We all know that digital communication can bring out the worst in how humans relate to one another. Talk with your daughter about unkind online behavior and make it clear that rules for virtual social behavior are the same as the rules for social behavior in the real world: she doesn’t have to like everybody, but she should never conduct herself in ways that are less than polite. How much you need to supervise your daughter’s social media activity will depend a lot on your daughter. Some girls use social media to stay in touch with good friends and would instinctively avoid conflict if they saw it online. Other girls interact with as many peers as possible online and can easily find themselves caught up in unpleasant social drama.
If your daughter isn’t yet texting or interacting online, wait until she really wants a phone or social media accounts and make your right to supervise her activity a condition of gaining access to the digital world. Go with the begin-strict-then-loosen-up approach (known by teachers as “Don’t smile till December”) and start with frequent monitoring. It’s always easier to relax your rules than to create new ones when things already feel out of control. And remember that supervising your daughter’s digital activity isn’t all about busting bad behavior. You can use what you notice while monitoring to comment on how teens talk to one another and to discuss what should, and shouldn’t, be shared digitally. If you know that your daughter is being sarcastic in her texts but aren’t sure her friends can tell, gently point that out. Teenagers are learning what it means to be a friend both in person and online. So long as you don’t overdo it, you may be able to offer some feedback and guidance.
If your daughter already has a phone and social media accounts, you might implement some rules if you haven’t already. To do so, you’ll need to say something like, “I know that I’ve given you total privacy with your phone and social media until now, but I’m thinking that was a mistake. If the whole world can know what you’re doing digitally, I should have access too. So I’m going to start checking your phone and social media accounts from time to time.” Should your daughter balk (a likely response), there are a couple of routes to consider. If you’re paying for her phone, her computer, and her online access, you can stick to your guns and decide that funding her technology use means you can monitor it. Alternately, you can talk with your daughter about who can monitor her digital activity. I know of one insightful thirteen-year-old who explained, “It’s not that I’m doing anything bad on my phone. We mostly just talk about who has crushes on who. When my friends come over, it’s really weird if my mom and dad know all that.” She and her parents came up with the solution of having her levelheaded seventeen-year-old cousin keep an eye on her digital activity. The thirteen-year-old didn’t care if her cousin knew about the crushes in her tribe.
Most parents get to a point where it stops making sense to keep close tabs on their daughter’s phone. If you are there, or when you get there, you can say, “If I hear that you are being unkind or inappropriate online, I’ll let you know and we’re going to figure out what to do. And remember that deleting information from your accounts doesn’t mean it’s gone—it’s still out there somewhere.” So long as you are financing your daughter’s technology use, you can make the case to regulate her online activity. That said, we do well to remember that our parents had almost no idea how we acted with our friends. We made mistakes and we learned from them. For better or worse, we are in the first generation of parents who have detailed access to how our teens interact with one another. This means that we have a useful record of interactions that go poorly, but it can also mean that we have too much access to what should be private communications among teenagers.
When parents monitor their daughter’s online activities, they often do so in an effort to keep her from making a permanent record of unseemly behavior. This is a valid rationale and one that we’ll delve into in chapter 5, “Planning for the Future.” As you consider the question of how much to monitor your daughter’s social interactions online, it may help to ask yourself, “Am I doing this because I truly worry that she might do terrible things online, or am I doing this simply because I can?”
Joining a New Tribe: When to Worry
There are three conditions regarding your daughter’s social life that should cause you to worry: if your daughter has no tribe, if your daughter is a victim of bullying, or if your daughter bullies her peers.
Social Isolation
A girl doesn’t need more than one good buddy, but she’s in trouble if she doesn’t even have that. Studies of teens who become socially isolated haven’t teased out whether the isolation causes or is caused by feelings of depression and low self-worth, but being alone and feeling terrible are closely linked in adolescence. And research finds that having a close relationship with one’s parents, or doing well at school, can’t make up for the harm of being socially isolated. Loneliness should be taken seriously. The longer a girl goes without a tribe, the worse she will feel and the harder it will be for her to build new friendships.
Further, girls who are friendless become prime targets for bullying. As we know, conflict comes with human interaction, but I have watched girls withstand a surprising amount of friction with their peers when they have comrades who will defend them or reassure them that they are loved, even if not by everyone. Girls without friends face the social slings and arrows of adolescence without any armor to protect them. Run-ins that are painful for well-connected teens become unbearable for girls with no one on their side.
Though some meanness comes with the territory in any large group of teenagers, comparatively few adolescents are directly involved, either as the culprit or victim, in true bullying situations where one person is repeatedly mistreated and unable to defend herself. But most teens are aware that bullying occurs, and research consistently demonstrates that bystanders who witness bullying are the individuals best equipped to prevent it. Sadly, research also shows that bystanders tend to ignore or avoid their isolated peers.
If your daughter becomes socially isolated, take aggressive measures to help her connect with a tribe. For starters, you might ask trusted adults at your daughter’s school for insights about her social situation. Teachers and administrators know more about the dynamics that unfold between students than anyone. See if there are changes that you or your daughter could make to improve her prospects and ask if there is anything the school can do to connect her with potential friends. I’ve seen thoughtful teachers assign seating and work groups to create social openings for girls who need them.
Find summer and after-school opportunities that might help your daughter connect with new peers. Girls without friends can become socially pigeonholed at school and have few opportunities to try out the interpersonal skills needed to spark new connections. Happily, when girls are given a blank slate to build new friendships (such as going to a summer camp), they often return to school feeling more confident about themselves and enjoy more social success than before. If your daughter struggles to connect to her peers no matter what you do, talk with your pediatrician or family doctor about a referral to a seasoned psychotherapist. Your daughter is suffering. She needs support and may benefit from having a neutral third party who can help her figure out what keeps her from finding a tribe.
Being Bullied
One morning in early December, I received a phone call from a mother who was looking for help for her eighth-grade daughter. Over the phone, the mom explained she had just learned that Lucy was being bullied at their local parochial school. The bullying came to light when the school nurse called home to share that Lucy usually came to her office complaining of headaches on gym days and appeared to have a panic attack in response to the suggestion that she go to class despite not feeling well. Lucy’s mother mentioned the call when her daughter came home that afternoon. To her mother’s surprise, Lucy fell apart and described, with heaving sobs, what was happening at school. Not knowing what to do next, Lucy’s mom called me.
Lucy didn’t want to meet with me alone but was willing to come to my practice with her parents. At our first appointment, she sat next to her mom on the couch while her dad pulled my extra chair close to be near her on the other side. Lucy—a pretty and somewhat overweight eighth grader—was polite but very tense. Clearly, she felt like a specimen waiting to be examined under my microscope. Hoping to put her at ease, I began.
“Lucy, it sounds like things have been really hard at school—your mom told me over the phone that you’ve been dealing with some rough treatment for a long time. What would be best? Do you want me to ask questions, do you want to share what it would be helpful for me to know, or do you want your folks to tell me what you’ve told them?”
Quietly, but visibly relieved to have options, she said, “They can tell you.”
Together—sometimes finishing each other’s sentences—her parents recounted what their daughter had shared. Before and after gym class, Lucy was often cornered in the locker room by three of her eighth-grade classmates. They teased her about her weight and cruelly joked within earshot about how hard it must be for some girls to find exercise clothes big enough to fit. Once, they stole her bra while she showered and told the boys in their class that she was not wearing a bra later on that day. The boys gladly joined in on the teasing and carried on loudly for weeks afterward about the fact that Lucy was “letting it all hang out.” The rest of her classmates knew what was going on but remained silent. Lucy’s parents imagined that they were in no rush to paint targets on their own backs.
Girls can be incredibly cruel to one another, but that doesn’t mean they have the market cornered on bullying. Lucy discovered what research demonstrates: boys bully girls (while girls rarely bully boys), and the mistaken belief that girls will only be bullied by other girls can keep adults from getting a clear picture of some bullying situations.
The effects of bullying can be lasting and profound. We have long known that the trauma of child abuse can leave psychological scars that endure into adulthood; new research also suggests that verbal harassment from peers can make a lasting imprint on the corpus callosum, the part of the brain that coordinates the functioning of the brain’s left and right hemispheres. As uncomfortable as it was for Lucy to be in my office, I welcomed the opportunity to address the emotionally toxic treatment she’d suffered and to help her parents protect her from further harassment.
If you think that your daughter is being bullied, you must step in. Carefully. Start by reaching out to adults at your daughter’s school to see if they have any helpful information for you. Though you may feel very upset, be as calm as you can when sharing your concerns with teachers and administrators. Bullying situations can be highly volatile for schools, all the more so as some states have laws holding them accountable if bullying occurs among students. The adults at your daughter’s school are more likely to take you and your concerns seriously, and be less defensive, if your approach isn’t confrontational. I encouraged Lucy’s parents to make notes on what she told them and to begin by sharing their information with the person most likely to be able to evaluate the situation directly—for them, a kind and earnest gym teacher. We agreed that they would move up the chain of command if the gym teacher was unhelpful or if she lacked the authority to address their concerns.
Lucy’s father wondered if he should also contact the parents of the students who were mistreating Lucy. I strongly encouraged him to hold off and pointed out that his wish to stand up for his daughter grew out of a protective instinct shared by most parents. Regardless of what was actually happening in the locker room, the parents of the teens who were harassing Lucy were likely to stick up for their kids, which would only make matters worse. In my experience, it’s rarely a good idea to tackle bullying by calling other kids’ parents because some girls tell their parents they are being mistreated at school without owning up to the fact that they dish out more than their share of misery. You would rather find out from your daughter’s teacher that she gives as good as she gets than discover this by calling an alleged bully’s parents.
As a side note, I also discourage parents from calling one another about girls who are in conflict. I have never seen situations made better by such calls, and they are often made worse. For example, a parent who wonders why her daughter has been dropped by a longtime friend might feel compelled to call the friend’s mom to inquire. Parents on the receiving end of such calls are unlikely to offer good information about what’s happening (assuming, of course, that they even know) and making the call stands to harm the social reputation of the girl who has been dropped. If you’re worrying about your daughter’s friendships, support her efforts to repair her relationships or build new ones, or seek advice from a neutral third party such as a teacher or coach who might have insight into a tricky social dynamic. Should another parent call you about a friendship issue, feel free to say, “Thanks so much for letting me know. I am really confident that the girls will find a way to come to their own resolution.”
Having met with Lucy’s dad, the gym teacher immediately notified the high school principal about what she’d learned. After meeting with Lucy and her parents to hear the details firsthand, the principal met separately with bystanders who confirmed Lucy’s account, then began disciplinary proceedings with the students who had targeted Lucy. The principal handled the situation remarkably well. Experts on bullying counsel against having the bully and victim meet to sort things out. In a true bullying situation, doing so seriously risks exposing the victim to future mistreatment. The students who targeted Lucy were required to perform community service at the school, and they and their parents were warned that any evidence of further harassment would be grounds for expulsion. Lucy never had to confront her tormentors directly and was, to her relief, soon ignored by them at school.
After several meetings with her parents joining us, Lucy felt ready to meet with me on her own. When we got to know each other better, she told me that she had been so hurt by the passivity of her bystanding classmates that she had thought about killing herself. Lucy explained that she doubted that things would ever get better and added that having suicidal thoughts only seemed to confirm her sense that she was damaged and crazy. Together, we worked our way through her painful feelings and developed strategies to help her manage the panic attacks that sometimes came on when sitting near one of the students who had harassed her. Lucy’s burden seemed to lighten as we talked. In the words of one of my colleagues, “Things seem so much worse when they are on the inside than when they are on the outside.” By the spring of her eighth-grade year, she’d connected with two bright, easygoing girls who happily included her in their weekend plans and sought her company during the school day.
Being a Bully
Research suggests that girls who bully other girls often do so to create a sense of belonging or to alleviate boredom in their group by creating excitement. In other words, girls sometimes find their place in a tribe by harassing or excluding girls who don’t fit with the group norms. They may also target their peers to create social “glue”—something to talk about, something to do—when they lack the maturity to come together around positive interests.
If you discover that your daughter engages in bullying, don’t blame her behavior on anyone else. No parent wants to believe that his or her child could be a bully, but denying reality will keep you from helping your daughter. Studies tracking teens who engage in bullying find that, over time, they are at heightened risk for depression, anxiety, drug abuse, and antisocial behavior. Let your daughter know that bullying is unacceptable and punishable, and keep a close eye to prevent it from happening again. Consider having your daughter work with a therapist to help her understand why she’s been abusing her peers, repair any damage she has caused, and build positive social skills.
Even if your daughter doesn’t have firsthand experience with bullying, point out the critical role that bystanders play in helping victims. Let her know that you don’t expect her to confront a bully, but, unlike the girls in Lucy’s locker room, she should take action if she knows a classmate is being harassed. Tell her that she should act regardless of her personal feelings about the victim and that you stand ready to think with her about how she can advocate for a classmate who is being bullied.
Sometimes, the elements of adolescent development come together to form their own perfect storm. This is especially true when we combine the two strands we’ve covered so far (“Parting with Childhood” and “Joining a New Tribe”) with the strand we’ll turn to next: “Harnessing Emotions.” We already know that teens are shifting away from their families and toward tribes of peers, and that they are seeking (and sometimes competing for) tribe membership at the same moment as everyone else they know. With so much at stake for girls, it’s no surprise that they get upset when their social lives aren’t going well. But you may have already discovered that getting upset can be a stunningly intense experience once your daughter becomes a teenager. It’s hard enough for girls to try to figure out how they fit into the broader world; the job is made that much more challenging by the fact that most teenage girls feel as if their emotions can spin out of control.
* Note that dr. boyd elects to spell her name in lowercase letters.