CHAPTER THREE
Girls Among Girls
More often than not, girls’ friendships make their lives better, not worse. From early childhood on, our daughters have fun with their girlfriends when all is well and look to them for company and support when the road gets rough. Most of the time, our daughters’ social lives help to ease their stress and anxiety. This chapter will focus on the rest of the time. At some point along the way, your daughter will almost certainly find herself feeling troubled by her interactions with one or more of her female peers.
We’ll start by addressing some of the age-old tensions that arise in girls’ relationships with one another. From there, we’ll turn to the game-changing impact of social media and what parents can do to ensure that their daughter’s online activity doesn’t leave her feeling constantly on edge. Finally, we’ll address the taxing and treacherous world of competition among girls.
Anxious Is the New Shy
On an overcast day in April, a couple in their thirties visited my practice to discuss their daughter’s upcoming transition to the fifth grade. When making the appointment over the phone, Toni explained that her daughter, Alina, had always felt uneasy in social settings. While Alina had two steady buddies at her cozy elementary school, her parents were already worrying about how she would manage in the coming fall. In our town of Shaker Heights, all of the neighborhood early elementary schools merge into Woodbury School, a large building that houses every fifth and sixth grader in the district. With ten fifth-grade classrooms, Alina couldn’t count on being grouped with one of her close friends.
At our first meeting, Adam and Toni sat together on my couch and took turns describing their nine-year-old girl to me.
“Alina was one of those babies who had a hard time feeling settled,” Toni explained tenderly. “She was fussy and tense—we didn’t realize just how true this was until her little brother, who was really easygoing, was born two years later.”
“Her social anxiety started very early,” Adam added urgently. “As a baby she cried when strangers approached, and even as a toddler she hid behind my legs when my folks came to visit from out of town. Her brother, by comparison, can’t seem to get enough of other people.” Amused, Adam added, “He loves going to birthday parties and would have three playdates a weekend if we’d let him.”
Toni continued, “When we try to nudge her to be outgoing, she only gets more tense. At that point, we don’t know what to do, since she’s clearly too uncomfortable to have fun with anyone.”
“When we spoke on the phone,” I said to Toni, “you mentioned that Alina has a couple of good friends. What are those relationships like?”
“Yes, she’s got Zoe and Erin at school—and they do so well together. Alina’s known them since she was in preschool, but when we ask if she wants to have them over on the weekend, she always says no.”
Clearly concerned, Adam added, “We’ve tried to work on her anxiety, but it hasn’t seemed to help. In fact, it only seems to get worse.”
Curious, I asked, “What have you tried?”
Shaking his head in a way that expressed both worry and despair, he said, “We’ve worked on building her confidence and talked with her about being brave. But it doesn’t seem to do anything.”
Toni jumped in. “I know what it’s like to feel nervous around new people. I get that way sometimes, too. But we’re scared that her social anxiety is getting worse. At this rate, we can’t even picture what middle school will look like. We’re hoping that you can help her get her nerves under control.”
“I do think that we can move things in the right direction,” I responded. “But first, I think we might start by framing the problem a little bit differently. Instead of saying that she’s got social anxiety—which I’m not convinced is the case—let’s start with the assumption that she was just born shy.”
Any parent with more than one child knows that babies have personalities from the day they are born. Some are mellow, some are tetchy, some are sunny, and some are highly active and wiggle all of the time. Long-established research tells us that newborns come preprogrammed with dispositions and that most babies can be assigned to one of three categories: easy children, who are generally cheerful and adapt quickly to novelty; difficult children, who have irregular routines, dislike change, and can be pretty cranky; and slow-to-warm-up children who are pretty low-key and need a long time to adjust to new experiences.
Here’s the most important thing to know about these categories: all three are normal, and children from all three categories mature into well-adjusted adults.
“Ten years ago,” I offered, “we probably would not have used the term anxiety to characterize what you’re seeing in Alina. We’d likely say that she’s ‘slow to warm up,’ which is one of the ways we describe totally normal, if cautious, children.”
From there, I told them about the landmark research conducted with infants as young as four months showing that some babies have a strong negative reaction to unfamiliar people and situations while other babies love anything new. Remarkably, we can even predict which young children will be shy based on brain wave patterns measured during infancy. In babies who go on to be wary toddlers, the right frontal lobe—which is associated with a negative emotional response—lights up in response to a changing display of colored Ping-Pong balls; babies who become outgoing toddlers show the opposite neurological pattern.
“Based on what you’re telling me,” I said, “Alina has probably been wired from day one to be hesitant in new situations.” Toni and Adam nodded to indicate that this fit with what they knew about their daughter. “The great news is that she clearly knows how to make, enjoy, and keep friendships.”
“Yes.” Toni smiled. “She really loves Zoe and Erin—and they love her back.”
“The next step will be to help Alina learn how to manage when she finds herself in new places or has to meet new people. There’s no question in my mind that she can become more comfortable with unfamiliarity. But to get her there, we need to work with, not against, her wiring.”
“We’re in,” said Adam gamely. “So, what do we do?”
“Starting today, you can help Alina observe and accept her reactions to new situations. If you notice that she tenses up when you suggest that she might go to a classmate’s birthday party, try saying, ‘I see that you’re feeling cautious about the party, and that’s your first reaction.’ ” Still modeling an easygoing, compassionate tone, I continued. “ ‘Soon, let’s see if you have a second reaction. Let’s hang out with this birthday party invitation for a little while and find out what that second reaction might be.’ You don’t want to help her avoid the situations that make her uncomfortable—doing so will make it that much harder for her to try new things—but you do want to let her come to new things on her terms whenever you can.”
I have spent more time than I care to admit trying to help people change unwanted first reactions. In retrospect, I count those efforts as almost entirely wasted. Individuals who are uneasy with change tend to have a first reaction that amounts to an automatic instinct to withdraw. And that instinct activates very quickly and cannot necessarily be stopped. When we think about first reactions this way, it leaves us with two options: fight the reflex, or accept and allow the withdrawal reflex and then see what happens next.
I now believe that opposing a person’s innate first response can be more than just useless. It can actually be harmful. This is a lesson I learned while caring for a teenager named Tya who had convinced herself that she would only be “cured” of her anxiety once her chest no longer tightened in response to awkward or difficult situations. Every time she felt her familiar—and probably hardwired—clenching feeling, she took it as a sign that her anxiety remained out of control. Unfortunately for Tya, her chest tightened, often fleetingly, several times a day. Having set herself an impossible goal, she spent a lot of time feeling both helpless and hopeless about what she saw as a failure to master her nerves.
When weeks of effort to help Tya maintain a steady state of calm were clearly going nowhere, I decided to take a different tack. One day I said, “What if we just accept that the feeling you get in your chest might not go away? And what if, instead of worrying too much about it, we simply take it as a normal warning sign that something’s up?”
Tya was amenable to this idea and willing to step back and learn more about what the tightness in her chest actually signaled. Interestingly, we soon discovered that her gripped feeling sometimes happened in response to an outside threat—such as a pop quiz at school—but that it was just as likely to be alerting her to an uneasy internal experience, such as feeling annoyed or frustrated with someone else.
Once Tya and I learned to take an impassive yet curious stance toward her first reaction, it stopped giving way to a cascade of distress. Instead, her physical discomfort simply let us know that something around her, or inside her, had triggered her internal alert signal. Our next step was to learn more about what had set off her hair-trigger response in the first place. Once we knew what was bothering her, she could reflect on what her second reaction might be. In the time that we worked together, the anxious feeling in Tya’s chest never went away. But she was much better able to manage whatever set off her anxiety when she no longer felt frightened of her automatic first reaction.
Wanting to share this perspective with Toni and Adam, I added, “In the longer term, I think you might want to help Alina appreciate her tentative style. There’s no reason for her to feel bad about it and no reason for you to worry that she’s unduly anxious.” Though our culture rewards extroverts who jump into new situations with both feet, there’s a lot to be said for those who watch and wait before deciding how to move forward.
“When you talk with Alina about the transition to fifth grade, I think that you can be very reassuring while pointing out that she—unlike her brother—doesn’t go charging into new situations. She likes to take her time and size things up before she joins in. You can let Alina know that there’s nothing wrong with her approach and that you’re there to support her while she gets comfortable, especially with the start at Woodbury next year.”
Toni asked, “Is there any possibility that telling her that it’s okay to hang back will only make her more shy?”
“Actually, it’s probably the opposite,” I explained. “If you push her, she’s likely to dig in her heels. If you tell her that she can take her time before moving forward, that will probably help her to relax. You can also let Alina know that, over time, it probably won’t take so long for her cautious first reaction to give way to a second reaction once her visceral response dies down. And that second reaction might be a sense of curiosity, of wanting to engage, or of not wanting to miss out.”
“This does feel like the right way to go,” Adam agreed, “but how do we know for sure that she doesn’t have a problem with anxiety? At the end of the day, we’d like for her to make lots of friends.”
“For now,” I replied, “everything you are describing about Alina is well within the normal range. I know that there’s a lot of concern these days about anxiety, but we don’t want to risk the possibility of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we treat Alina as though she’s broken, she might start to feel anxious about that. She will probably never be a party animal like your son, but she will almost certainly learn to become more comfortable in new situations.”
I wrapped up our first meeting by reassuring Toni and Adam that decades of studies tell us that children’s personalities do, indeed, become more flexible over time. And from that research we’ve identified the critical factor that helps children to adapt and thrive: having parents who will work with, not against, their inborn traits.
Numbers Bring Drama
I bit my tongue when Adam, in the most loving and well-meaning way, expressed his sincere wish for his Alina to have “lots of friends.” While I know this is what many parents want for their daughters, experience has taught me—and research confirms—that the happiest girls are those with one or two solid friendships. Having a couple of reliable buddies reduces stress by lending predictability to girls’ social lives. Girls with true best friends or tiny friendship groups know whom they’ll see on the weekends, and whom they’ll turn to for support when life throws a curveball.
If your daughter exists in a small but contented social cocoon, don’t expend any of your energy urging her to become a social butterfly. In fact, go out of your way to let her know that she’s doing it right. Girls who move in small circles can sometimes worry that they are uncool or marginal. They may envy their classmates who belong to larger groups and wish that they, too, were “popular.” Indeed, popularity really can sound like a good thing, especially in middle school when girls seek a sense of belonging and spend a lot of time fretting about whether and where they fit in.
But here’s the problem: numbers bring drama.
Social turmoil almost always comes with the territory for groups of four or five girls or more. The reason behind this has nothing to do with girls being catty or mean or exclusionary (though they can, at times, act in all of these ways). It is simply the case that one cannot possibly assemble a group of five or more human beings of any age who like one another equally. Yet tweens, with their wobbly social skills, attempt this.
Girls who belong to large friendship groups run into all sorts of predictable stressors. While small groups are usually composed of girls who have handpicked one another, compromises are invariably made when girls coalesce in large numbers. And these compromises usually cause a great deal of social stress. Perhaps two or three girls in the group really enjoy being together and don’t always want to include the whole crew in their plans. When they decide to invite everyone, they feel unhappy about it. When they don’t include everyone, they’re stuck dealing with the aftermath of having left certain girls out. Or perhaps two girls in the group have an oil-and-water relationship. This happens all the time, and it means that the other girls in the clique are invariably pressed to serve as mediators or confidantes, or to pick a side in the conflict.
To make matters both better and worse, research consistently shows that girls are especially plugged in when it comes to thinking about other people’s feelings. Studies find that girls are more empathic than boys, a difference that is explained by how we socialize our daughters and sons, not by some innate biological factor. Girls, more than boys, are raised on a steady diet of encouragement to “think about how the other person would feel,” which means that if your daughter’s friend finds herself on the sharp end of a social stick, your daughter will feel some pain, too.
This is all to say that even under the best conditions, a surprising degree of stress and anxiety attends our daughters’ garden-variety social interactions. Girls in small groups sometimes worry that they’ll end up friendless if they find themselves at odds with their few buddies. Girls in larger groups often surf from one wave of drama to the next. And even when your daughter is having a good day, she can be knocked off balance by a friend who isn’t.
Regardless of the size of her social group, you can help your daughter manage the inevitable ups and downs that come with her peer relationships. Girls who are good at dealing with social friction spend more time enjoying their friends and less time ruminating about the latest social kerfuffle. As we know, our daughters look to us for cues about how troubled they should be when things go badly, so in order to be most helpful, we need to accept that it’s normal for girls to have difficulty getting along. If we are alarmed by the mere presence of social discord, our girls will feel alarmed by it, too. When we recognize interpersonal discord as a fact of life, we can take a pragmatic stance toward helping our daughters learn how to navigate it effectively.
Healthy Conflict 101
Girls, as a group, are bad at dealing with conflict because people, as a group, are bad at dealing with it. And we cannot teach our daughters what we don’t know. Though in the past I have declared my certainty that we will never find a cure for the seventh grade, and I have sometimes felt pessimistic about helping girls (and adults) improve their ability to manage disagreements effectively, I have lately changed my tune.
While conflict is inevitable, handling it poorly is not. Once we accept that putting more than one conscious person in the same room guarantees that, eventually, there will be friction, we can turn our energy toward understanding the ins and outs of interpersonal discord. Some approaches to engaging in conflict are preferable to others, and this complex and murky topic becomes a great deal simpler when we recognize that there are three common unhealthy forms of conflict management and only a single common healthy one.
The three forms of unhealthy conflict are instantly recognizable: acting as a bulldozer, acting as a doormat, or acting as a doormat with spikes. A bulldozer deals with disagreements by running people over, while doormats allow themselves to be run over. The doormat with spikes employs passive-aggressive tactics, such as using guilt as a weapon, playing the part of the victim, or involving third parties in what should be a one-on-one disagreement. Girls often have elaborate doormat-with-spikes repertoires, because we don’t always help our daughters learn to recognize, accept, and directly express their angry feelings. Given this, it’s really no surprise that their darker impulses are often expressed indirectly.
For healthy conflict, the guiding metaphor is a pillar. It stands up for itself without stepping on anyone else. But when conflict comes, to be a pillar is really hard; for most of us it’s certainly not our first reaction. Fortunately, if we can recognize and observe our first reaction—to be a bulldozer, doormat, or doormat with spikes—without allowing ourselves to act on it, we can usually find our way to reflecting on how we might become a pillar as our second reaction.
One Monday morning at Laurel School, Liz, an eighth grader, caught me in the hallway to ask if I had any time available to meet later that day. We determined that she had a study hall when I had an opening, so we made a plan to meet in my office early that afternoon.
“What’s up?” I asked as Liz settled into the chair across from mine. Though Laurel has a uniform, each girl finds a way to put her personal stamp on it. That day, Liz was wearing a sweatshirt, athletic socks, and running shoes—a look common among the students who are athletes.
Liz picked up one of the fidget toys I keep in my Harry Potter office and said, “I just want to get your advice on this weird thing that happened with one of the girls who plays on my club volleyball team.”
“Sure,” I said.
“I’ve known her forever and we’re friends—not great friends—but good enough. She doesn’t go to Laurel but she knows a lot of the girls here and we hang out with some of the same people on the weekends.”
She continued, “I went to her birthday party last year, and a few weeks ago she came up to me at volleyball to tell me that her mom said she couldn’t have a party this year because they had too much other family stuff going on. That was fine and I didn’t even really think about it until Saturday night when she posted all these pictures of what was clearly her birthday party.” Now sounding really bothered, Liz added, “She didn’t have to invite me…I get that…I just don’t see why she had to go out of her way to tell me that she wasn’t having a party.”
“Right,” I offered. “I can see why you’re upset.”
“So I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do, because I’m going to see her at practice tonight…it’s so uncomfortable.”
I empathized with Liz’s discomfort and told her that I was sorry she’d been put in this position. Given her tricky social situation, I walked her through the ways—three bad, one good—that people usually deal with conflict.
“Obviously,” I said, “you and I are going to try to figure out a pillar response, but sometimes it helps to get some of the other options out of your system.” Lightheartedly, I asked, “If you were going to bulldoze her, what would that look like?”
“I actually thought about that. There’s a part of me that just wants to go up to her at practice and say something nasty to her face.”
“Sure. You’re hurt and mad—it makes sense that you’d want to just let her have it. And if you decided to doormat this, what would that look like?”
Now picking up the playful mood, Liz replied, “I suppose that I’d just walk around feeling sad about it and cry myself to sleep or something.”
“Right. And how would you doormat-with-spikes this one?” I asked, enjoying this exchange.
“There are so many ways,” she said, now fully into our game. “I don’t even know where to start!”
“Go for it.”
“Well, I suppose that I could talk bad about her to my friends on the volleyball team or here at Laurel, or I could invite a bunch of girls over and post pictures of us having a great time and tag her so that she sees them. Or I could subtweet about it.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s talking bad about someone on Twitter without using her name—but everyone knows who you’re talking about. I could tweet something like, ‘Doesn’t it suck when you realize that someone you thought was an honest friend actually isn’t?’ ”
“Ouch!” After pausing for a moment I added, “You have to admit, social media can be a doormat-with-spikes bonanza.”
Liz gave a quick nod that expressed her total agreement while saying, “Oh, yeah,” slowly and keenly.
“There’s probably no easier way to involve a whole lot of other people in a conflict, and it also offers a million ways to go after someone indirectly.”
“For sure,” agreed Liz, now leaning forward in her chair.
“Okay, now that we’ve gotten our ugly impulses out of the way, how might you pillar this? How could you stick up for yourself while also being respectful of her?”
Liz started, “I suppose that I might say something to her at practice like ‘I saw that you had a party.’ ” She continued in a level tone, “ ‘And that’s fine, but you didn’t need to tell me that you weren’t having one.’ ”
“That’s pretty good! What if you wanted to say even less? Sometimes being a pillar involves starting a conversation, not trying to end one.”
“I guess I could just say, ‘I saw the pictures of your party, and my feelings were kinda hurt.’ ”
“Yes…I think that something like that might be a good place to start. Because what if something random happened? Maybe her mom decided to throw her a surprise party and didn’t really know who to invite. Letting her know how you feel might also give her the chance to offer you an apology if she owes you one.”
“That’s true,” said Liz sensibly. “I don’t really know the whole story.”
“Asking a question can also be a good way to be a pillar. Perhaps you could say something like, ‘I saw that you did have a party after all. Did I do something that made things hard between us?’ ”
“Yeah, I could do that. That’s good.”
It was time to wrap up. Before Liz left, I made a point of telling her that I did not expect that she would, from now on, be able to come up with pillar responses quickly and easily whenever she felt hurt or upset. Indeed, I shared with her that I still find that when I’m miffed, my first impulse is to be a doormat with spikes. I’m resigned to this unpleasant truth about myself and will sometimes even indulge in daydreaming about the passive-aggressive things I’d like to do when I’m mad. In my actions, however, I do try to be a pillar.
Given that girls’ interpersonal worlds come with unavoidable stress, we need to do our part to help ease some of the social strain our daughters feel. We can start by accepting that strife comes with human contact and help girls appreciate that they will inevitably have conflicts with their agemates. Further, we can recognize that, being human, our daughters (and other people’s daughters) will sometimes feel compelled to act like bulldozers, doormats, or doormats with spikes. Then, when peer conflicts do arise, we can have matter-of-fact conversations with our girls about the better and worse ways to handle them.
To the degree that our girls let us in on social turmoil that is taking place online, as it often does, we should talk with them about how it is basically impossible to be a pillar online because pillar communications rely heavily on tone. Indeed, if you think about it, the same exact phrase—“Can we talk about why I wasn’t invited to your party?”—could come across as aggressive (bulldozer), woeful (doormat), sneering (doormat with spikes), or respectful (pillar), depending on the tone in which it is delivered. All the emojis in the world cannot communicate the subtleties of the human voice. When it’s time for your daughter to act as a pillar, help her appreciate that doing so will, almost certainly, require a face-to-face interaction.
As we help our daughters handle peer conflict, we can remind them that nobody always gets it right the first time and nobody gets it right every day. But with practice, they can learn to deal with interpersonal discord in ways they can feel good about and to use strategies that should calm, rather than stir up, their social dramas.
Freedom to Pick Her Battles
A week later, Liz was back in my office. I felt surprised to see her again so soon, given how quickly and completely she had latched on to my advice about how to have a healthy conflict.
“So…what happened?”
“Honestly,” she said, “it wasn’t good. I saw the girl at practice and I could tell that something was wrong. She avoided me during warm-ups and wouldn’t really look at me during drills.”
“What do you think the deal was?”
“I think that she felt bad about leaving me out of the party, but she wasn’t going to apologize about it, either.”
“Did you say anything to her about it?”
“No, it just didn’t seem right. But now I feel like I’ve been a total doormat about the whole thing, and that doesn’t feel right, either.”
I could see Liz’s point and could see how she had landed there given our conversation. Still, I had an idea.
“You know,” I offered, “you’ve got another option for handling this problem.” Liz’s face took on an expression that was simultaneously curious and skeptical. “You could try some emotional aikido.”
Her look shifted to fully skeptical.
“I know that adults encourage girls to stand up for themselves—and that’s an important thing to be able to do. I can also see how our conversation from last week gave you the impression that not responding to your teammate makes you a doormat.” Liz raised her eyebrows and nodded. “But there’s also the option of strategic sidestepping.”
Liz said nothing but looked at me expectantly. I took this as permission to continue.
“Here’s what I mean. In some forms of combat, like boxing or wrestling, people fight by punching or pushing against the other person. In other forms of conflict, like aikido, if someone is coming at you, the first thing you do is step out of that person’s path. This pulls you out of harm’s way, and it can leave your opponent off balance.”
Liz was still listening but, to her credit, doing nothing to hide the fact that she found my metaphor to be ridiculous.
“Bear with me,” I said. “I know that this sounds strange, but here’s how I want you to think about it: making the decision that it is not worth your time to engage in some dumb drama actually gives you the upper hand.”
Liz’s skepticism lightened by a shade.
From there we talked about the fact that she alone could determine how much she cared about being left out of the party and how much energy she wanted to expend on trying to repair or improve the relationship with her teammate, who had, after all, never been a close friend in the first place. I told Liz that she certainly had my support to decide against taking an open stand on the matter.
Liz seemed relieved by the idea of not having to confront her teammate. Going forward, we agreed that she’d be cautious, yet civil, at practice and that she’d resist her temptation to be a doormat with spikes by trashing her teammate to others. I invited Liz to come back my way if she continued to have a hard time with the girl. At that point, she could decide what, if anything, she wanted to do about it. In the meantime, she could conserve her energy by electing to sidestep what appeared to be a fruitless showdown. While agreeing to this plan, Liz was still leery.
“Are you sure I’m not just letting her walk all over me?”
“You’d be letting her walk all over you if you were crying in the corner about not being invited to her party or if you were sucking up to her to try to be included in the next one.”
Liz agreed.
“In this situation,” I added, “you are making a considered choice about how much of your attention this situation deserves. You are not ignoring or forgetting how she acted—that information is yours to keep—but you are deciding, for now, not to let this girl take up any more of your time. Just because she threw a problem at you doesn’t mean you have to catch it.”
In my work with girls I have tended, in the past, to automatically encourage them to stick up for themselves when slighted and to push back against any degree of mistreatment. This guidance fits with my conscious commitment to helping other people’s daughters, and my own, mature into empowered young women who take guff from no one. Yet I’ve come to realize that the advice we give girls doesn’t mirror how competent adult women often handle interpersonal conflicts. We pick our battles. We decide when, and with whom, a confrontation is worthwhile. And we often dispatch trivial or pointless disputes with nods and fake smiles because we have better things to do with our time.
In truth, confrontation, even when done well, is psychologically taxing. It is also true that some social problems suffocate for lack of attentional oxygen. Of course, there will be times when it makes sense for our daughters to take someone on. That’s when we want to help our girls act as pillars who effectively assert their own rights while respecting the rights of others, which offers the best possible chance of resolving the conflict successfully. All the same, our daughters should know that overtly standing up for themselves can be optional. Indeed, we unwittingly add to girls’ stress when we suggest that they must address themselves to every injustice or snub. Holding one’s fire is not the same as surrendering. Adults know that discretion can be the better part of valor, and we should let our daughters know this, too.
Round-the-Clock Peer Stress
Thanks to digital technology, our daughters now conduct their social lives on multiple planes and, as we know, run into conflicts both in person and in cyberspace. But even when girls are getting along online, they can find that their social media activity takes an emotional toll.
Growing up in the digital age almost certainly plays a role in the spiking levels of stress and anxiety we see in today’s teenagers. While the available evidence does not support exaggerated claims that smartphones are turning our kids into psychologically stunted screen-zombies, omnipresent technology has, beyond question, changed how we live. Not all of those changes are for the better, and adults are still coming to terms with what it means to raise children in a fully wired world.
The more that we, as parents, understand how the digital environment shapes our daughters’ interpersonal lives, the better equipped we’ll be to help them ease some of the tension that comes with being plugged in. Experts note that adolescents aren’t enthralled by technology—they’re enthralled by the peers on the other end of the technology they happen to be using. Indeed, teenagers have always been obsessed with their friends. Decades ago, we wanted to connect with our peers just as desperately as our kids now want to connect with theirs.
At this point, you might be thinking, “Okay, fine. But not like today’s teenagers. With their surgically attached phones and their mortal fear of missing out on even the most frivolous peer communication? We were never addicted to each other like that.”
Actually, we were. To plug into our own peer-obsessed pasts, we need to remember how we employed the connective technologies of our time. I, for one, can easily summon the memory of that hot, damp, and even slightly painful ear sensation that would set in after spending hours with the family phone pressed to the side of my head. I even recall that, most evenings, a point would arrive at which my ear became so uncomfortable that I finally had to interrupt my friend at the other end of the line to say, “Wait…hold on a minute…I have to switch sides.” To which she would reply, “Yeah. Me, too.”
And do you remember when call waiting came out? That changed everything. Before call waiting, there would come a time each evening when my mother would interrupt me mid-call to say, “You have to get off the phone. Someone might be trying to reach us.” I’d stall, hang up eventually, and—now completely disconnected from my friends—sullenly resign myself to doing my homework. With the arrival of call waiting, I became the self-appointed family receptionist who commandeered the phone for the entire evening on the promise that I would hand over the line if (and only if) my parents happened to receive a call or wanted to make one.
We really were no different from our own children. We just had lame technology.
Once we recognize that there’s nothing new or strange about young people’s intense desire to be connected to one another at all times, we can remember something else: being connected to one’s peers can be very stressful. As much as I loved being on the phone with my friends, there was often a lot of drama going on.
Even with our limited technology, we found ways to simultaneously script and follow the latest episode of our own adolescent soap opera. We’d get together to listen in on each other’s conversations, maintain a frenzy of connections by ending one call to take another before calling the first (or second or third) person back, or use call waiting to toggle back and forth between two conversations at once. When my mother eventually kicked me off the phone for the night (even, sensibly, after we had call waiting), I’m sure that my outward resentment was secretly lined with a modicum of relief.
Girls’ relationships with one another have always been charged. Today’s unprecedented capacity for connection only makes these interactions more complex, consuming, and flat-out stressful than they ever were before. In the old days, we took much-needed breaks from interacting with our friends, simply because we had no choice. Now we need to help our daughters push the pause button on their social lives—to engage in some conscious compartmentalization—so that they can get their much-needed breaks, too.
Accomplishing this can be fairly straightforward, but you should not measure the success of your approach by how enthusiastically your daughter embraces it. Limiting a young person’s access to technology is rarely a popular decision, but making unpopular decisions is, to be sure, an important part of being a parent.
You can reduce the resistance to any rules you make by holding the whole family to them. Many parents (myself included) are as absorbed in their technology as their teenagers are and can benefit from placing some limits on their own use. It can also be easier to draw lines around the time we spend on digital media when we make it clear that we’re not so much against technology as we are for other things. Here are some aspects of your daughter’s life that you might actively look to protect from the intrusion of technology: enjoying face-to-face conversations with family members, having uninterrupted time to concentrate on homework, being physically active, pursuing hobbies, playing outdoors, and being able to fall asleep quickly and stay asleep through the night. Needless to say, digitally mediated social interactions pose a threat to each of these.
Involve your daughter in deciding how she wants to implement any rules you lay down. Some will be relatively straightforward, such as setting the expectations that phones are never guests at your dinner table, that her technology shuts down by a certain time each night, and that she engages in meaningful activities that require her to take breaks from social media. Other rules will be trickier to make and enforce. It is often the case that teenagers use digital technology to do their homework together, each from her own home. Accordingly, you’ll need to talk with your daughter about how she’ll know when being connected to her friends while doing homework lowers her stress by helping her get her homework done or when it only adds to it.
Don’t underestimate your teenager’s capacity to come up with smart solutions. Plenty of girls figure out that they complete homework more efficiently when they use “do not disturb” settings to turn off pinging text notifications and site-blocking software to silence the siren song of their favorite social media sites. A colleague who works at a girls’ school discovered a particularly inventive way that several high school juniors barred themselves from social media for the duration of finals. They handed over their passwords to one another and authorized their friends to change them, setting them back again once the exams were over.
That said, girls cannot always be counted on to taper their own social media use when it is causing them more stress than joy, or when it gives rise to poor decision making. I especially admire parents who notice when social media is taking a particularily heavy toll on their daughter and, at least for a little while, reduce her access to technology or adjust her smartphone to turn it into a dumb phone for a few days. Every parent I know who has done this has told me the same story. At first, they encountered fierce resistance from their daughter, who had no interest in scaling back her social media use. Soon thereafter, she seemed more relaxed than she had been in a long time and became her happy old self again.
Just as digital connection can hijack our daughters’ waking hours, it can also derail their nights. Protecting a girl’s ability to get as much sleep as she needs often means that she’ll have to renegotiate her evening relationship with social media.
Sleep vs. Social Media
Few of our daughters get enough sleep, and this is likely one of the simplest, yet most powerful, explanations for girls’ high levels of anxiety. Sleep is the glue that holds humans together, and by adolescence girls tend to get less sleep than boys. With the onset of puberty, all teenagers experience a natural phenomenon known as sleep phase delay, which makes it easier for them to stay up later at night and sleep longer in the morning. This biological curveball accounts for why your seven-year-old awakens hours before school starts while your thirteen-year-old might struggle to get up in time to catch the school bus. Girls on average enter puberty around age twelve (versus age fourteen for boys). Unfortunately, this means that by early middle school, our daughters often struggle to fall asleep before ten or eleven at night. With early school start times, it becomes impossible for girls to get the nine hours of sleep—you read that right, nine hours—that teenagers actually need.
There’s no rocket science behind the connection between sleep loss and anxiety. When we get enough sleep, we can handle most of what life hands us; when we don’t, we become frazzled and brittle. An event that would have been merely bothersome to a well-rested high school sophomore, such as leaving a needed textbook at school, can set off a full-blown panic attack in a teenager who is exhausted.
It can be easy for girls to assume that they can swap sleep for caffeine and willpower. But any clinician used to working with teenagers will start by asking one question of a girl who arrives at her office complaining of anxiety: How much sleep are you getting each night? If the answer is that the girl routinely sleeps fewer than seven or eight hours, her anxiety cannot be evaluated, much less treated, until her sleep deprivation is addressed. It’s no different than if a person wearing three parkas indoors were to complain of being hot—trying to solve the problem by offering a cool glass of water would be a senseless place to start. When a girl who is bone-tired says that she feels fragile, breathing techniques aren’t the answer.
Plenty of things keep girls up at night. Many of our daughters have busy lives after school and may not even dig into their schoolwork until late in the evening. But it is often the case that even when a girl finally puts herself to bed, she’s unable to fall asleep. At these times, social media is usually to blame.
Girls’ online social activities keep them up in more ways than one. As most of us now know, light emitted by backlit screens suppresses melatonin, a naturally produced sleep hormone that rises at day’s end. For this reason, it is incredibly difficult for anyone to fall asleep immediately after interacting with technology for any length of time. Helpfully, many girls use digital applications that adjust the light radiating from their screens to blunt its melatonin-curbing effects. But the light is only part of the problem.
Often I hear from girls that it’s the content they encounter on their social media sites that keeps them up at night. Picture a girl who successfully stays away from socializing online while she diligently completes her homework. We can easily imagine that she might want to relax at the end of the night by checking in with her online crew. Just as discovering a worrisome, late-night email from one’s boss would have any adult staring at the ceiling all night, a girl can be kept up for hours if her quick peek at social media reveals that the one classmate she cannot stand is now dating the one boy she’s crazy about.
All of us, and especially adolescents contending with the realities of sleep phase delay, need to protect our ability to fall and stay asleep. This usually requires that we equate falling asleep with finally coming to the end of a ramp that eases us toward dozing off and not think of it as a switch that we can flip at will. Humans really do need time to unwind—both physically and psychologically—in order to fall asleep. To this end, our daughters should find ways to relax that do not involve social media, such as reading or watching a show they like, for an absolute minimum of thirty minutes before they want to sack out. Furthermore, good things rarely come from having technology in an adolescent’s bedroom, especially overnight. Studies show that, even after a teenager falls asleep, it is not unusual for her to be awakened throughout the night by incoming text messages from friends.
Separating your daughter from social media during the pre-bedtime stretch has a double benefit. It forces her to take a break from the taxing constant engagement with her peers, and it will also help her get more of the anxiety-buffering sleep she needs. Indeed, a recent research study that followed teenagers over time found that having nighttime access to a phone undermined the ability to sleep, which, in turn, led to a decline in both self-esteem and the ability to cope with everyday challenges. In sum, sleep loss leads to emotional fragility and increases the likelihood that our daughters will feel on edge throughout the day.
The High Cost of Social Comparison
To be a teenager is to compare oneself to others. We ourselves did it when we were young, and now our kids do it as well. But with ever-present social media, our tweens and teens can now measure themselves against meticulously curated versions of their peers, and carry on with this all day and all night. There is almost no way for this to go well for your daughter. Why? Because she is weighing what she knows about herself—that she is whole and complex and imperfect—against her peers’ crafted, polished, and depthless online posts. This is like comparing a lived-in home to a furniture showroom. If outward appearance is the yardstick, the furniture showroom will win every time. And social media, by design, is all about outward appearance.
When girls (and, as they can at times, adults) forget this, they spend a lot of time feeling inadequate as they scrutinize other people’s posts. Not surprisingly, research confirms that viewing the social media images of peers who come off as happier, prettier, or better connected takes its toll on a girl’s self-esteem. Studies also tell us that girls, more than boys, suffer as a result of their online social comparisons, perhaps because they have been taught by our culture to prioritize their physical appearance. We can’t always stand between our daughters and their normal inclination to evaluate themselves against one another, but we can help them gain some stress-relieving perspective about their online worlds.
On a recent caffeine run, I was reminded of just how complex adolescent social comparison becomes when it plays out over social media. As I stood at the end of a long line at my local coffee shop, Shauna, a good friend of mine, slipped out of her place toward the front of the line and took the spot behind me. After we greeted each other warmly, she said, “It’s funny that I’m seeing you—I almost picked up the phone to run something by you last night, but it didn’t seem like a big enough deal to call about. Is now okay?”
“Of course,” I replied. And I meant it. I don’t usually wear my professional hat when I’m with my friends, but if they ask for my input, I’m happy to try to help.
“Danielle,” she began, dropping her voice and referring to her thirteen-year-old daughter whom I knew well, “was a wreck last night.” She paused to collect her thoughts, then continued, “She’s got a good group of friends at school but wants to be in with the more popular crowd. So last night we hear her crying up in her room. At first, she refused to talk about what happened. Then it all poured out. Danielle showed me a picture she’d posted—a selfie she took in her room. She actually looked really cute in the picture. But one of the girls in the popular group took a screen shot of the post and shared it in a group text to several classmates. She said in the text that Danielle was ‘So fake.’ One of Danielle’s friends—in what I think was a genuine show of kindness—forwarded the text to Danielle, who, of course, was devastated.”
Shauna explained further. “In trying to help me understand what was going on, Danielle showed me that her selfie had gotten more likes and comments than some of the selfies posted by girls in the popular group. The whole thing was so weird that I didn’t even know what to say.” I shook my head sympathetically and told Shauna that I’d heard similar stories before.
“Last night,” added Shauna, “Danielle said that she was too upset to go to school today. She was in better shape this morning, so she went without too much grumbling. I sent her off with a hug, but I wasn’t sure what else to do.”
“I’m sorry that happened,” I said, “and in the short term I think you could point out that what the popular girl did was really mean and that Danielle is probably better off with her real friends in the lower social ranks.”
“I did that, and it seemed to help a little.”
“Longer term, I think that you might want to have a bigger conversation with her about the fact that there’s really no such thing as being ‘genuine’ on social media.”
We headed outside to take advantage of a Cleveland rarity—a mild, sunny day in February. While we leaned against my car in the parking lot sipping our coffees I continued, “Girls get so anxious about what they put up on online and how it will be received. It’s a teenager’s job to worry about how everyone sees her, but it’s our job to help teenagers take a few steps back from the whole thing.”
“True,” said Shauna, “but I would so love to just do away with social media altogether—I hate how much energy it sucks from Danielle.”
“I know, but think of it as giving you an opening to have a conversation we should probably be having with our daughters anyway.”
Shauna nodded for me to go on.
“We need to help girls get past judging one another on how ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ they are and help them appreciate how we all—both teenagers and adults—craft our online presence to try to present a particular picture of ourselves.”
“Yes, that’s true,” said Shauna. “I know that I use Facebook as a place to try to be funny and interesting—I certainly don’t share everything that’s on my mind, and I sometimes go back and edit my posts if the tone seems off.”
“Yep,” I said, “everyone does—and that’s not a problem. It’s only a problem when teenagers run with the crazy idea that a two-dimensional pixelated space could accurately represent the whole of a real person.”
“Right. But how do I bring this up with Danielle?”
“I think that you could tell her what you just told me: that there’s an agenda, and for you a totally reasonable one, behind what you choose to share online. And that this is true for everyone.”
Girls really do feel better when we remind them that social media is just one big furniture showroom. In the words of Jill Walsh, a sociologist who studies how teenagers engage with social media, young people (and most adults, to be sure) use their posts to show the “highlights reel.” They take hundreds of pictures and put up only the best one. They stage and curate their online presence to garner likes and comments, not to let people in on what’s really happening.
It can be tempting to be critical of how teens operate online, but it’s probably more accurate to assume that if social media had existed back when we were teenagers, we would have used it just as our girls do. In lieu of judgment, we should offer support. This means having conversations designed to reduce some of the stressful inadequacy teens feel as they scrutinize their peers’ highlights reels and as they anxiously contrive their own.
Dr. Walsh notes that teenagers use social media to tell a story about themselves and that we can help our daughters engage in some literary criticism about those narratives. “We might ask our teenage girls,” she says, “ ‘What do you think of that picture?’ or ‘Why was it taken?’ or ‘Who is it for?’ and start a discussion about the agenda behind the image.” It’s unlikely that raising these questions will inspire your daughter to forsake social media or to stop comparing herself to others. But those aren’t realistic goals. Our objective is actually a simple one: to remind our daughters that what they see online does not, and cannot, represent the wonderful, messy complexity of her peers any more than what she posts online tells the whole story about herself.
Finding Comfort with Competition
Our daughters compete with one another both online—as Danielle did when assessing how many likes her selfie received—and offline. Regardless of the arena, peer competition among girls quickly becomes fraught as they struggle to square their wishes to get along with their girlfriends with their wishes to outdo them. It’s hardly a surprise that this seemingly no-win situation often becomes a potent source of stress.
One Monday afternoon a couple of years ago, a local pediatrician and longtime colleague left me a voicemail saying, “I’ve just sent an eleventh grader named Katie your way. She’s been complaining of stomach pains for a couple of weeks, but we’ve ruled out everything we can and are pretty sure that it’s just stress. You’ll hear from her dad in a day or two about setting up an appointment. By the way, you’ll love Katie. She’s terrific.”
Katie’s dad soon called, and I hurried his daughter into my practice because her stomach troubles were so bad that she was leaving school early some days. When I met Katie in my waiting room, I saw immediately what my pediatrician colleague was talking about. Katie announced with her clothing that she was creative and self-assured. Instead of the skintight jeans and extremely fitted tops that are the unofficial uniform of most girls in our community, she wore patterned leggings under a vintage A-line dress that was almost certainly a thrift shop treasure.
We quickly got down to business.
“Your dad told me over the phone that you’re doing well in every way he can name—but that your stomach is really bothering you.”
Katie answered as if we’d already known each other a long time. “I don’t know what’s going on. Things seem fine, but about two weeks ago, these stomach pains just showed up out of nowhere, and my doctor can’t find a medical explanation.”
“Did anything stressful happen around the time the pains started?” I asked. “Our bodies sometimes break down when we’re taxed, but everyone’s body breaks down in a different way. I get eye infections when I’m on overload but don’t always realize that I’m maxed out until one of my eyes starts acting up.”
Katie reflected briefly before saying, “Well, a couple of weeks ago, our adviser for the school newspaper announced the application deadline for next year’s editors…and the application process isn’t going well.” She paused. “Yeah, to be honest, I think that’s been bugging me more than I’ve wanted to admit.”
Katie told me that she had worked for the school newspaper since she was in ninth grade and had decided to pursue a career in journalism. At the end of the school year, juniors were invited to apply for the upcoming year’s editorial positions, and Katie was eager to be the paper’s editor in chief. Though she went to a coed school, the newspaper staff was dominated by girls, many of whom were Katie’s close friends.
She explained, “We don’t like to compete against one another, so we decided to pick for ourselves who would apply to each role—chief, sports editor, opinions editor, and features editor. I wanted to apply for chief, but somehow my friends tapped Maddie for it. I love her, and she’d be great at it, but I really wanted a shot. Now I’m stuck. I want the job, but if I apply and get it, my friends will be pissed at me. Even if I didn’t care about my friendships, which I do, I’d be setting up a terrible year as chief.”
“Sounds like you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”
“Damn right,” she joked. “No wonder I’m sick to my stomach.”
Our daughters have taken up our encouragement to be wildly ambitious, yet they struggle to compete with their peers in ways that feel socially acceptable. Rigorous competition always involves a dose of healthy aggression, a drive to outperform others. But girls don’t always know how to reconcile their competitive feelings with the lifetime of instruction to be nice. As we could predict, this leaves girls, far more than boys, worrying that competing against their friends will damage their friendships. They often find themselves trying to figure out how to make a splash without making any waves.
It’s both impressive and alarming to catalog the many ways that ambitious girls twist themselves into pretzels to avoid the appearance of being cutthroat. When they do well, they cloak or misrepresent how hard they actually worked. Or they feign disappointment with a test result when they have, in fact, gotten a very high score. Or they ask forgiveness for their success; one tennis coach told me that he spent an entire season beseeching a talented player to stop apologizing every time she hit a winning shot. Or, like Katie and her friends, they come up with elaborate schemes to try to avoid the problem altogether.
We can help our daughters feel less stressed when competing by illuminating the difference between being an aggressive competitor and being an aggressive person. When they are young, we can model this distinction as we play games against our daughters. Though it can be tempting to let our daughter win, doing so unhelpfully suggests that beating her is somehow unkind. Instead of going easy on girls (or taking gleeful delight in defeating them), we can play to win while simultaneously encouraging and celebrating our girl every time she makes a smart move or scores. If our daughters feel discouraged about losing to us, we can say with compassion, “It’s not easy to play against an adult. But when you win, which you will, you’ll know that you beat me for real. You’ll feel great about it, and I’ll be excited for you, too.”
We can also point to the many excellent examples of professional female athletes who are fierce competitors while competing and incredibly gracious people once the match has ended. When watching Olympic swimming (my favorite) with my own daughters, I’ll often say, “Just look at these women. In the water, they are sharks. On land, they do nothing but cheer for one another.” We can tell our daughters that they should go all out when they are in the proverbial pool, such as on tests, at auditions, when performing, and during competitions. Then we can remind them that, once back on land, we expect them to celebrate and support their peers, regardless of how things went in the water.
Envy’s Inevitable
It’s easy enough for a girl to celebrate her competitors when she’s winning, but it’s much harder when things are not going well. Given how devoted our daughters are to their friends, it can be exquisitely painful for them to resent the success of someone they really like and care about. My work with Katie drove this point home.
As we talked through the problem that had brought her my way, Katie realized that she could alert the newspaper adviser, who happened to be a teacher she really admired and trusted, to what was going on.
“She’s solid—and I know that she’d want us to have a fair competition. Of course she’s expecting to get more than one application for each spot so I could let her know that that will only happen if she requires us to apply for at least two jobs each. Then she decides who gets the spots. And we don’t.” Looking visibly relieved, Katie added, “That would be much better.”
Her idea was a great one. I gave Katie my number and let her know that she should feel free to update me on how things unfolded and to come back for another appointment if her stomach pains didn’t go away.
Two weeks later, we were meeting again at Katie’s request and with her parents’ support. Her plan to talk with the newspaper adviser had worked, and she’d applied for the jobs of editor in chief and opinions editor. To her disappointment, Katie was appointed the opinions editor.
“My friend Trish will be the editor in chief, and she’ll do the job well,” she said with her eyes cast down. “But I really wanted it…I feel like it’s what I’ve been working toward since ninth grade.”
Now teary, Katie added, “I can live with being opinions editor. But honestly…the hardest part is that I’m really jealous of Trish. We hang out all the time, and it’s just hard to be comfortable around her because I feel like I should be okay with it. But I’m not.”
“Listen,” I said, wanting to ease Katie’s conscience, “competitive feelings aren’t always rational. There’s no need to feel guilty about them. They just come with the territory of being an ambitious person.”
Katie studied me as I explained, “It’s okay to be jealous of your friend or to be angry that she got the job you wanted. Those feelings don’t cancel out the fact that you like her, respect her, and may even feel happy for her, too.”
“Yeah. I actually am happy for her—and I know that she’s really psyched about it.”
“It’s strange, but your envy of Trish and your happiness for her can actually live side by side. The only thing you should feel bad about is if you act on your jealousy in some unkind way.”
“Oh. No. That’s not something I’d do,” Katie said hastily.
I nodded vigorously to let her know that I didn’t think she would.
“We’re cool in person, but I’ve just been mad at myself for feeling mad at her.”
“Well,” I said, “I’m hoping you can let yourself off that hook. Judge yourself for what you do, not what you think or feel. Because if you’re going to be someone who really goes for it”—I smiled warmly to indicate that I loved her determination—“you’re going to feel crummy, and perhaps a little bitter, when things don’t go your way. Don’t beat yourself up about it or get weighed down by it. Acknowledge it to yourself, then just keep going.”
While it can be agonizing for our daughters to envy their close friends, it’s also painful for girls to covet the trendy clothes, cool summer plans, or lax rules of other teenagers they know. As parents, we are often caught up in the stress our daughters feel as they compare themselves to their peers because we either cannot, or will not, help them keep up with the Joneses at school.
Even when we refuse to stretch our values or family budgets, we can ease our daughter’s discomfort by acknowledging how helpless her envy makes her feel. We might say, for example, “It’s natural to want the nice things that other people have. I sometimes feel that way when I see an expensive car. But, as an adult, it’s easier for me to stand my envy because I’ve made decisions about my priorities along the way. For now, you’re stuck with the choices we make for you and I know that’s not always so great. Before long, though, you’ll have more say.”
Girls’ relationships with their female friends can be both wonderful and fraught. The same can be said for their relationships with boys. What we teach girls about how to have healthy conflicts extends to all of their relationships; and if they ever feel pitted against one another for a boy’s attention, the guidance we provide on weathering competition with other girls will come in handy. But these aren’t the only ways that guys add to girls’ stress and anxiety. So let’s turn our attention to how we can help our daughters navigate the sometimes challenging waters of connecting with boys.