Empowering Girls to Buck Perfection

This week’s article summary is How Empowering Girls to Confront Conflict and Buck Perfection Helps Their Well-Being.

Earlier this year, Jeff and Brad talked to us about how gender is a social construct. While I agree, I also know that gender remains a powerful and influential construct that mfp often than not results in different behaviors in boys and girls.

Close your eyes and imagine a typical 7^th grade girl and boy. Do their school lockers/cubbies look similar? Do they take notes in class the same way? Does their completed homework look the same? If only one of them has a student planner with myriad markers organized in color order, is it the boy or girl? Who is more comfortable ‘winging it’ in class, offering brash responses with little substance to whatever questions the teacher poses?

While clearly all kids are individuals who may or may not fall into traditional gender behaviors, research shows that girls in particular beginning in elementary school are more prone to strive for perfection than boys. As the article below attests, this unachievable goal to be all things to all people at all times can lead to anxiety, depression, and lack of confidence. Add social media to this mix and girls today feel even more pressure to be perfect 24-hours a day.

The article provides some helpful strategies for parents and teachers to help girls resist this societal pressure to excel in everything from academics to relationship to community service--although the techniques work for stressed-out boys as well.

As the author aptly states, adults need to help girls “engage in productive conflict, acknowledge and grow from mistakes, develop emotional intelligence, and take responsibility for the role they each play in social situations.”

Joe

Girls and boys have always grown up with cultural and societal stereotypes swirling around them. Despite the unparalleled access to opportunities that young women have today compared with the past, many are still absorbing strong messages about how they should look, act and be. For girls, many of the most powerful influences come from the media, but young girls could find relief among the people in their lives. Social media has changed the game, requiring educators and parents to also change strategies to help girls navigate complicated waters.

“There's nothing I talk about practicing with girls that doesn’t also apply to boys,” said Simone Marean, CEO of Girls Leadership, a nonprofit working to help girls find and raise their voices.

Marean is raising two sons, so she knows many of the skills her organization teaches are important for all humans, but she also recognizes girls and boys are still socialized differently.

Some studies show the rate of depression and anxiety increasing more rapidly among girls, and social media culture has heightened the sense among many girls that they must be perfect,  presenting a pleasant, well-behaved, curated persona to the world.

Marean sees the same patterns from early elementary school girls through high school.

Marean advocates for helping girls gain the skills to navigate these spaces with a different script. She says it’s crucial that adults start helping young girls to engage in productive conflict, acknowledge and grow from mistakes, develop emotional intelligence, and take responsibility for the role they each play in social situations.

Girls can’t express how they feel effectively until they take time to notice and name their feelings. Marean says girls know they are supposed to feel happy, calm and confident, so they disrespect their other emotions. Many don’t even have the language to talk about more complicated, nuanced and less sunny feelings. But when girls name how they feel in a situation, they can recognize that it’s the situation, not them, that’s the problem. That opens up a wider range of options for how they handle that situation.

One way educators and parents can help girls to develop an emotional vocabulary and give permission to feel less than “perfect” feelings is with role modeling. When girls hear that the important adults in their lives also feel excluded or jealous or hurt, it normalizes those complex feelings. And, when a girl comes home talking about a difficult social experience, adults can help her build empathy by asking how the other person might have felt in that interaction.

In over 15 years of working with girls of all ages, Simone Marean has found that many believe conflict is bad. Girls are often raised to be socially aware and connected, so friendships are extremely important to them.

“What we see in our girls is they lack a script to have direct conflict,” Marean said. “They literally don’t know the words. They also lack the permission; they feel like something is wrong with the friendship if they have conflict.”

Marean has found that girls from third grade through high school say the same thing about what it means to be a friend: like all the same things (or hate the same things), do everything together and never fight. That’s an unrealistic expectation for friendship and it doesn’t help equip girls for feelings of jealousy, anger or hurt that are regularly part of healthy relationships.

“Conflict is going to happen all the time,” Marean said. “Conflict is part of a normal, healthy, functional relationship. This is how we get things to change.” The challenge is helping girls to see it that way, to not be afraid of it. She cautions that if kids don’t learn how conflict can lead to positive change from the adults in their lives, they’ll learn about it from friends online. And online there’s no eye contact, no tone of voice, and things can get nasty.

“Role play is the only way to talk about the how of communication,” Marean said. When a girl comes home upset about something that happened at school, it’s a normal parental reaction to want to take away her pain and get angry on her behalf. But that doesn’t help her develop the skills to deal with the situation.

Instead, Marean suggests offering empathy and asking questions about what she wants to do next. At this stage, many younger girls aren’t good at immediately articulating the result they hope for; instead they often go straight for what they want to do. This is where an adult can help them think through how a gut reaction might play out. Role-playing the situation gives the girl a chance to try out the words and debriefing solidifies it.

“The number one fear I hear from parents around teaching their girls to have a voice is that what if she does it all and she doesn’t get what she needs? What if her voice is not heard?” Marean said. Her answer: that’s all right; her voice won’t always be heard. But the experience of expressing it can be empowering and it’s a first step.

Schools across the country are beginning to recognize that social and emotional skills are important to lifelong success in school and beyond, but how to effectively teach those skills in school and at home is more of an open question. Programs like Girls Leadership make the case that while the same conflict resolution, communication, emotional intelligence and empathy skills are needed by all kids, regardless of gender, the ways kids experience the world are still different. As much as we’d like to believe the world is an equal place, with the same opportunities for everyone, the fact remains that context matters.

The Self-Driven Child

This week’s article summary is The Key to Raising a Happy Child, an interview with the author of the recent book The Self-Driven Child.

I particularly liked the article’s advice to parents to metaphorically move from being the boss/manager of their child to being a consultant: available to help, support, and provide advice while making sure that ultimate responsibility and decision-making rest with the child.

The premise of The Self-Driven Child is that kids today are more stressed and depressed because as they grow up they really don’t have the opportunity to develop agency—a strong sense of self, belief in oneself, self-confidence in dealing with adversity. To the author, one solution to this problem is for parents to be less controlling of their kids.

The article’s comments on ‘homework wars’ reminded me of battles I fought and won with my parents but lost with my kids.

I also liked the author’s advice that parents need to support their children in pursuing extracurricular interests even when they interfere with school work as those hobbies develop brain circuitry, e.g., the ability to focus for an extended period time, which will eventually be used for ‘adult’ realities, like jobs. Too often we as parents want our kids to concentrate on ‘serious matters’ like school work when passionately pursuing a hobby develops those same habits, skills, and brain synapses we esteem and need as adults. I used to nag one of my kids because he spent more time self-learning how to play the guitar than on his homework. I thought he was wasting his time when in fact he was developing the ability to focus, persevere, and learn by doing.

Joe

For much of the past half-century, children, adolescents, and young adults in the U.S. have been saying they feel like their lives are increasingly out of their control. At the same time, rates of anxiety and depression have risen steadily.

What's the fix? Feeling in control of your own destiny.

"Agency may be the one most important factor in human happiness and well-being." So writes William Stixrud in his new book, The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives. Feeling out of control can cause debilitating stress and destroy self-motivation.

Building agency begins with parents, because it has to be cultivated and nurtured in childhood.

But many parents find that difficult, since giving kids more control requires parents to give up some of their own.

Instead of trusting kids with choices — small at first but bigger as adolescence progresses — many parents insist on micromanaging everything from homework to friendships.

The author’s advice to parents is to stop thinking of yourself as your child's boss or manager, but rather try consultant.

I spoke with Bill Stixrud, a neuropsychologist who has spent the past 30 years helping parents and kids navigate life's challenges.

Let's start with a basic definition from the book's title. What does it mean for a child to be self-driven? When I used to do psychotherapy, I was struck by how many young adults who said, "I feel like I've spent my whole life trying to live up to other people's expectations. I want to try to figure out what's really important to me." I think that the self-driven child is driven by internal motivation as opposed to other people's expectations, rewards, insecurity or fear. To be self-driven, kids need to have a sense of control over their lives and are energetic about directing their lives in the direction they want to go.

Consultants, not managers? I can imagine some parents feeling really uncomfortable giving up that much control over their children's lives. I’ve heard from family after family saying, "I hate the time after dinner at our house because it's World War Three." And I was struck by how many of these meaningless fights would happen over homework — completely unproductive fights, hugely stressful, pitting the kid against his parents. If you decide you're not going to fight about this anymore, say instead, "How can I help?" You think about yourself as a consultant and acknowledge respectfully that it's the kid's homework. You can't make your child do it. What you can do is offer to help. You can set up what I call consulting hours between 6:30 and 7:30 p.m., and just say, "This is your work, and I respect that you can figure this out and I'll help you."

Letting go can be especially hard for anxious parents, who worry a lot about their kids getting good grades, getting into a good college, landing a good job, etc. How do you help them let go? All of us have what I call a shared delusion: that the path to becoming successful is extremely narrow and, if you fall off it, you're sunk. And it just doesn't take very long to look around and realize how untrue that is. Research suggests that it doesn't make that much difference where you go to college in terms of how successful you are financially or professionally or how satisfied you are or how happy you are. The idea that getting into the most elite college at any cost is the right focus of a kid's development is completely wrong. And many parents with enough support can come to see that and make peace with it. But it's a big project because so much of the world that we live in gives the opposite message. Also, we need to make peace with reality. And the reality is, you can't make a kid do his work. And that means it can't be the parent's responsibility to ensure that the kid always does his homework and does it well. In some ways, it's also disrespectful to the kid. I start with the assumption that kids have a brain in their head and they want their lives to work. They want to do well. That's why we want to change the energy, so the energy is coming from the kid seeking help from us rather than us trying to boss the kid, sending the message, "You can't do this on your own."

One of my favorite moments in the book is when you reveal how you, as a parent, approached homework and report cards with your kids. What was the message you were trying to convey to them? When my kids were little, I had just been reading some research that suggested there's a very low correlation between grades and success in life. And so, when my kids were in elementary school, I said, "I'm happy to look at your report card, but I don't care that much. I care much more that you work hard to develop yourself, and part of that is developing yourself as a student. But also it means developing yourself as a person. If you want to be an athlete or musician or whatever is important to you, I care much more about that because that's the stuff — that self-development — that helps you be successful. It's not the grades."

On the subject of homework, you say: Inspire but don't require. A number of years ago I wrote a couple papers on homework and I was dumbfounded to learn that there's virtually no correlation between the amount of time spent on homework and what you learn in elementary school. Research today still finds no compelling evidence that homework contributes to learning in elementary school and even in middle school — or in high school beyond two, two-and-a-half hours. I think the wisest thing is to try to inspire kids to learn at home. I don't want kids going home and being on social media or video games all night. I want them to be working on developing themselves, and I want teachers to inspire kids to learn. Tell them, "Here's what you're going to get out of this assignment. I think it will help you. Or find a different way to learn this material." But don't require homework and grade it because, in my opinion, it confuses the means for the end.

You say the best way to motivate a child for the things you think he should focus on is to let him spend time on the things he wants to focus on. Why? Reed Larson studies adolescent development with a strong focus on motivation. He concluded that the best way to develop a self-motivated, older-adolescent adult is to encourage their participation in their pastimes — in the stuff they love. The point he's made is that, if a kid is deeply involved in something that he loves to do, he's going to create a brain-state that combines high focus, high energy, high effort and low stress. Ideally, at least in our professional lives, that's where we want to be most of the time. We want to be interested, engaged, active, alert, and focused but not highly stressed. In my own experience, I was a C+ student in high school, but I spent at least two or three hours a night working on rock 'n' roll music. I was in a band and learned to play instruments and learning chord structure and practicing harmony parts. I feel that I really sculpted a brain that, once I found something professionally that really speaks to me, I could go pedal to the metal.