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.