notes to self
Raising a powerful girl means living with one: Lily in New Orleans
Raising a powerful girl means living with one. So says Meg White in Understanding and Raising Girls, a line that made me laugh out loud. LOL, as my daughters would say. My three powerful girls.
This is a story about my oldest daughter Lily in New Orleans. She went there for the Super Bowl (Note to self: Next time check location of Superbowl. Also remember that Super Bowl tickets are hundreds of dollars, so she is unlikely to really go, even if in the same city as Super Bowl). I wasn’t crazy about this idea even when I thought she was actually attending the game. You can imagine how I felt when I (belatedly) discovered that the real purpose of the weekend was one long party in New Orleans. But she is 21, her boyfriend was playing in an exhibition baseball game, and the sponsors paid for their tickets and hotel rooms. There wasn’t much I could do to stop her. Sigh.
This story requires a bit of background, so bear with me. When I entered my doctoral program, I had two young daughters 4 and 6. I was fortunte enough to be at Harvard at the same time that Carol Gilligan, Lyn Brown and Annie Rogers were directing the Harvard Project on Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development. It grew out of Carol’s work on moral development, In a Different Voice, which has been described as “the little book that started a revolution.” (Note to Self: Would a 216 page book have been described as “little” if written by a man?)
I digress. In this book, Carol argued that girls develop differently than boys psychologically. I know. As my daughters would say, duh. This is perfectly obvious to anyone who has ever been or had a girl. But Carol proved it, and at the time (1982), it was truly revolutionary in the field of psychology. By the time I got to Harvard in the early 1990’s, the “psychology of women and girls” was an emerging and (for me anyway), inspiring field of study at the Graduate School of Education.
It’s hard to describe how much impact this research had on me. I was transfixed by the developmental trajectory that girl after girl described in Carol’s interviews. Were my daughters also destined to lose their “voice” and self confidence and take their true feelings “underground” during early adolescence? Unfortunately I could recall this experience only too well in my own life. One day in seventh grade (if anyone can hear the words “seventh grade” without shivering, please write in), certain things and people were cool, and other things and people were not cool. I was most definitely in the latter group. The judgement of my peers was swift, powerful and devastatingly effective. I shut up, kept my head down, and tried to fit in. It took me years to unlearn those lessons.
I imagine that boys undergo a similar transition. As the mother of three girls and the sibling of three sisters, I’ve never experienced it first hand. But there is a critical difference between girls and boys during this period in their social and emotional development. When the defining line between acceptable and unacceptable begins to emerge in early adolescence, girls, unlike most boys, can become mean to their friends. The myriad of reasons why this occurs is a subject worthy of another blog (or two), but it produces “relational aggression,” a phenomenon described by both Catherine Steiner-Adair and Rachel Simmons. And anyone in the process of raising a girl recognizes it instantly, whether your girl is a victim or an aggressor. “Frenemies” anyone? ”Mean girls”? “Queen bees”?
One of the effects of relational aggression is to make girls afraid to speak their minds. Who wants to risk telling your true feelings when it could result in being ostracized by your friends? Who wants to risk anything?
I was determined that my daughters avoid both the practice and the experience of relational aggression. The good news is that there are ways to do this. Our daughters have been fortunate enough to attend schools that are equally committed to raising strong, confident, assertive girls, and have designed curriculum to do so. A major goal for educational interventions designed for girls is to teach them how to challenge their friends directly, rather than indirectly. Many girls are afraid that disagreements and disputes mean the end of a relationship. And most girls will go to almost any length to preserve their relationships. Girls can learn that disagreements and disputes strengthen relationships, if done constructively and directly; ” Sarah I don’t like it when you do that?” rather than ” Amy, did you hear what Sarah said to Charlotte about you.” They certainly need to learn how to do this to assume leadership roles in their communities, jobs and relationships.
The bad news is that raising a powerful girl means living with one. There is nothing my daughters will not discuss, debate, challenge and dissect with us. We talk about everything, all (and I do mean ALL) the time. This is frequently exhausting. My husband and I now recognize that we employ a team of world -class litigators, who are kept busy full-time, negotiating with us. Our oldest daughter Lily treats every request from us as an opening offer. Middle daughter Annie would (as I recently exclaimed during an exasperated phone call) argue with Satan if given the chance. Our youngest daughter, trained by masters, shows early promise.
This is the reality of raising powerful girls. As my brilliant friend Catherine says, girls need to identify themselves as leaders in the context of their relationships. Our daughters need to feel effective in their relationships, especially when they become adolescents. Including their relationships with us.
So if you want your daughter to be able to challenge the boy who wants to drive her home drunk, she needs to be able to challenge you. If you want your daughter to be able to assume personal authority in her workplace, she has to be able to do so with you. She needs to practice the skills of challenging, confronting, discussing and disagreeing with you. And sometimes, increasingly as she matures, she has to “win.”
This is incredibly hard to do. But the bottom line is that your daughter needs to become the boss of herself, even in her relationship with you.
So to Lily in New Orleans… While out on Bourbon St., Lily noticed that a table of of men behind her where taking picture of her butt with their iphones. She was wearing “jeggings,” jeans that fit and feel like leggings. There were about five men at the table, aged 45 to 55. (I asked if they had been drinking which shows the level of my ignorance about Superbowl Weekend in New Orleans. Lily said, “What a mother question!”). Lily walked up to them and said, ” Excuse me, I saw you talking pictures of my butt. If you are going to do that, at least you should give me your Mardi Gras beads.” Needless to say, they were stunned.
And embarrassed. Immediately handing over their beads, they began explaining. They were a group of old friends from Texas, having a reunion weekend in New Orleans. One of them, Eric, a lawyer, apologized profusely, saying, ” I promise that I am not a sketchy guy. I don’t normally do this. I have a family and two kids. We are just on a boys weekend, having fun.” I am not exactly sure how everything followed, but Lily joined them, saw pictures of Eric’s children, they bought her a drink and she explained her boyfriend was in a tournament. As she got up to leave, Eric wrote the number of his law firm on a beer coaster, in case “she ever got into trouble and needed a lawyer.”
Lily ran into “the guys” several times over the weekend. They greeted her enthusiastically, asked if Brad had won his game, and chatted some more about New Orleans. Needless to say, they never attempted to take another picture of her butt. Lily said they parted as friends, and weren’t “bad guys.”Nonetheless, she couldn’t wait to tell me the story. I think she was proud of herself, and happy that she had confronted them.
Me too. You go girl.