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Teenage Girls: How to Connect With Your Daughter
Advice from Rosalind Wiseman
Has your daughter stopped talking to you about her life? Is she dealing with friendship drama, cliques, and boys? Read on for advice on how to connect with your daughter and help her survive these challenging years of adolescence.
The key to maintaining your relationship with your daughter is understanding how and why she’s turning away from you and toward her friends, and being there for her anyway. In this book I will teach you to develop or restart your girl brain. It’s like looking at the world through a new pair of glasses. And even though she may be acting as if you aren’t an important influence in her life, you are-she just may not want to admit it because either it feels like she’s becoming too mature to need your help or afraid of what you’ll take away from her if she tells you what’s really going on. If you can learn how to be her safe harbor when she’s in the midst of Girl World conflicts, your voice will be in her head along with your values and ethics.
The first step is to understand what your daughter’s world, Girl World, looks like. You need to know who intimidates her, where she feels safe, and where she doesn’t. If she has a problem, does she think going to an adult will make the problem better or worse? Who does she go to for advice? What kind of music does she listen to and why? Why did she choose her ring tones on her cell phone and what does that say about her? What common things can ruin her day or make her feel on top of the world?
An even harder task is taking a closer look at her social interactions. What is she being teased about? Why are other children mean to her? Or the worst to ask yourself, why would she be cruel to others? What would make her lie or sneak behind your back? Get inside her head, and you’ll understand where she’s coming from.
It helps to remember what it was like to be your daughter’s age. Remember your experiences, the role models (both good and bad), and the lessons learned from your family, your school, and your community. Suspend the worry, the common sense, and the wisdom you have accumulated over the last years. Think back to what you were like and what was important to you back then. Now if you’re really struggling to remember, like seventh grade is just a black hole in your mind, you may have to do some reconnaissance. That’s right, you know what I’m talking about. It’s time to take out the yearbooks and read what people wrote you- or even scarier—open up those diaries and start reading and remembering.
Parents, teachers, and other adults are telling you what to do—and especially what you can’t do. You have a close group of friends, but for some reason one of your best friends comes up to you between classes and tells you that one of your other friends is spreading rumors about you. Your face feels hot; you can feel everyone looking at you. Thoughts race through your head. What did you do? Why is she mad at you? Are your friends going to back you or side with her? What can you do to fix the problem? All of a sudden, a question drives an icy stake of fear through your heart as you stand there clutching your orange plastic lunch tray in the cafeteria line: Where are you going to sit at lunch?
Can you remember what it was like? Not too pleasant. As adults, we can laugh at how immense and insurmountable problems like those “lunch tray moments” can feel when you’re young. But in Girl World they’re vital issues, and to dismiss them as trivial is to disrespect your daughter’s reality. And within those moments are ethical choices and complex dynamics that are just as challenging as negotiating a peace treaty. Who says anything when someone is being excluded and treated cruelly? Who believes that seeking revenge or teaching someone “her place” justifies humiliating someone? What issues are more important than that? If you want your daughter to be a morally courageous person, it starts in these moments. And frankly, although the core issues remain the same, it’s probably harder for her than it was for you at her age. Did you have to deal with telling someone a secret and then having them forward it to everyone in the school? Did anyone ever set up a webpage dedicated to destroying you and making you feel that everyone hates you? You didn’t. I didn’t. But your daughter does….
This book may be painful to read. If you decide you hate me, have no idea what I’m talking about, or I hit a nerve, I have only one request. Take a moment to reflect. Ask yourself why what you read bothered you so much. Did it call up memories of your own experience as a victim, bystander, or perpetrator? Did it give you a sinking feeling that your daughter is a target or evildoer? Is it hard to face the fact that your daughter is thinking and acting in ways you aren’t happy about? Acknowledge the pain you feel, but don’t let it stop you from learning all you can about your daughter’s world. Everything in this book comes from what people have told me over the years, my teaching experiences, and from girls’ comments as they have read drafts of this book. I’m not accusing girls of being bad people, judging parents as incapable, or predicting which daughters will be failures as adults. I’m reaching out to you, as parents, educators, and role models, to show you what I think girls are up against as they struggle to become healthy young women who will make our communities better. Now, let’s start by looking at one of the main reasons I had to rewrite Queen Bees in the first place: how technology impacts girls’ social lives.
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Copyright © 2002, 2009 by Rosalind Wiseman From the book QUEEN BEES & WANNABES: HELPING YOUR DAUGHTER SURVIVE CLIQUES, GOSSIP, BOYFRIENDS, AND THE NEW REALITIES OF GIRL WORKD published by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. Reprinted with permission. |
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