Raising nice girls

One of the things that worries me as the mother of a young girl is the "mean girl" syndrome. I'm sure you're familiar with it, either as a former girl yourself, in which case you experienced it growing up, or as an information consumer, since the media regularly tells stories about the mean girl phenomenon.

Mean girls are nothing new. When I was young, during high school, girls formed cliques, with the popular girls setting the standards for what was cool and what was not cool. And if you weren't cool, you were fair game for insults, humiliation and social isolation.

Nowadays, there are a couple of new twists on the mean girl trend. The first is the rise of the internet and cell phones, which means that girls can be insulted and humiliated instantly and to the broadest possible audience. The second is the fact that mean girl syndrome is happening at an ever younger age. It is the latter fact that I'm addressing here, because I think the younger age means that parents have more, not less, control over the situation.

My 5th grader is coming into contact with mean girl-itis. There are, apparently, some very mean girls at the school, girls who flaunt their success with boys (a horrifying thought when you're dealing with 5th graders) and who denigrate other girls for being too youthful or too unfashionable. That's bad.

What's good is the fact that my 10 year old is still young enough to confide in me about all this. Unlike a 13 year old who feels I have no comfort or advice to offer, she still comes to me and talks -- and, more importantly, listens. I can help her put the mean girl in perspective and lessen the psychic burden inflicted upon her.

What I can also do is stop my daughter from engaging in mean girl conduct. Yesterday, my daughter came home with a play date delighted with the clever joke she and her friends had set up. They had written a letter to a boy in the class, purportedly from the girl they didn't like, in which that girl professed to love the boy and wanted to meet up with him.

Had my daughter done this as a teenager, she never would have shared it with me, because she would have understood what a mean thing it would be to send this letter. As it is, however, my daughter is so young that she had no understanding of the ramifications of what she and her friends were planning to do. I was therefore able to talk to her -- not scold her, but talk to her -- about what this letter would do to the girl.

I explained that, even when someone is mean, humiliation is never, never an appropriate response. We talked about times when we've been embarrassed and how it's a more awful feeling even than a physical injury. I also talked about the fact that, 35 years after the fact, I still feel guilt about the people I humiliated when I was young. I didn't know then that I was doing something wrong, but I do now, and I still feel bad. And because my daughter is 10, she was receptive to this message -- Thank Goodness.

The other good thing about learning about this plan from my daughter was that I could pick up the phone and call the parents of the other girls. I didn't call them to lambaste them for leading my daughter astray. Instead, I called them to say, "Did you know....?" I made sure that they understood that I appreciated how naive all the girls were, but I explained how I felt about it regarding my daughter, and how I assumed they'd want to pass the same messages on to their daughters.

Not only were the other parents most appreciative of my call, they also shared with me things that they'd heard from their daughters that provided important information for me. Mostly, it's the fact that the girls are talking about sex.

I wasn't quite planning on talking to my daughter about sex right now, but I think I'll have to. And again, because my daughter is 10 and not 13, I can talk to her about regarding her body as something precious that doesn't just get thrown around, and she will listen.

In other words, the downside of parenting today is that sex is saturating our culture younger and younger. But the upside is that my daughter is getting these messages and opening these conversations when my opinion still matters and, perhaps, my message of self-respect and abstinence can still get through.