Emergence of a Mean Girl?

I am terrified of my daughter becoming a “mean girl”. Her dad and I have blatantly tried to impose our values upon her, ceaselessly providing opportunities and challenges to appreciate beauty from non-traditional sources. This used to work just fine.

Now, at age seven, our voices are not the only ones she takes in. The voices on the playground are, sadly, louder at the moment. I have been watching this transformation in her, from a believer in the Veggie Tales gospel that “God made you special” to an impressionable social seeker rapidly moving toward the lemming-like tween years. I see her trying to reconcile messages she gets from the trusted adults in her life with messages from friends whose approval means everything right now.
I thought I would have a few more years to prepare for this.

But, here we are. Her behavior is very unpredictable at the moment. One day I catch her speaking with openness and affirmation to girls in a park about her mom, who “has alopecia and that’s why she has no hair”, and the next day I find out that she has made hurtful comments to a dear friend about her appearance. One day she is genuinely befriending a girl with severe facial deformities at her school, and the next day she is playing the “that girl’s scary so let’s run up to her, scream, and then run away" game at the same girl’s expense.

It’s hard to know how her sorting out process is going. Which messages will stick with her? Which will define how she acts and views people around her? She has a kind heart, but she is also desperate to be a normal kid with friends who accept her. What is my role right now as a parent? Do I keep trying to impose a set of values on her as a foundation for the choices she will make later in life? Or do I take a deep breath and a few steps back, allowing her to glean her own wisdom as she witnesses the consequences of her own actions?

This little incident with our friend happened just the other night. Apparently, Esther said something hurtful, and then my friend addressed it by explaining that the comment hurt her feelings. Fine. This is to be expected at my daughter’s age, and I’m glad my friend was able to talk about how the comment made her feel and why it’s not appropriate to repeat.

What is absolutely not fine is that my daughter did, in fact, repeat the comment again, immediately after hearing how it had affected this friend. Maybe she was trying to see how far she could push; maybe she was more interested in watching and learning about our friend’s reaction than in the actual content of the messages; or, maybe she really couldn’t really identify with the fact that her comment had hurt this friend, whom she loves.

After hearing about this, I got my “I can’t believe you did this, because I know you are not this kind of girl” face on, and I let her know, without a doubt, that what she said was not okay. If the conversation had ended after the first comment, I would take a different approach—something like sitting down, asking questions, explaining why the comment was not something we would want to say again, etc. The fact that she said it again after our friend talked to her about it is what concerns me. So, after the lecture, the “mommy’s mad” eyes and the finger wagging, I decided I had better engage her in a different way. I want her to know the seriousness of verbal insults, but I also want to make sure she is developing a worldview in line with the ideals of compassion and justice.

So, I made her draw a picture of our friend. I told her to draw this friend exactly how she (my daughter) sees her. Then I asked her to write “(Name) is beautiful”. Drawing on notes I have taken in therapy sessions, I figured a picture would help to make concrete the abstract notion of using words to build people up rather than tear them down. I wanted her to create an image that she labeled as “beautiful”, not only to associate it with our friend, but also to own the feeling of being able to be a definer of beauty instead of just a judge of it.

This journey is just beginning, I know. The years to come will be filled with similar instances of reconciling two different sets of standards. I have hope in the solid foundation we as parents, along with family and community reinforcement, have given our daughter—and our three-year-old son. I must also look on my daughter with as much compassion as I am asking her to show others. And there’s the rub—because having compassion on my daughter’s emergent “mean girl” tendencies, real or imagined, requires me to have more compassion on the corners of my own self/heart wherein lie similar tendencies.

I haven’t decided whether or not to give the picture my daughter drew to my friend. That forced apology thing (“Now, say you’re sorry, and tell her she’s beautiful”) has never sat well with me. I do want my friend to know what I’m working on with my daughter, but I would like to wait until my daughter draws a picture of our beautiful friend without prompting before giving anything to her.

Raising daughters. Raising little women. Lord, help us.