Mean Girl

Breaking The Generational Cycle

Accidental Mommies

Laurice is completing her Master’s Degree in Social Environmental Behavior Disorders. Her role is to, essentially, deal with Mean Girl and Mean Boy before they grow up and leave the system, ending up as dysfunctional teens and adults. I asked her if this was really possible. I mean, there is far more bad parenting going on, especially in our African American community, than good parenting. The overwhelming number of mommies, of any ethnicity, are, in fact, Accidental Mommies. Whether married or not, I’m confident the number of planned births are dwarfed by the number of surprise pregnancies—whether welcome or unwelcome.

I’m confident the overwhelming number of mommies love their children, but, statistically, the age gap between black mother and child has shrunk dramatically over the last few generations. Mommy is now, more often than not, maybe fifteen or sixteen years older than Mean Girl. And, Mean Girl might be mean, but she can count. Mommy’s moral authority is undermined by the math; Mean Girl knows Mommy was pregnant by the time she was Mean Girl’s age. And Mean Girl not being pregnant gives Mean Girl the high moral ground on Mommy.

So, what do we do about Mean Girl? Is this a lost cause? Laurice doesn’t think so. “The earlier we catch them, the better the success rate,” she says. “You have to use something called Token Reinforcement. You must connect their bad behavior to something tangible in their lives, correlating their negative behavior to their own unpleasant experiences. You have to make Mean Girl experience her own meanness.

“For instance, you punish Mean Girl by taking away her cell phone and CD player or what have you. Later you talk with her, ‘Now, remember how powerless and angry you felt when I took away your phone and iPod? You were angry, right? But there was nothing you could do about it, right? That’s what it feels like to be bullied. You are mistreated and you are powerless to do anything about it. And that’s how you make those girls feel.’”

Of course, this doesn’t always work. I mean, making the weaker kid feel weak is precisely the point of bullying, and sometimes Mean Girl has no conscience. If she has a conscience, Token Reinforcement will, I’m sure, plant a seed that will eventually grow and make it impossible for her to bully without experiencing a sympathetic reaction. It’s what Christ meant when He said we should do unto others as we’d have them do unto us [Luke 6:31]; it’s a reciprocal experience that makes it impossible for me to harm you without experiencing that harm myself because I now realize what that harm feels like. Once you make Mean Girl carry that kind of weight around, it becomes that much more difficult for her to accomplish her Mean goals.

But, what if Mean Girl has so suppressed her own conscience that, not only doesn’t she care that she’s inflicting harm, but, having taught her what this harm feels like actually empowers her to harm the weaker kids more?

“Well, then I try something else— Mediation Therapy. An adult will get involved, but only to facilitate the conflict resolution between the kids.” An adult coming in and wagging a finger and demanding Mean Girl stop being mean can often cause more problems than it solves. But, as I said, I’m all for the Belt Method. I think, frankly, Mean Girl is mean because she knows she can get away with it. I know I sound horrible, but I really believe snatching kids up is often the best way to demonstrate boundaries and limits and behaviors we, as a society, simply will not tolerate. These lessons become deeply ingrained, and Mean Girl learns that her bullying is about to cost her dearly.

Mediation Therapy

But, Laurice has a better idea. “The next step is, I make them Buddies For A Day. For at least one day—longer if I think they need it—the bully and the person being bullied will be partnered off, joined at the hip. I’ll make them sit across a desk from each other. Make them eat lunch together. Work on a project together.

“By the end of the day, I will require them—the bully and the bullied—to come up with five positive things to say about one another. Five things they now know about each other that they didn’t know before.

“I’ll isolate them, taking away the bully’s audience. See, the bully’s audience is his true power source. His circle of friends is what motivates him. The crowd’s laughter and reaction is his reward. Putting them in a different classroom or different environment strips the bully of most of his strength.

“By the end of the day, usually, what has occurred is, the kid being picked on has suddenly become a person. See, before, this kid was just a victim. A punk. Just a shirt; somebody for the bully to victimize. But now he’s Bobby. Now he’s Jake. Now he’s a kid who likes the same video games, the same bands, the same girls. By the end of the day, they’ve discovered some common ground. Doesn’t make it impossible for the bully to continue bullying this kid, but it does make it harder if he stops seeing the child as a victim and starts seeing them as a person.”

After the tragedy here at Columbine High School and other places, many if not most municipalities have passed anti-bullying laws. When I was a kid, bullying was to be expected. It was, simply, a part of growing up and you just had to learn to deal with it. But the shooters at Columbine were weak kids who had spent a lifetime being bullied and who felt, ultimately, only hatred and loathing for the kids, for the teachers and for themselves. This disaster was a huge wake-up call for America, and the issue of school bullying was pushed to the forefront.

Many schools now have a zero-tolerance bullying policy, and will intervene, often preemptively, at the earliest sign of such behavior. Which, I suppose, is both good and bad. Sure, it’s good for kids to have some resource against constant bullying. But bad in the sense that it just teaches kids to become litigants, like ion Judge Judy’s court, rather than resolve their own conflicts.

I’d rather there was some student council, some peer group, empowered to help mediate these kinds of things. Cool kids and nerds, younger kids and older, a grab-bag of different types of kids, so the bully’s own friends are likely to be on this council and he is less likely to avoid their scrutiny or evade their decisions.

Calling the cops on a fourteen year-old seems extreme. It will not end high school violence. There will always be high school violence. There will always be some Mean Girl or some Fast Girl who’s using Bobby to make Jake jealous and so Jake comes up to Bobby’s school and Bobby’s boys jump him so now Jake’s boys hear about it and they roll out to Bobby’s school and Bobby’s boys hear Jake’s boys are on the way, so somebody goes to the glove compartment and gets their pistol.

This nonsense is, unfortunately, in our DNA. Boys will always be desperate to prove they are men. Which misses the point that, if they were, in fact, men, they wouldn’t need to prove it. A mature man accepts the fact that his woman will either be faithful to him or she won’t. Getting dragged into stupid drama by her is all about her immaturity. If she wants to be with Bobby, fine, be with Bobby. A mature man is not going to toss and turn all night and worry about what she’s up to: she’ll either be faithful or she won’t. There’s really nothing he can do about it. Getting himself locked up to prove his “love” for her is utter nonsense.

But, when you’re 16, somehow this makes perfect sense to you., Call your boys. Get a gun. Jump in the car. Nobody disses me. A mature man is concerned with protecting his family and earning a living. An immature boy is worried about his rep. And still more immature boys will rally together to protect their reps by not allowing strangers to simply invade their territory. And on and on. It is utterly childish behavior, these boys desperate to prove their manhood by acting in the most immature way possible, while Mean Girl sucks her teeth and twists her hair—these boys risking their futures over some girl neither of them will even remember twenty years from now.

It amazes me how connected we all are. How your failure at parenting can, and often will, result in tragic consequences as Mean Girl goes from teasing Susie about her shoes to enticing Jake into poor choices. It’s the exact same behavior. And, having satisfied himself with Mean Girl, Jake now stops calling and avoids Mean Girl, who is hurt by this violation and thus uses her power on Bobby. Now, mind you, Jake has already hit it and could care less about Mean Girl, but his boys are clowning him now because Bobby has “Jake’s girl,” so Jake has to step up. Which is how it begins. How it ends is, as often as not, at the jail or at the morgue.

All because you’re too hung up in your own mess to realize the damage you’ve done, you are doing, to your child.

Go Out And Play: At-risk African American latchkey girls self-parenting in the 'hood.

Good News

Of course, the good news is real change—effective and lasting behavioral change—can best be attained through the redemptive experience of having Christ in our lives. Just accepting Christ won’t necessarily make Mean Girl less mean, but if she experiences God in a real way—not in a sit-in-the-back-of-the-church-and-pass-notes way—it is impossible for her to not take on the characteristics of Jesus Christ. The redeeming characteristics of an indwelling of the Holy Spirit is typically less of a sudden shift and more a gradual change as the Holy Spirit purges behaviors and obsessions that do not please God.

The best thing any parent can do about Mean Girl is to invest themselves in a meaningful relationship with God. By inviting Christ in and becoming more spiritual themselves, they give Mean Girl a better model to emulate. In our Baptist tradition, our church covenants often speak of “family and secret devotions,” but how many of us actually honor that? Make times with your kids to pray with them, to read the Bible with them. They’ll hate it—do it anyway. Getting results is all about planting seeds.

The more real God is to you, the more real God is in your home, the better a person you will become. The better a person you become, the better choices you’ll make. The better choices you make, the better example you’ll model for Mean Girl. The better example you model for Mean Girl, the more options you open up for her. And, when you least expect it, you’ll see a breakthrough, a real change. And maybe, just maybe, you can break the cycle of meanness handed down from generation to generation.

Christopher J. Priest
20 February 2006
editor@praisenet.org
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Black Girls and Puberty

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Rona Carter, M.S., James Jaccard, Ph.D., Wendy K. Silverman, Ph.D., and Armando A. Pina, Ph.D.

National Institute of Health
Author Manuscript

A study was conducted with a focus on a sample of vulnerable African American adolescent girls who reside in an economically disadvantaged urban setting. Such girls are at increased risk of engaging in problem behaviors, including substance use and mental health conditions (e.g., depression; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2001). Given the challenges that adolescent girls in disadvantaged urban settings face, a better understanding of the effects of pubertal timing on psychosocial adjustment within this population is needed. This study's sample thus focused on a subset of these youth who had been referred to a counseling center for having conflicts in school or home (e.g., truancy, running away).

This study examined how girls' retrospective reports of pubertal timing and perceived relative pubertal timing are linked to behavioral and emotional problems among African American adolescent girls. The study also examined how girls' retrospective reports of the development of their breasts and perceived relative development of breasts are related to behavioral and emotional problems, independent of girls' retrospective reports of age of menarche and perceived age of menarche. These relations were examined for behavioral and emotional problems as rated by adolescents, parents, and teachers, thus adding a new source dimension into the literature. Further, because girls' perceptions of their pubertal timing are subjective and based in part on their own sense of development relative to their peers, it was of interest to examine how girls' perceptions of relative pubertal timing related to the girls' retrospective reports of pubertal timing.

African American adolescent girls tend to describe their beauty ideals in terms of personality characteristics (e.g., style, attitude, pride, confidence); whereas European American adolescent girls tend to describe their beauty ideal in terms of fixed physical attributes (e.g., tall, thin, high cheekbones) (Parker, Nichter, Vuckovic, Sims, & Ritenbaugh, 1995). The effects of pubertal timing on African American girls' psychosocial adjustment may therefore vary depending on the extent to which African American girls depart from the African American subculture standards of “feminine” physical attractiveness. As such, the main purpose of the present study was to clarify the nature of the link between early pubertal timing and behavioral and emotional problems among adolescent African American girls..

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Pubertal Timing
and Theoretical Frameworks

One explanation for the relation between pubertal timing and behavioral and emotional problems is the Stage Termination Hypothesis (Peskin & Livson, 1972; Petersen & Taylor, 1980). This hypothesis states that early pubertal timing does not allow girls sufficient time to complete prior developmental tasks before the onset of puberty and new developmental pressures (e.g., moving into older mixed-sex peer groups, entering romantic relationships). The physical changes that occur during puberty may compound early developing girls' difficulties because other individuals (e.g., peers, parents, teachers) may view the girls as older and more socially and cognitively advanced than the girls, in fact, are (Caspi, 1995; Caspi & Moffitt, 1991).

An alternative explanation is the Social Deviance Hypothesis (Alsaker, 1992, 1995). This hypothesis states that early and late pubertal timing place adolescents out of sync with the normative experiences of their peers during a developmental period that is already characterized by heightened vulnerabilities. As a result, both early and late developing girls are anticipated to be at greatest risk for adjustment difficulties due, in part, to the perceived lack of shared experience with others. Recall that in Michael and Eccles (2003), both African American and European American girls who perceived their pubertal timing as either early or late relative to their peers had significantly more psychosocial adjustment problems than girls who perceived their development as on time, thus supporting the Social Deviance Hypothesis. Michael and Eccles (2003), however, did not address the development of breasts.

The Nature of Behavioral
and Emotional Outcomes:
What One Source Sees Another
Does Not

Past research in this area has relied almost exclusively on either parent or youth as informants of the youths' psychosocial adjustment (Alsaker, 1996). However, findings from Latinen-Krispijn, Van der Ende, Hazebroek-Kampschreur, and Verhulst (1999) suggest links between pubertal timing and outcomes in adolescents may depend on the informant. Disparate results as a function of the informant source has been well documented in the literature (Achenbach, McConaughy, & Howell, 1987). Adolescent reports can differ from parent reports for many reasons. First, what is memorable to a parent may not be memorable to an adolescent and vice versa. Second, the behavioral universe to which a parent has access to is not the same as the universe of behaviors to which the adolescent has access.

In addition, because girls function in multiple settings, using just youth and/or parents as informants may not adequately capture the domains that are affected by pubertal timing. An important setting for youth is the school, as this is a setting that parents have limited access. We could not locate any study on pubertal timing and social and behavioral adjustment that used teachers as informants of the girls' behavioral and emotional problems despite the apparent advantages in having teachers provide information about girls' functioning in the school setting (Achenbach, 1999). The present study thus used parents, adolescents, and teachers as sources of ratings of girls' psychosocial adjustment, and in doing so, extends past research. Based on the common observation that adolescents are more accurate in reporting their internalizing problems than externalizing problems while parents and teachers are more accurate in reporting youths' externalizing problems than internalizing problems (Achenbach, 1999), we expected internalizing problems such as anxiety and depression would be linked to pubertal timing when rated by the adolescent. Conversely, we expected behavioral problems such as delinquency and aggression would be linked to pubertal timing when rated by the parent and teacher.

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