Adolescence

Wednesday, Apr 4, 2012 1:00 PM UTC

Why is tweenhood so fraught with “drama”?

Technology has transformed the process of growing up. An expert explains how to help girls in their "drama years"

By Mary Elizabeth Williams

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A detail from the cover of "The Drama Years"

They’re not the carefree years. They’re not the everything-is-awesome years. They are, as Haley Kilpatrick explains, the drama years. It’s that uniquely turbulent time in a girl’s life between childhood and adolescence, when friends become frenemies, when hormones run amok, when the pressures of school and activities ramp up, and Mom and Dad suddenly just don’t get it anymore. Welcome to middle school, kid.

Kilpatrick understands. While still in high school in her small town in Georgia, she founded the national peer mentoring organization Girl Talk, mostly as a means of helping her younger sister navigate the social minefield she herself had only just departed. With its emphasis on helping tween girls learn from teens who’ve survived their own drama years, Girl Talk now has chapters in 43 states and six countries.

But after a decade in the tween trenches, Kilpatrick (with the help of co-writer and former Salon.com contributor Whitney Joiner) is sharing the secret life of girls with the people who often seem the most blindsided by it – their parents and educators. “The Drama Years,” published this week by the Free Press, is a plainspoken set of dispatches from the front lines of tweenhood, culled from three years of interviews with girls around the country and framed in their own quirky, authentic voices.

As the mother of one middle school-aged daughter (and a younger one who’s careening toward her own tweenhood), I know all about drama — and the ways that stony silences can erupt into tears, or that blossoming maturity can go hand in hand with exasperating stubbornness. Case in point: When a copy of “The Drama Years” arrived at our house, my daughter rolled her eyes at the array of tween archetypes on the cover and huffed, “Which one is this supposed to be me? I don’t know anybody who looks like this.”

Yet the “dramas” of the book — defined by chapters on body image, materialism, friendship, the intense pressure to succeed and more — do look familiar. And the fact that we as parents are struggling through this unique time in our children’s lives right along with them is new and challenging territory in and of itself. As my friend Louis, a Bay Area artist with an 11-year-old daughter, says, “In my house we let the kids say whatever is bothering them and we try to help them fix it. My parents didn’t give me this kind of platform. I can see why they said, ‘We’re not doing this.’ It’s exhausting to live with this shit over and over.”

And even my daughter, wielder of drama though she is, acknowledges her growing pains can be rough on the family members in her warpath. “Everybody says you’re supposed to live in the moment. Well, when you’re in the sixth grade, everything is all in the moment, all the time. That’s why when I can’t figure out my homework or the outfit I wanted to wear today is in the laundry, it feels the most important thing in the world. ”

Salon spoke recently with Kilpatrick about Girl Talk, the new book and what our tweens want us to know about their drama years.

You’ve been doing Girl Talk and working with middle-schoolers for a decade. Why did you decide to do something now addressed to adults?

It grew out of behind-the-scenes conversations with adults around Girl Talk. They’d ask, “Are there things they’re not telling me? How can we help them? I felt obligated to put together a document that would be a resource for them.

Tweenhood feels like such huge terrain to tackle in a book. How do you stay specific about it? Can a seventh grader in one set of circumstances, in one part of the country, really grasp the issues that another in a very different environment might be facing?

When I started this 0 years ago to help my sister, I just wanted to make a difference in my hallways. It turned out that whether it was inner-city schools or elite private schools, there are so many things girls have in common. That’s how we defined the nine core issues in the book we wanted to address.

We have programs in boarding schools in Connecticut and the slums of Cabrera; we have girls from upper-middle-class families and we have girls in foster care and shelters. It doesn’t matter if you live in a rural area or a city. There’s a horizontal line that goes right through middle school. Girls everywhere need to feel validated by their peers, to feel like they’re making their parents proud, and to know that it’s OK to change. There’s so much stigma that peers put on each other. They say, “Oh, she’s changed.” Well, everything changes in middle school. You’re supposed to change. What I want to see is girls of all different backgrounds coming and laying the tracks for how they’ll treat each other through high school and womanhood, and break the cycle of some of the negative things women do to each other.

One of the things that I thought was admirable about the Girl Talk model and the book is that it teaches younger girls that older girls can be their allies instead of enigmas.

Not having an older sister, I was completely intimidated by older girls when I first got on the school dance squad. I was terrified of them. But if you expect older girls to have good behavior and you say, “You would be an amazing leader and role model,” there’s something about that that flips the switch in high school girls’ minds. They’re someone to look up to. That’s a great thing for girls — learning though teaching each other.

And it takes some of the pressure off parents. It seems like so many parents spend their daughters’ lives being overprotective, and they get to the tween years and the girls don’t know how to fend for themselves.

I think it’s important for parents to remember that girls are going to make mistakes and get hurt. If you’re not going to experience pain, you’re not going to experience growth.

How are things different for tween girls now than they were even a few years ago, when you were in middle school?

The one line that sums it up is that there’ve been more technological changes in the past decade than ever in human history. Now girls feel so much pressure, knowing that anything they say or do can be something that hundreds — even thousands — of people can see. There’s a fear of being judged and it’s creating a huge social anxiety disorder. Girls are nitpicked from head to toe, and that pressure to look beautiful and feel perfect is relentless.

Meanwhile, parents are scared of this unknown world their kids are in, and the long-term effects of what they’re doing there. You have to know your child and how they’re affected by things people say. I see schools now trying to establish norms to prepare kids, because the way we’re communicating with each other is not a way that’s respectful. We give attention to the bullies and the mean girls. But if we focus on kindness, that will become the norm.

What do middle-school girls most want their parents to understand about their lives?

Remember their brains are still developing. Adults see the world and their problems vertically. They prioritize them. Middle-school girls see their problems on a horizontal line. It all has equal weight. We asked every girl, “What is stressful in your life?” And girls would say, “I’m stressed because I don’t have the right clothes and I’m nervous about school and I had a fight with my friend and my brother is sick.” That’s really how they see things. That’s why the word they keep coming back to is “drama.” So don’t think she’s an alien or she can’t prioritize.

The greatest gift you can give her is your presence. It’s so hard to be completely present in conversation, but challenge yourself when you want to move ahead to the million other things you’ve got going on. Engage in a conversation, ask for an update, ask what’s causing stress. You know those days when she’s hysterical? Please refrain from just saying, “Don’t worry.” She wants you to listen to her, to say it’s OK and know you’re there and sympathize at that very moment. Put a note in her lunch, get a dry erase board and write her a message. Remind her that you’re there and you care and you’re listening.

You daughter wants you to understand that she’s going to fall and she’s going to mess up. You can’t walk the tightrope with her anymore. All you can do is let her know you’re there for her with the net, cheering her on.

Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams.

Friday, Jan 13, 2012 4:45 PM UTC

Girl, uninterrupted

Facts and the real world hardly exist in Caitlin Flanagan's"Girl Land," where gauzy, phony nostalgia reigns

By Irin Carmon

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Caitlin Flanagan (Credit: Andrew Zinn/Little, Brown)

Of the many questions formed while reading Caitlin Flanagan’s “Girl Land,” most pressing is why it was written at all. One convincing answer comes not from its pages – which are filled with gauzy pronouncements on female adolescence, the occasional literary or even historical close reading, and no particular argument or thesis — but from an interview on Vogue’s website. In it, Flanagan says, “I didn’t write this book from the perspective of being a parent; I wrote it from the perspective of my girlhood being so intense for me.”

Flanagan works as a critic, was once a teacher and counselor at an elite private school, and is the mother of two boys, but somehow nothing has matched the intensity of that girlhood; it forms the only authentically compelling material here. Roll your eyes all you want, and I did, at declarations like “one of the signal differences between adolescent girls and boys is that a boy does not fetishize the tokens of his childhood.” (Flanagan appears to have missed the past couple of decades in popular culture.) But then comes the quiet horror of Flanagan’s unerringly detailed recounting of an attempted rape she experienced at 16, and what it taught her about power and control and shame.

But this is not a memoir, or it rarely is, and it’s not clear why. After all, a memoir might conveniently free Flanagan from one of her fiercest hostilities — her resistance to empirical data or any evidence at all. (Or, as I learned when she twisted quotes from an interview I conducted far out of context, her refusal to allow facts to interfere with her point.)

Flanagan mocks, for example, the suggestion on a Planned Parenthood site that abstinence-only education is linked to the rise of previously exotic forms of sexual activity (read: oral and anal) for teens who want to stay “virgins.” She concedes the existence of a Columbia University study that found that abstinence pledgers were far more likely to have those forms of sex, but sniffs, “I would hardly count Columbia as the go-to source for information on the hearts and minds of evangelical teenagers.” Yes, what do those wine-sniffing Upper West Side liberals know — except that the study, published in a peer-reviewed journal, actually drew on longitudinal data of 12,000 teenagers. This is rich coming from an author whose most decisively cited sources include “a friend who attended a leadership conference for girls” and “every woman I’ve known.”

Katie Roiphe may have (accurately) panned Flanagan’s book in Slate, and Flanagan may have just disdained Roiphe’s love of Joan Didion in the Atlantic, but the two have some things in common — and it’s not just the ire of less speculative feminists. Both were raised in privileged liberal enclaves that they simultaneously seem to loathe and be incapable of seeing beyond. They skewer these earnest precincts in occasionally devastating detail, successfully positioning themselves as sage truth-tellers more attuned to the red-blooded America, but they never get very far afield. In “Girl Land,” Flanagan is especially guilty of draining her coordinates of specificity, when she may as well own that this is really about Cambridge, Berkeley or the North Shore of Long Island at a very particular time. Or that it’s about her own parents, particularly her mother, with whom she is continuously upset for failing to protect her from the cruelties of the world.

Much like Roiphe’s partisans, Flanagan’s defenders — I have never met a female one, or as Flanagan herself might put it, “every woman I’ve ever known” is infuriated by her — cite her prose styling as an end to itself. That strikes me as a low bar. If these admirers truly believe that they are saying something brave and contrarian about women and girls, I suggest they spend more time outside the places Flanagan and Roiphe can’t seem to leave.

As for the place Flanagan calls Girl Land, it is full of “romance” — Flanagan’s favorite word, as in “the emotional life of a little girl is drenched with romance.” Its borders are arbitrarily designated by Flanagan’s nostalgia, with chapter titles giving equal weight to “menstruation” and “proms.” The book includes a hopscotch through other people’s social histories and examinations of era-specific icons like Patty Hearst and “Go Ask Alice.” (Flanagan is upset, for the record, that “The Diary of Anne Frank” is shelved in the Holocaust section).

There is romance in Girl Land, Flanagan repeatedly reminds us, but there are also looming dangers, like sexual violence and objectification. But Flanagan is too lacking in empathy and too interested in imposing the contours of her own life and her own conservative counter-rebellion to shed much light on them. (For meatier stuff on girls who are not Caitlin Flanagan, you might instead read Peggy Orenstein on the rise in the marketing of “pink” culture, or Rachel Simmons on girls’ friendships and bullying, or Jaclyn Friedman on developing an authentic sexuality in a world that wants to commoditize and homogenize it.)

Flanagan seems troubled by how the culture reduces female sexuality as being acted upon or being looked at by men, a reality to which girls are often rudely introduced, and yet she is uninterested in doing anything about it except keeping girls from this supposedly immutable truth for as long as possible. For all of the vague talk of sexual awakening in “Girl Land,” it takes a hundred pages for female desire to get any real airing. She sounds pitying when girls are shamed for being sexual (though she tends to cast these as misguided bids for affection) but proposes reviving the same old-fashioned strictures that enforce that shame: “Society has let its girls down,” Flanagan insists, by denying that “female sexuality is as intricately connected to kindness and trust as it is to gratification and pleasure. It is in the nature of who we are.” Just take her word for it.

Despite dipping into histories of how being a girl in America has changed over the past century or so, Flanagan has a retrograde vision of the safe home, guarded by a male protector, that seems utterly ignorant of how lives are more often lived. The most bafflingly terrible portion of the book is a series of tips at the end on how to preserve the endangered Girl Land. Tip No. 3 is “Get her father involved in her dating life,” because that renders adolescent girls “far less likely to be targets of the kinds of boys who become emotionally, physically or sexually abusive.” Really? What if her father, or equivalent thereof, is also any of those things, a sad truth of many girls’ (and boys’) lives?

As for that “dating life,” it’s worth mentioning that non-heterosexuals do not exist in this book, though they do more than ever in the real Girl Land. Flanagan also has curiously little to say about the boys that might visit Girl Land; her two sons are barely mentioned. Perhaps she wants to maintain their privacy, and yet it’s impossible not to wonder why she cares so little about how the way societies raise sons might affect the lives of girls. Boys in Flanagan’s imagination are usually crude creatures, free of emotional complexity or sexual shame, waiting to despoil Girl Land. There is the lightly intriguing parenthetical, in the discussion of moral panics (to her credit, Flanagan is healthily skeptical of the teen oral-sex “epidemic,” calling out the creepy prurience of the adult freakout). She says that “the demonization of boys oversimplifies the problem and spares on the arguably sadder truth.” Apparently, the “sadder truth” is the actual virility of teenage boys (which, gross) but this is a missed opportunity for an avowed expatriate of Girl Land to think critically about the lives of boys.

Another helpful tip that should already be notorious is for parents to type “porn” into Google to prepare themselves for what terrors lie ahead for girls. Flanagan won’t forgive the Internet for allegedly destroying dreamy, interior-focused diaries (which get their own chapter here) and she has already warned about “the endless hard-core and even fetish pornography” available online. Yes, that’s right, the Internet also features sexual subcultures! Statistically speaking, this may be something the parents of girls already know firsthand.

One of Flanagan’s proposed solutions is to refuse girls Internet connections in their rooms, as if this would somehow keep the world out. But then, this is an essential problem with what tacked-on argument the book does contain. Correctly identifying a culture that is often suffused with terrible and constricting messages for girls, Flanagan’s proposed remedy is to protect them in their presumed vulnerability, instead of trying to equip them with the tools to be strong.

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