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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Valley&State Backpage O&E Sports Archives Classifieds Faith&Beliefs Obituaries Revels April 29, 2004 'Mean Girls' puts a lens on the vastly different social world of teens By Chris Honor� Tidings Reviewer In "Queen Bees & Wannabes," Rosalind Wiseman makes one prepotent point that permeates every page of her insightful and very straightforward book: Parents who have daughters (and sons) in middle school and high school are clueless when it comes to truly understanding the very complex cultural milieu of their adolescent children. Parents may nurture the idea that they have a pretty good idea about what goes on in school; however, Wiseman states, unequivocally, that they would be wrong. It's an illusion, one that is often fostered by a very skillful daughter and her friends. What parents observe is merely the patina - surface behaviors often displayed in the context of school activities, formal interactions in the presence of adults, truncated responses when asked for information, none of which truly reflects the world girls live in. Wiseman points out that culturally, anthropologically, parents live on one side of the island, and their newly minted adolescent daughters, who belong to the tribe known as Girl World, live on the other. GW is a panoply of subtle, covert, coded behavior, and girls turn themselves inside out to belong. Part of the GW code is silence and secrecy - parents are kept, at all cost, out of the loop. And though they are aware abstractly that adolescence means separation, many are still, in effect, blind-sided. Not so long ago parents viewed their young daughter as accessible, open, one who looked to her mother and father for guidance and conflict resolution. And then suddenly, as if by alchemy, this same youngster is transformed. Wiseman asks in her book, "Do you feel as though your adolescent daughter exists in a different world, speaking a different language and living by different laws?" Do you feel that "ten seconds ago she was a sweet, confident, world-beating little girl who looked up to you? And now...she's confused, insecure, often surly, lashing out." Wiseman goes on to say that these young girls are facing some of the toughest pressures of adolescent life - coping with a changing body, understanding a new social world, and often toughing it out at school. The reality is that though your daughter needs you more than ever to navigate this precarious rite of passage, she is pulling away. Her friends - the clique, a boyfriend, a new best friend - have become the final arbiters of all that is acceptable, the interpreters of GW markers (meaning what is appropriate dress, hair, and behavior), and the translators of the GW codes. It's often a harsh world this place called middle school (and later high school), composed of social hierarchies, a whirl of cliques, intense friendships that vanish like so much mist, only to be reconstituted the next week in a different form. It is a world of Queen Bees (those powerful, popular, beautiful girls who are the center of the wagon wheel socially), sidekicks, messengers, pleasers, wannabes, and, of course boys. The ever present boys who live in Boy World, with their own culture and norms and codes of masculinity, and though enigmatic, even abusive, still much desired by the inhabitants of Girl World. Often to the point of obsession. GW can be a world of gossip, back-stabbing, and declarations of absolute loyalties that dissolve seemingly over night. Still it can feel like a haven, a life raft (to use Wiseman's metaphor), and membership is coveted at all costs. Lying to parents is often the currency that allows a girl to get from point A to point B, meaning going to a party that is off limits, or spending time alone with a boyfriend. Some adolescents lie even when they don't have to, simply as a way of defending their right to privacy and a separate life. And parents, contrary to what they might think, have very poor lie detectors. The often painful reality is that adolescent girls do live in a different world and there is simply no readily available window to Girl World that parents can avail themselves of - other than speaking to (not interrogating) their daughters. The problem is that Girl World is predicated on secrecy and nondisclosure. Privacy and personal space are paramount to the adolescent girl, hence parents often feel shut out. What is the sound of a bedroom door slamming? Wiseman goes to great lengths to explain how parents can best lend their support when needed. And how they can most effectively frame those very tenuous and difficult communications, a dialogue that will often seem like the equivalent of running gingerly through a minefield, hoping to avoid seeing one's daughter roll her eyes, sigh deeply, and say, snidely, almost angrily, "whatever" and then quickly exit the room. It is not an easy process, one fraught with problems, parents often having to confront their own insecurities (left over baggage from their own adolescence) while attempting to deal with the difficulties of their daughters. Parents must keep in mind that nothing that goes on in GW is trivial: a request (demand?) for new shoes, a party invitation, one's reputation, a sudden, all consuming crush. All can take on a heightened sense of importance, though they may seem, on the surface, inconsequential. As Wiseman points out, "it isn't just about new shoes." It is about much, much more, and conflicts can arise between girls over these issues, triggering internecine warfare that can prove to be confusing, traumatic and ultimately humiliating. Wiseman reiterates in her book that it can be an endlessly frustrating, anger provoking experience trying to parent an adolescent girl (or boy). It can also be joyous and heartwarming-for a day or two. The author constantly acknowledges how enormously difficult it is for parents to offer counsel, to give support, while being rejected for being too intrusive. However, Wiseman's book is not just an anthropological view of school culture and all its attendant social strata, but a very helpful and cogently written how-to manual. Anyone who has ever looked into the adolescent abyss is always humbled by the experience. Wiseman offers concrete ways to not only survive but succeed. 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