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August 6, 2004/Av 19 5763, Vol. 55, No. 46
'Girl world' difficult to navigate
BETH OLSON
Staff Writer
Navigating the world of friendships is a nec-essary part of ado-lescence.
I'm reading a fabulous book about the subject, "Queen Bees & Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends & Other Re-alities of Adolescence" by Rosalind Wiseman (Crown Publishers, $14.95 paper-back), which delves into the "Girl World" of teen and preteen girls in today's society.
While at times the book is shocking in its description of the world today's girls live in, it is also en-lightening and should be required reading for every parent of preteen or teen girls. The book explores how the roles teens play in adolescence affect their relationships with their parents, their own self image and the roles they play as adults. It also addresses parents' own issues that are derived from their adolescent exper-iences.
While reading the book, I felt that the content didn't really apply to my 13-year-old daughter, although the author cautions parents about being in denial about their own daughter's roles.
However, my daughter has been reading the book, too, and while she tells me that she recognizes the things discussed in the book happen at her school, she says she feels removed from it.
While I breathe a sigh of relief that my daughter isn't prone to the unpleasant world of cliques, gossip and boy-craziness, I also recall that I wasn't always so happy with her social inter-actions.
When she was in ele-mentary school, I worried a lot about her not having enough friends. She always had a couple of friends, but was rarely invited to anyone's house to play or to birthday parties unless there was some sense of obligation (one of my friend's daughters or a member of our dance car-pool).
I didn't really notice the lack of friends as a problem at first. She was my oldest and so I wasn't even aware of the whirlwind of birthday invitations that can be part of childhood.
She spent a lot of time playing by herself - happ-ily.
The older she got the more devastated I became that she wasn't able to make close friends. I worried about it daily, and occa-sionally found myself nearly in tears - particularly the time almost her entire class, boys included, were invited to a birthday party and she wasn't among the invitees.
The key here is, though, that it was I who was worried and concerned. She never once complained about not having friends or not being invited to a birthday party. She was never unhappy playing alone.
As her sister, six years younger, began preschool, my concerns grew. My younger daughter started preschool when she was nearly 3. In the first six months, she was invited to half a dozen birthday parties. At first I just thought it was a tight-knit group, but as the years went on it turned into parties and play dates weekend after weekend, sometimes two or three in one week. And they weren't just classmates - she was invited to play and party with friends from dance class and Hebrew school, friends from the neighborhood and friends she met at other birthday parties.
As one child's social circle continued to grow, I became increasingly concerned about my other daughter. Fortunately now, I realize that it was all a waste of time and effort. Once she started junior high, she made many friends and the bonus is that they all seem to lack the "typical" adolescent behaviors of gossiping, back-stabbing and being mean.
However, now that I'm reading "Queen Bees & Wannabes," my concerns are drifting in another di-rection.
How do I help my younger daughter - who is de-finitely a potential Queen Bee or what now is pop-ularly known as a "mean girl" - navigate the years between now and high school with confidence, grace and kindness? While she's always been the "picked first" girl, she also seems much less happy and not nearly as confident as her less social sister.
And how do I prevent myself from wasting my time worrying about what she may become rather than appreciating her for what she is?
I do the only thing I know how to - I stay connected with my daughters, spend time with each of them every day and try to listen to their views, concerns, joys and sadness with the same kindness, compassion and openness that I hope they'll share with the people in their lives.
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