What Can Parents Do About Mean Girl Behavior?

In Part 2 of 2 of her series on bullying, Samantha Parent Walravens provides pathways to discuss Mean Girl behavior with your teen girl, and steps to take if bullying is happening.

As a parent, what should you do if you suspect that your daughter is being bullied by a mean girl?

1. Get the facts. Find out what’s happening, who’s doing it, how long it’s been going on, and if the teacher knows.
2. Make sure your child knows that it’s not her fault.
3. Talk about ways of responding to mean girls’ behavior. Role-play with her, acting out the different scenarios she might encounter.
4. Encourage her to get involved in activities that focus on her talents and interests, especially activities outside of school and even outside of town. This will help her form new friendships outside of the “cliques” and put her with kids who share common interests. It may help your child realize that the mean girls are not “all that.”
5. Tell her your own story if you were bullied as a child (and most of us were, in some way). What did you do in response? Did it work?

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What Motivates Mean Girl Behavior?

Samantha Parent Walravens gets to the heart of the “Mean Girl” culture, so that we can effectively address it. Instead of merely demonizing the behavior, understanding the motivations can be a first step to stopping it.

Our culture is fascinated with the image of the mean girl. Reality TV shows like The Real Housewives of New York, The Jersey Shore, and The Hills feature real-life mean girls in action — publicly humiliating and spreading nasty rumors about each other, pitting friend against friend, excluding or rejecting former friends, and even engaging in physical aggression.

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Why We Should Let Our Kids Fail

Samantha understands but warns against the tendency parents have to shelter their children from failure.

As parents, our natural instinct is to protect our children from harm, disappointment and failure. But doing so is not always in our kids’ best interests. When my daughter was in fourth grade, her basketball team was on a 0-7-game losing streak with no apparent signs of a mid-season comeback. After a particularly dreadful loss, …

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Mean Girls in Kindergarten? Are You Kidding Me?

Samantha Parent Walravens realizes how early drama can arise among young girls, especially in school.

I have four kids – my boys are 15 and 13, my girls are 9 and 5. While my boys nearly drove me into the ground as toddlers with their endless physical energy and constant running around, the girls are currently winning the race to dig me an early grave with their ongoing girl drama and emotional highs and lows.

If I had to choose, I’d take the physical exhaustion of boys over the emotional exhaustion of girls ANY DAY.

I wasn’t expecting the girl drama to start at such a young age, however. This morning, my 5-year-old stopped me at the door of her Kindergarten classroom with tears running down her chubby little cheeks. She told me that she was scared to go to school, that her friends weren’t being nice, and that she wanted to go home.

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