How do we teach our girls to lift each other up instead of pulling each other down?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Don’t let your daughter hear you gossiping about other women behind their back.

Monitor her friends and try to steer her toward girls you know to be kind and nice, with parents you also know to be kind and nice.

Keep tabs on their social media activity.

If you catch her trash talking other girls, have consequences. If my mom heard me being mean about other girls or found notes I wrote about other girls, I got punished for being mean.

Don’t spoil her. Keep her down to earth. If she’s always getting the latest and greatest and most expensive brands without having to earn things, she’s probably going to be a bit materialistic and this leads to making fun of less fortunate kids.

I agree with this 100%.

Also, remember when they were little, a parenting mantra was "Catch them being good"? I try to do that. For example, my daughter has a couple of friends who are SUPER supportive and thoughtful. I really praise the whole bunch of them for the nice things they do, and encourage my daughter to always think about how to pay that forward to others.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Why does this have to be posed as “girls lifting each other up?” Why not be concerned about boys lifting boys up, boys lifting girls up, or girls lifting boys up?

OP here-
Feel free to start a thread on this. Bullying behavior is not exclusive to girls but in my experience, the type of mean behavior exhibited by girls is different than that exhibited by boys in the tween years. IMO popular culture has made it seem like it is socially acceptable.

Also, I think that there is a growing movement in the US towards empowering women which could be more impactful if girls/women would supported each other.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:On the first day of my freshman year at my all-girls high school, my teacher wrote the following on the board:

"Those who gossip with you, will gossip about you."

We had a bit of a class discussion around it and that was it.

For whatever reason, that really resonated with me at 14 years old. It has stayed with me and guided my actions since then. Perhaps that's something that will resonate with your children too.

This is great! I'd love to see more of that type of discussion in the schools.

[Anonymous]

Good question. Unfortunately the first woman to run as a main party candidate for president, doesn't set a good example for supporting women....

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Human nature is such that people simply aren't always nice all the time. People get upset, hurt, scared, frustrated, irritable, rejected, jealous, guilty, ashamed, bitter, cynical, angry, annoyed, disappointed etc.

When you put the situations that cause those feelings and the managing of those feelings into different developmental stages, you get different ways that people act on this.

We don't live in a kumbaya world. There is conflict, and pain and sadness and adversity and suffering that is part of the human experience. Rather than trying to figure out how to avoid is completely and then being unable to cope when it happens, it is better to accept that this is part of life and figure out how to deal with it so it isn't so impactful. Growth comes from adversity and failure. A life that is everyone always getting along and no negative anything isn't possible or healthy.

Love this. I'm a young woman who was horribly bullied as an 11yo and now that I'm older, I realize that people just suck. Men and women manifest horridness in different ways. It's a great part of why I'm childfree because I see no point in continuing the human race.