I was fortunate to attend the Educating Girls Conference on April 7. In the first hour alone, I was reminded that we are facing a health crisis among our girls within today’s culture. Our keynote speaker, Rachel Simmons (author of “Odd Girl Out” and “The Curse of The Good Girl”), eloquently spoke about success and achievement among girls being fueled by a brutal self-criticism that is quite alarming.
Girls are pursuing what she called “effortless perfection” at the cost of a colossal loss of voice and self. They have the impression that they have to have the “perfect” life in order to be successful. At the same time, they have the added pressure of striving to achieve without looking like they are trying too hard. Their persistent state of self-criticism erodes their capacity to care for each other and causes them to lose their willingness to take risks, speak up, or challenge themselves. They are, in her words, “trading the experience of learning for the avoidance of failure”.
Add to this the presence of social media, which has created a new kind of social “work” for our students and reinforced the notion that people are living perfect lives (after all, don’t people post what looks like the ideal life?). In addition to a school day, our girls are spending added time crafting their online persona. They pain themselves to post just the right comment; part funny, casual, and above all seemingly spontaneous.
I think back to my own childhood. There was school and home for me. I don’t remember giving much thought to what everyone else was doing when I headed home after school to do homework, chores, and then spend time with my family. By contrast, with social media today, girls are painfully aware of what everyone else is doing when they are not together. The hardest for them to accept are the pictures documenting the get togethers which they were not invited to.
The final factor to consider is our culture’s continued sexualization of girls, seemingly at younger and younger ages.
Girls who master the “good girl” phenomenon find that these skills don’t spell success in the real world, which rewards risk takers and interrupters.
How do we bolster our girls against the daily highlights reel of all that you lack? Of measuring their self-worth by the number of likes that they get? Of questioning the investment of time in the cultivation of an online image of themselves? Of cutting themselves off when they are experiencing feelings that are not positive?
I was feeling an increasing rise to action.
I attended two breakout sessions that day. The first session was offered by a Canadian school presenting their ongoing intervention with their 5th and 6th grade girls targeting their anxiety about school work. I loved the idea of polling the rising 4th and 5th graders to ask what their greatest worry was and then organizing a curriculum to address that.
The second session detailed the development of a student portfolio system that centered on reflection and a parent-student meeting that was held once a year to share that student’s ideas about their own progress. What resonated with me was the ownership being given to the student regarding meeting and setting their own learning goals.
In a small group meeting later in the day, a woman who was a physician and on the board of trustees at her child’s independent school spoke about her own daughter. While the daughter currently attends MIT, she was the only female who enrolled in the higher level Science and courses along the way. Her mother is working to change this trend by organizing a one day Science symposium for the girls in the school that is mentored and organized by women.
One poignant piece of advice we received was to help young girls to accept the reality that they will be excluded from plans (and it’s o.k.). As a Middle School Director, I have been asked to mediate between girls fraught with feeling sad and angry at having been left out from plans that were later publicized with a smiling picture. More times than not, the girls acknowledge that of course their friend is entitled to make plans without them, but they also are hurt when they discover the evidence that they, in fact, did. I’m really proud that they are comfortable expressing these unpleasant emotions to one another in what they’ve found to be a safe environment. Perhaps some girls will even begin to question whether they have a need to post that exclusive movie afternoon that they organized.
I’m encouraged that our work with RULER, a program for social and emotional learning out of Yale’s Center for Emotional Intelligence, has provided a framework for our students to become aware of their own feelings, label them as such, and feel comfortable expressing them to one another. This seems like a big step away from the ruse of perfection, as normalcy dictates that a range of emotions are experienced within a day, some of them more or less pleasant, and some with more or less energy.
As part of this work, students are encouraged to check in with themselves throughout the day to take their own emotional temperatures. They are also taught strategies for regulating their emotions, such as deep breathing or taking a walk. I’m hopeful that perhaps this can counter the tendency of girls to shut themselves off and disengage from the world when they are feeling negatively.
I’m hoping to share the work of Rachel Simmons with as many people as I can. I think the research she has done is the starting point of a larger conversation that should be ongoing for not only girls, but all students. I’ve realized that I’m part of a movement to defend girls’ wellness. They have a right to pursue success authentically without it costing them their self-worth and courage. I agree that “a life well-lived should emphasize self-care and getting support when one needs it.” That’s why I’m proud of having offered mindfulness classes to our students; they haven’t always found it easy to be in the moment or just breathe, but they are trying, and I believe that’s where the true work is. And they are seeing tools that help many adults to balance their lives.
Our next step will be to introduce modeling of self-compassion and more transparency so students can see that the adults in their lives have experienced success, but failure too. After all, we are all works in progress. I’m so grateful to have the opportunity to help shape the next generation of learners and hope we can begin to make a dent among all these challenges they face.