Over-hearing a conversation between Lauca and her friend I learn that a girl in their class has been ranking female classmates in levels of attractiveness (these kids are five and six years old) and that she’s told Lauca she isn’t pretty, and what’s more, that Lauca has a ‘boy haircut’. (Who called the gender police?) Coincidentally, the little girl doing the ranking has also decided that she is at the top of that ‘pretty list’.
A couple of thoughts flash through my head. The first one is ouch, my poor baby. That thought goes for quite a few seconds because what woman doesn’t find ‘not pretty’ intensely triggering? And my second thought is that when you have to rank yourself at the top of a ‘pretty list’ and tell others about your list that you’ve got some self-esteem problems. I know that, but you know, the next thought isn’t so great and I have to admit that I do ask Lauca and her friend who this little girl is, even though I know the information is going to forever colour my view of some kid in their class and … it takes all my strength as the adult in this situation not to spit out HER? She’s not fucking pretty! Because hey, I’ve done high school and I am an old hand at this ‘queen bee’ crap by now and a bit of retaliatory ranking could come awfully easily to me.
My next thought is Already? Here it comes*. This is the beauty myth, female competition, objectification as power ranking, all of it – coming right for my little six-year-old girl. This is why I try to be a feminist parent; I always knew it was coming for Lauca and it was just a matter of time and all I have been doing, really, is shielding her from the inevitable long enough to build her strength up for it. You can think you’ve created a feminist utopia around your daughter all you like until they reach a certain age and the world starts happening to them without you. We’re only at the beginning here, in fact, it will get much, much worse. And every protest until now – has all been a dress rehearsal, because the real deal happens outside the sanctified home of privilege we’ve created for our daughter with our non-commercial television, our gender neutral clothing, our compliments for feminised and non-feminised traits, our critiques of sexism, our bodily autonomy stuff, our anti-princess rants, and our hand-selected circle of playmates.
There’s a temptation to fully digest this moment for my daughter, but one of the few things I’ve learnt about parenting in my small number of years on the job is that you don’t react to your child’s social dilemma until you’ve first seen how your child is reacting to it themselves, so I force myself to stop thinking. I wait until we are alone together and then I ask Lauca how she felt about that experience when it happened. Lauca tells me she brushed that girl and her insults aside. (Feminist parenting success story? An outcome of Lauca’s personality traits? Luck?). She thinks the whole thing was “stupid”.
Round one of misogyny, Lauca wins. Only a billion more to go in her lifetime.
* I know a lot of you don’t like the hypocrisy of that Dove ‘onslaught’ advertisement but I still think it was a very clever little film for communicating some big ideas, and this is exactly what it feels like to me.
My daughter isn’t that age yet but my first reaction was “Speak to the teacher!” I know how much that can backfire though and it does seem a bit hyper-involved (especially since noone seems obviously hurt). Would you speak to her teacher about that sort of thing though? Interested in advice for the future. Am dreading school dynamics.
Ugh, I hadn’t seen that ad in ages and now that I’m a mother of a daughter it made me cry. I’m not ready!!!
We’ve had girls bullying by exclusion (you’re not wearing the right coloured socks or underpants so you can’t play) and girls being told they are fat or have boobies. This is in grades one and prep and in a small school dominated by a “progressive” set of parents. Interestingly the girl who has mostly been at the centre of this has parents who consider themselves to be the most progressive of all. The girls haven’t started ranking each other yet, but I can’t see it being far off.
Being fat myself I find the fat comments very sad and triggering, but I try and model the no shame HAES approach. Hopefully one day my daughter and others will see the word fat as descriptive rather than insulting. We approached the bullying on many different fronts over time but working with the girls so they could call the bully in her own behaviour has been by far the most effective. The day Grace said “I like xxx, she is my friend, but I don’t like it when she is mean or bossy” was a very proud parenting moment. for me. This girl is no longer queen bee all the time and the other girls have realised that they can say no when someone tries to manipulate them. Hopefully that will help when they challenges become deeper and more complicated.
Oh poor Lauca! I am now having flash backs to when my daughter (now almost 16) was 6 and a little girl at school would pick on her mercilessly because she has a hairy top lip. It’s taken years, but finally my daughter is starting to see that she really is beautiful. (And not just because she is pretty on the outside, but because she’s so lovely on the inside as well.)
She’s always known that what’s on the surface counts for little in the end. But being told every single day for six years that you are ugly for x, y and/or z, will mess a kids head up. (And she too brushed it off initially because she’s been raised to find value in herself based on other criteria, not the reflection in the mirror)
Speaking to the teacher, well, there’s not really a lot the teacher can do. The child is learning this behaviour at home. (The teacher could address the issue with some kind of lesson I suppose, that might negate the harm this little girl is doing to her peers…) The people who need the talking to is her parents. She’s reflecting what she’s been taught and told. Being six, school hasn’t done that. Mum and Dad have.
Of course, confronting a parent over something like that is just as perilous as confronting the teacher, (probably even more so). And what sucks the most is that because of the way we view this type of behaviour as a society, it’s the not the “mean girl in training” who will have to change or alter her behaviour, but the other girls, who’ll be told to toughen up, or get over it or to wait and see that mean girls will eventually get their comeuppance. (Which we as adults know is not necessarily true) And it’s these types of behaviours that scar kids so easily, because there’s often no outward mark like a bruise. All the bruising happens inside.
I stumbled across a website recently that talked about these kinds of things and thought (as someone who is not a mom but who was once a little girl) that they had great advice: http://awaythrough.com/blog/relational-aggression/what-not-to-say-when-helping-girls-through-relational-aggression I was always told to ignore them, but I wish someone had told me that I could stand up to them instead. It would have done wonders for my self esteem.
Wow, this blows my mind – 5 and 6!
I’ve been very lucky – my eldest is almost 11 and my youngest is almost 6 (both girls – with a boy in the middle). Neither of them have ever mentioned anything like this yet. To both of them, especially the younger one, pretty = a fancy party outfit.
“Lauca tells me she brushed that girl and her insults aside. (Feminist parenting success story? An outcome of Lauca’s personality traits? Luck?). She thinks the whole thing was “stupid”.”
I think it is a bit of everything – parenting as the foundation, but a bit of personality thrown in there. One of my girls would take this quite hard, (I think) and the other would not care (I think) even though they are the product of the same home/parenting/values.
Waiting to see how your child is reacting sound like the best way to handle it -kudos to you and Lauca both.
Oh. Crap. Hi five to Lauca from Bear and Mitts for smooth handling though.
Not quite a looks yet – as far as I’m aware – but as Bear reached senior child care year she found there were in and out groups, exclusions, nastiness. Ie these are 4-5 year olds.
@armagny – yes we often got “X isn’t my friend anymore, or X said he/she wouldn’t be my friend”. This was usually resolved over night but worrying until I discovered that it was often because my child had started a fight or ended a fight by biting the other child. This issue has now thankfully been resolved and such incidents are now rare. Having stayed back instead of going to school this year means that she is also older rather than younger than the bulk of the kids which has helped. I really hope that the ‘you aren’t pretty’ doesn’t start in kinder. That would suck.
We’d already had some nastiness at the age of three. Only girls wearing dresses can be princesses, you know. Girls with straight hair can only play with other girls with straight hair. A bunch of related nonsense that all came from the same girl- who has bullying tendencies. My sensitive little girl frequently came home from day care crushed by the day’s nonsense, and began to refuse to wear anything but dresses. She couldn’t do anything about her curly hair, though.
In this case, the teachers were actually a big help, which was good, because the whole thing caught us by surprise and unprepared.
All I can say is thank god for The Paper Bag Princess, and boy was I glad we’d already been reading it, because it helped us make the case that a real princess can wear whatever the heck she wants. (We, if you can’t tell, have decided to go the “redefine what it means to be a princess’ route to handle the onslaught of princesses in our life- avoiding them felt cruel given the extreme princess focus of the peer group at day care.)
Hm, this sounds very, very familiar, and not because I have daughters.
Good on Lauca for handling it so well!
This has me thinking about what we can do as parents to help our children handle these sorts of dynamics. I think the people who can best help change these situations aren’t the children who are being bullied and not the ones who are bullies but the ones in the middle. It is too much of a burden on the victims to have to stand up to the aggressors on their own and the children who are bullying usually have other issues. As parents we need to raise strong kids like Lauca to tell these bullies that it isn’t ok. Peer pressure used for the good!
Oh wow. Yea for Lauca for handling it so well. I am so concerned about this stage because I really don’t know the best way to deal with it. I was bullied myself as a child and all the advise adults gave me was useless. I guess I just have to ensure that the Strumpette has so much self worth that she knows she is more then that. But – I was a confident person and it still was really bruising. I think, more importantly, is monitoring to ensure that the Strumpette is not being the bully. Sigh.
You have the BEST username. That is all.
I just saw your response Hendo. Thank-you so much. I worry it is too unwieldy, so it’s nice to hear it’s the best!
I had a similar, but to my mind much worse, experience yesterday. My daughter was the nasty one! I was dropping her off at preschool and she was sitting next to one of her friends and she said in a clear voice to me, “I don’t like M’s shirt. It’s not very pretty.”
Poor gorgeous M shrunk into herself while I talked to Lil about 1. The shirt being very cool and perfect for adventure (it was a red checkered flannelette shirt); and 2. How unkind her comment had been and to think about how she would have felt if she were M.
She apologized and complimented M on her tiara (!), but I left feeling horrified. My daughter was being the bloody gender police! Clearly I have a ton of work to do.
Should I call M’s mum?
Yes, I think you should call M’s mum, or better yet, talk with her about it in person to let her know how you plan to address it with your child. If your child had been the target of that talk, wouldn’t you want the other adult to make you aware of it, so that you could have the opportunity to discuss it with your child?
I know I appreciated it when another parent reached out to me after a similar incident. I have a 3.5 year old son who was recently one of the targets of some exclusionary behavior and mean talk by his friend’s 7-year-old sister. Their mother approached me to let me know that her daughter had crossed some boundaries on my son, and had hurt his feelings. Then she shared with me how she was handling it with her children. I was extremely impressed with how she proactively addressed it; I’m sure it was not easy for her.
Rosalind Wiseman has written extensively on creating cultures of dignity vis-a-vis responding to relational aggression. Her book “Queen Bee Moms and Kingpin Dads” has some excellent scripts and hypotheticals for having those difficult conversations with other parents. One of her best insights for me was it’s not necessarily about how the other parents responds to what you have to say – it’s the fact that you stood up for personal dignity by having the guts to say something about the injustice in the first place. Highly recommended:
http://rosalindwiseman.com/publications/
I second what @Hush said. When my daughter was being bullied by the other girl at day care, we talked a bit with her parents, and having all of the adults at least aware of what the other adults are saying is very helpful.
Also, FYI- we absolutely did not judge the other parents for the incidents. We would perhaps have felt a bit judgmental if they had blown off the incidents, but they took it seriously and acted to fix the problem, and that, in my opinion, is good parenting.
I should add that I also spoke to M to see if she was ok etc… But clearly my opinion was not the one that mattered.
My daughter is 12 and this year seems to be the year of shake-ups among her friends. Or girls who used to be her friends, that is. I’m proud to say my daughter chose wisely, and without asking or talking to me about it, so yeah, proud mom. All on her own! She was in a group of friends who have been friends since the beginning more or less of elementary. This year, a new girl *from Australia* got in with the group, but then some of the girls started being real nasty and then actively working to exclude her and turn all the others against her — sending around a petition, making a list of things to do to “get rid of N”… So proud that my daughter chose to stick with N and abandon the others. She chose well, too. N is such a wonderful, polite, mature, gentle and kind girl. So now my daughter has two good friends instead of a gaggle of 7 or 8 friends, but she’s much better for it.
(Apparently N’s parents actually spoke with the parents of the other nasty girls and they were totally dismissive of the nastiness, even refusing to discuss the issue with their kids. Imagine!)
That sounds totally awful, Cat. A petition and a list on how to get rid of her – appalling! I can’t believe the teacher dismissed it. I was in a similar situation in intermediate school. My group of friends decided to banish one of the members of our clique and I was told to choose. I choose the girl who was banished (after consultation with my Mum – never choose the person who asks you to choose was her wise advice). The thing is, I didn’t actually like this girl. She was a bully actually and quite nasty, which was why she was banished. So I ended up being banished along with her. Eventually it all resolved itself but I am quite glad I “chose” her despite her being dislikeable. It was one of those formative experience in life – I will remember it as the first time I had to make a really “adult” decision.
Jane, Yes! Awful! But not uncommon, unfortunately. I don’t know what the teachers had to say, but I suspect very little. These hurtful things (as most women have experienced) are often subtle acts, done while not in class. At any rate, I have seen deep reluctance from the school to intervene in anything that isn’t a flagrant BAD behaviour (like being disruptive in class). Though they do have anti-bullying awareness campaigns.
(I’m also selfishly pleased that daughter is no longer friends with one of those girls: she was snotty, entitled… ugh…. and has been since she was little. How can a 6 or 10 or 12 year old elicit such a response from an adult? But she did from me.)
I like your mom’s advice, and will file that away to be used when wisdom is called for. 😛
This happened to me when I was in year 7 (first year high school). I am long since over it because I knew these girls all through the 6 years of high school and they turned out to be neither particularly smart or nice, but I still remember some of the things they wrote in their little letter telling me I couldn’t hang out with them anymore (8-1=7, nice mathematical touch there), and worse, the absolute fear and horror of what I was going to do with no one to sit with in class or at lunchtimes. Luckily I took a chance and asked a couple of other girls if I could sit with them, and they turned out to be much nicer and I ended up friends with more nice people because of them… I am still friends with 2 of these girls today, 17 years later, in fact I was hanging out with one last night!
Fascinating discussion on this today from Lisa Wilkinson and “Georgie GArdiner. Karl S made a few pointless comments, but I was really impressed with LIsa.
She said as soon as she had a daughter she made a conscious effort not to ever comment on her own body or size, or say ‘oh I can[t eat a chocolate; etc.
I have also done this.
If only we could have LIsa in the mornings without having to put up with Karl. If he was good looking he could be the dumb bimbo (role reversal) but he is soooo impressed with himself it is offensive.
Thanks for all these comments – it has been an unsettling experience to see this happen to my daughter and it was very nice to be able to toss it around with a bunch of other feminists.
Kudos to all the commenters here for not retailing the lazy factoid “girls are really worse, you know, they use psychological weapons, whereas boys, you know, they just hit one another and forget about it”. Besides the valorisation of a good hit, this is bullshit, but I see it trotted out wherever this subject comes up – apart from here!
I really hate that factoid too. Cruelty is not gender biased, in any form. But society does like it’s neat little boxes….
Ouch. It is inevitable unfortunately, but to happen so young must be so hard to deal with. You must be so proud of Lauca (whether it be parenting or her personality). It stands her in such good stead to be able to respond in a powerful way the next time it happens too.
This post was so powerful, because of both yours and Cristy’s experiences. It would be so easy (I’ve done it myself) to blame the child’s behaviour on their parent. It was so powerful to see the experience from Cristy’s point of view too.
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