Talk to me about 'mean' girls........

[Earlybird]

Have always heard about how 'mean' girls can be to each other. When does this trait begin to emerge? Any ideas what causes it?

Did you experience it yourself growing up, and what were your strategies for dealing with it?

Were you the 'mean' girl? Why? What made you stop - or did you just grow out of it?

BTW - not talking about targeted bullying toward a specific child, just general unpleasant, dominant 'alpha female' traits...

IMO it can start really young, but is not so much to them being girls, its more to do with them copying their mothers.
I remember once when dd1 was about 2, we were at the paddling pool and she tried to play with some girls aged about 3 and 4, and they kept giving her really evil looks, glaring if she followed them, telling each other to stay away and not let her join in. DD1 obviously didn't really notice, but I sat there quite stunned that such young girls could be so mean for no reason. Then I noticed their mothers....

Anyway, I have 2 dds and one ds, and have never noticed or known of my dds being mean to anyone other than each other occasionally. BUt at toddler groups etc, I have noticed it tends to be the girls who are capable of this, and the boys who seem to play with anyone.

dd1 is in reception and so far has had no problems with girls or boys being mean, but I know friends with girls aged 7 and 8, who are starting to experience it.

Again, I think if children are being deliberately 'mean' and bullying, you have to look at what they are being taught at home. As teenagers, a lot do it to fit in, and copy each other. Went to an all girls school and it was very bitchy. I didn't join in because I wasn't brought up that way, just kept my head down and stuck with the nicer ones !

ive noticed this in girls from about the age of three...where do they get it from? a lot of it seems to be:

your not coming to my party
your not my friend
shes my friend were not playing with you

so far have only seen the verbal side....a bit bemused by it though as i have two sons and i dont remember this from school personally but never hear any of the little boys saying stuff like this

DD now 7, and we've had the 'you're not my friend' phase or the threats of 'you're not coming to my party'. She (and I)have mostly shrugged that off as unsophisticated threats issued by a child trying to compel others to do their bidding.

DD is just starting to see slightly more devious tactics from one or two classmates now. My inclination is to tell her to stay away from the one or two girls who exhibit this behaviour. But bless dd, she doesn't want to be 'mean' herself by avoiding the children in question.

my dd is 6 and this is very prevalent in her age group - a couple of her so called friends are particularly unpleasant - however she has her moments too - nice as it is to believe your own child is the angelic one amongst all the little horrors I think it is just something they all go through whether we witness it or not unfortunately.

my dd is 5 and there are a couple of right horrors in her year group, who control who plays with who, etc etc

horrible, hope it's different when we move schools next year

There are a couple of girls in DD's age group who we know who can be like this. A few others may ave their own moment, but are then almost immediately sorry and apologising or crying for being mean (hormones, lol!).

how do you convince a three yr old that these are empty threats and to ignore them and not to get upset?...at this age everthing is so emotional...my son and his friends (male and female) all seem to completely adore each other but are guilty of saying these unkind things occassionaly...a bit of emotional experimenting? it seems to work with ds and he has been in tears a few times. i have said to him though that he only has to do what mummy daddy and his teachers ask and not to be rude to other adults...but if another child tries to emotionally blackmail him it is difficult to steer him away from it and be a bit more robust

Actually I saw this in full force this weekend at a party - amogst a group of boys. Although I know it shouldn't have it did suprise me. Infact as a group they were a lot worse than the girls we know of the same age.

I read something interesting about girls' friendships and popularity - that in order to be popular, girls have to be exclusive. They will have a small number of cronies, if they try to be friends with everyone they will find themselves not being 'popular'. Counter-intuitive in a way, but it certainly rang bells from my experience at school. Meanwhile boys can be popular/successful (maybe because their success is measured more by academic or sporting success) without being exclusive.

I don't know WHY that is though. It certainly seems to kick in early - when DD was 3 I went to soft play with a friend and her daughter, who I think wouldn't have been quite 3 at the time. They played nicely, DD even helped her little friend over a few challenging obstacles. Aw. But then I helped her friend over a little bridge, only to find on the other side DD with a face like THUNDER, saying 'I thought you were MY best friend'. To me. Really weird.

I posted this on a another teen thread recently....was talking about young teens but it still applies?

Groups of girls are really mean and usually need to have a permanent target to make themselves feel good about themselves.

Have you read about "queenbees and wannabees"?

A study of girls' social interactions found that there is usually a "queenbee" who everyone admires and who parents also admire. She keeps her hands clean but eggs on (very subtly) the "wannabees" who cluster around her to victimise girls who are on the outside of the group. She remains safe and can also offer her sympathies to the victim, further hooking her in to be tormented!

Think about your own childhood - which one were you? "Queenbee"? "Wannabee?" Outsider?

I am not saying that girls are bad - it's just that when my dds were having problems with playground politics knowing some of this made them stronger. It has also helped me to point out when I thought they were in danger of being a "wannabee" when they seemed to be being manipulated into not liking someone who'd previosuly been in their group.

One book I read (Odd Girl Out - v good) also pointed out that as parents/teachers etc we cause some of these problems by not allowing children (girls particularly) to move on in their friendships. We tend to suggest to girls that they should "be nice" and to say to someone - "you know what - we have little in common nowadays so bye bye.." is unacceptable. So girls struggle to find reasons to push the unwanted ex-friends out and end up ebing bitchy not honest.

Actually I know many adult women who use the same tactics!

yes, the controlling of who plays with who, and also what is played seems to be at the heart of what dd is starting to experience.

One girl in particular has taken to getting physical with the children who don't comply. DD has come home with tales of how this girl pushed another over, and how she sometimes grabs hold of dd's arm and squeezes as hard as she can or attempts to twist dd's wrist. If dd says 'stop it, that hurts' or 'stop being mean' this girl replies that she's only being mean because of dd's behaviour (meaning that dd isn't complying).

And then a few minutes later this child comes to dd (or whoever she's been rough with), and says 'are we best friends'?

Girls can be vicious to each other, from a very young age. My DD used to moan about the appalling things girls had said and done (and they were appalling), but then she'd let slip what she had said as well and it was usually just as bad. It's verbal, emotional bullying and can be poisonous at times. Boys can be like this, but usually just hit each other and move on -far more straightforward .

A lot, worryingly, is to do with physical attractiveness. Even at 4 or 5 the girls have clocked which ones of the girls in the class are conventionally pretty, and those will be the alpha females. It's very depressing.

The best friend thing is a nightmare. I was rahter firm and drilled my girls into saying "my mummuy says it's best not to have a best friend - let's all be best friends shall we". Tragic I know - but at least I tried

Interesting dontcallmebaby - so the article you cite seems to reinforce the power of cliques...

sigh, gagarin
that is exactly what i said to my dd tonight.

her supposed friends are forever asking her
"who's your best friend?" and via MSN telling her other friend that she is not friends with her but with them!
very upsetting.
easier to say i have lots of best friends.

With younger girls (year 2), would you do any/all of the following:

a) speak to the teacher, and ask her to keep an eye out and deal with if necessary
b) speak to the parents of the 'mean' girl to express concern and give them a chance to address their dd's dominant/manipulative behaviour at home
c) do nothing (unless/until it becomes extreme), figuring there will always be disagreeable people,and dd needs to learn to fight her own battles
d) something else?

I think many girls pick up on the competitiveness of their mothers

Goodness this thread brings back memories...totally agree with Chankins that the 'mean' girls have 'mean' mums; after all, such girls have to learn their behaviours from somewhere.

Girls tend to use emotional, non-physical means to get what they want and they are more intuitive and empathetic than boys. They are thus better equipped to manipulate the feelings of others and they are well aware of how somebody on the receiving end of 'you're not my friend' would feel. Boys, on the other hand, lack such emotional sophistication.

On a more positive note, such emotional skills mean that girls are more loyal to each other. For example, if a boy is left out of a group, he will be ignored by the other boys (who will probably be competing openly for the dominant position), whereas if a girl is left out of a group, there will be at least one girl who will attmept to include her (being empathetic to how she must be feeling).

Finally, because girls do not compete as openly as boys do, they have to employ more subtle ways of organising themselves.

very interesting thread.

my dd1 has been having problems with 2 girls who play out in the street.they are sisters.since some new people moved to the street,they have decided that they dont like my dd and they call her names,and have started encouraging the others to do the same.they dont care if i'm there,in fact they do it more.they seem to enjoy stirring up trouble for others and then watching the resulting arguments/fights.

i dont know what advice to give my dd though,i have no idea how to deal with this sort of thing as i was the outsider when i was at school.

Johnso - hmmm. Don't know the Mum well. She always seems nervous/frazzled/rushed when I see her (and perfectly nice). She is the family breadwinner, has 3 children and a stay-at-home dh who is primary caregiver. The 'mean' girl is the oldest child, so she's not learning behaviour in question from older siblings.....but she must be learning it from somewhere.

It would never occur to dd to twist someone's wrists, or push them over - it's just not in her character (also as an only child she is not familiar with sibling rough and tumble). I don't think this girl is dreadful - just wants to dominate, and is unable to deal with feelings of frustration when she can't control so resorts to physical intimidation/force.

Need to say again that this is not currently a huge or ongoing problem, but there have been a few incidents recently.

EB ... as I think you know, dd is very happy in her harmonious class (all girls) at school. So I am thinking about this from the other end, and wondering why there seems to be so little "meanness" (actually, basically, none, as far as I've heard) in her class.

I can only think it's down to some very deliberate social engineering (of the kind some parents might actually disapprove of, I guess) that the school (quite openly) does: active discouragement of "best" friends, for instance - so that if a couple of girls are becoming exclusive they are deliberately moved to separate tables, or given different work-pair partners; and a whole lot of quite formal, explicit "nobody gets left out" moral-teaching. Perhaps it's an example of the effects of zero tolerance - if you discourage something as apparently harmless as best-friend-pairing, then you don't get the further complexities that follow on from that?

I recall a discussion on a similar topic a while ago, which came down to trying to find ways to "dilute" the mean child's influence, or, for the victim-child, to feel it as diluted - as it is that, isn't it? Once somebody, child or adult, has been nasty to you, they then have a sort of power, a presence, that is somehow very difficult for the victim to completely shrug off. It is truly hard to ignore someone you feel has it in for you (even if they've completely forgotten having been nasty, or had been mean more by thoughtlessness than malice).

The best way of shrugging it off is to have something else (someone else, lots of someone elses) to get immersed in. But it's asking a lot of a child to be able to take that sort of long view, or be all well-set-up with lots of other friends to do the dilution. Maybe it's worth talking to the teachers to see if they can break down the groups?

please excuse the name, its a bet.
I would say I was very passive and a people pleaser, all through school I was walked over. It was happening to dd, then she had to live with her Nana for 6 weeks (I was in hospital, DH works nights) Her Nana is an Alpha female (believe me!!) it was in a funny way the best thing that happened to her. She is not in any way a bully, but she takes no rubbish of any one now! Strangely up until then the Alpha female of her class was adopted, I obviously do not know what her birth mother was like, but her now mother is a major Alpha Female and not in a nice way. Nature or Nuture - nuture in that case.

Don't approach the mother - she'll never believe the behaviour you describe!

I really don't think the girl is learning the behaviour from anywhere. In the nature/nurture debate I'm on the nature side when it comes to this sort of behaviour.

Much better to spend time wiht your DD explaining the way group dynamics work. She's young in year 2 to understand all this stuff but if you help she should be able to make sense of it without being dragged down by it.

A good explanation at this age is that the insult thrown at you reveals what the person doing the insulting is anxious about.

So for example when someone calls your DD ugly - she's worried about her looks; fat - she thinks she's fat; we're not your friend - have I got any friends? etc etc

Bink - as always, interesting and valuable perspective.

This child has only recently emerged as a notably 'mean' girl - and I'm hoping it is just a phase. Her physical dominance seems to be equally directed at anyone who challenges her - so not targeted specifically at dd. DD is bothered, but not particularly upset by it. I am perhaps being hyper-vigilant, but am concerned by the potential for escalation and want to see this nipped in the bud.

I've asked dd why she and the others allow this girl to dictate to them/hijack their games, but as far as I can tell, most of them are 'nice' girls who want to play together without conflict. Most seem willing to go along with this girl's demands. It doesn't seem to occur to them that they have the power to play together and 'exclude' her if she insists on being mean. They all simply try to work around her. Lovely that they're so inclusive .

I don't think that some 'mean' girls learn their dominant behaviour. I do think nature has more involvement than nurture and that some kids are just plain horrid. End of.