From Children's Magazine
Educationalist and author of 21st Century Girls Sue Palmer unravels what makes girls unique, equipping you to work with them more effectively. The trouble with girls? What trouble? For most people working with children, it’s boys who cause problems. Girls tend to settle down to activities and do as they’re told. They’re much easier to manage... Sadly, in the long term, that’s the trouble with girls. Due to a complex combination of nature and nurture, the female of the species is more socially aware than the male, and keener to please those around her.
She values the approval of others and judges herself by prevailing social norms. So if, as time goes by, a girl feels her life isn’t going well, she tends to assume it’s her own fault. ‘The big difference,’ says child psychiatrist Sammi Timimi, ‘is that boys externalise their problems and it comes out as bad behaviour – girls tend to internalise them, as sadness. Boys’ issues are therefore issues for others, not just themselves.’ As a result, we notice troubled boys immediately, but often we don’t recognise that girls are experiencing difficulties until much later, when they’ve had plenty of time to brood on their personal ‘inadequacies’.
21st century girlhood In a screen-based, hyper-competitive consumer culture, there are many sources of stress for young, impressionable human beings. Today’s girls are bombarded from birth with marketing messages about the way they’re supposed to look, dress and behave. They’re constantly exposed to unattainable images of female perfection and – as easy access to internet porn exerts increasing influence on popular culture – many of the messages they hear and see about ‘normal’ female behaviour are extremely sexualised.
So, despite 50 years of gender ‘equality’, 21st century girls are probably encouraged to think of themselves as sexual objects more than any previous generation. But they’re now competing alongside men in the work place, so girls from aspirational families are also expected to excel at school, and in a vast range of extra-curricular activities too. The American writer Courtney Martin puts it neatly:
‘We are the daughters of feminists who said ‘You can be anything’ and we heard ‘You have to be everything’. We must get As. We must make money. We must save the world. We must be thin. We must be unflappable. We must be beautiful.’
Unsurprisingly, the pursuit of perfection on so many fronts can lead to exhaustion or self-loathing, and emotional meltdown. Self-criticism begins early – girls of 5 now frequently express dissatisfaction with their bodies and appearance – so there’s a danger that, by the time they reach their teens, internalising these feelings will lead to depression or other mental health problems like anorexia or self-harm. These are dramatic examples, of course, but the pressures of growing up in a competitive consumer culture are likely to affect all girls.
Educationalist and author of 21st Century Girls Sue Palmer unravels what makes girls unique, equipping you to work with them more effectively. The trouble with girls? What trouble? For most people working with children, it’s boys who cause problems. Girls tend to settle down to activities and do as they’re told. They’re much easier to manage... Sadly, in the long term, that’s the trouble with girls. Due to a complex combination of nature and nurture, the female of the species is more socially aware than the male, and keener to please those around her.
She values the approval of others and judges herself by prevailing social norms. So if, as time goes by, a girl feels her life isn’t going well, she tends to assume it’s her own fault. ‘The big difference,’ says child psychiatrist Sammi Timimi, ‘is that boys externalise their problems and it comes out as bad behaviour – girls tend to internalise them, as sadness. Boys’ issues are therefore issues for others, not just themselves.’ As a result, we notice troubled boys immediately, but often we don’t recognise that girls are experiencing difficulties until much later, when they’ve had plenty of time to brood on their personal ‘inadequacies’.
21st century girlhood In a screen-based, hyper-competitive consumer culture, there are many sources of stress for young, impressionable human beings. Today’s girls are bombarded from birth with marketing messages about the way they’re supposed to look, dress and behave. They’re constantly exposed to unattainable images of female perfection and – as easy access to internet porn exerts increasing influence on popular culture – many of the messages they hear and see about ‘normal’ female behaviour are extremely sexualised.
So, despite 50 years of gender ‘equality’, 21st century girls are probably encouraged to think of themselves as sexual objects more than any previous generation. But they’re now competing alongside men in the work place, so girls from aspirational families are also expected to excel at school, and in a vast range of extra-curricular activities too. The American writer Courtney Martin puts it neatly:
‘We are the daughters of feminists who said ‘You can be anything’ and we heard ‘You have to be everything’. We must get As. We must make money. We must save the world. We must be thin. We must be unflappable. We must be beautiful.’
Unsurprisingly, the pursuit of perfection on so many fronts can lead to exhaustion or self-loathing, and emotional meltdown. Self-criticism begins early – girls of 5 now frequently express dissatisfaction with their bodies and appearance – so there’s a danger that, by the time they reach their teens, internalising these feelings will lead to depression or other mental health problems like anorexia or self-harm. These are dramatic examples, of course, but the pressures of growing up in a competitive consumer culture are likely to affect all girls.
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