The girls are all right

Why are we so prone to believe the worst about girls?

It is a hard time to be a girl in this culture. I'm not saying all girls are happy. There are girls today facing profound and genuine problems. Where we've gotten into trouble is [when] we've taken those stories, which are real, and extrapolated them to all girls. If you actually go back and look at stats and the research, most girls do not suffer from the kind of stuff we hear about all the time. Ninety-seven percent of girls do not have a diagnosable eating disorder. Eighty-five percent don't have food issues -- or don't have reported food issues. Fewer teen girls are having intercourse than they did 10 years ago. Illicit drug use is going down. More girls are participating in sports than their mothers did. More are going to college. You don't hear about that. You hear a disproportionate amount about those in trouble.

I think moms tend to be more worried about this, because they were teenage girls once. Part of what's so hypocritical now is that we were not angels, yet we expect our daughters to be not only angels but executive angels. I was recently speaking to a group of women, and I said, "Raise your hand if your daughter talked back to you today." Every hand went up. I said, "You may only put your hand down if you never talked back to your mother." Every hand stayed up. There is a strange double standard these days where everything our daughters do is wrong.

So you had a hunch that the media and the fear-mongering moms were blowing things out of proportion.

The thing that really got me focused on this was the girls at the all-girls school I wrote about in my last book. While working on that, I hung around with five girls, seniors in high school, and spent a lot of time with their families. I was like, "Look at all these wonderful girls! They're not monsters."

There was a girl in that book who was at school when a speaker came to talk about girls and body image. This woman was a very well respected cultural historian. We adults loved the speaker's effort to take a historical look at adolescent girls, and we loved all the examples of how society -- through advertising and media -- pressured girls to embrace a pretty rigid aesthetic. We thought she'd help turn the girls into savvier consumers, and provide them with a defense against the onslaught of media messages they see every day that tell them how they ought to look.

But after the talk, this one girl was very angry. She was like, "How dare you come to this school full of girls who want to make a vibrant life for themselves and assume we are anything less than marvelous?" She and other girls took [the speaker's presentation] as an insult; they didn't like the suggestion that they were a bunch of sheep that were incapable of evaluating society on their own.

All the adults were fascinated by the girls' perspective. Sarah was 8 or 9 when I was working on that book, and the idea for "My Girl" came right off that one. I thought, "She's my daughter. Why would I want to embark on the most interesting and full-of-change part of her life assuming the worst? Why not assume the best and see what we get?"

Who was the speaker?

I'd rather not say.

How do you think negative stereotypes affect people's perceptions of their daughters?

There's a mother in the new book whose daughter is about to turn 13, and every time the girl opens her mouth the mom is like, "Oh my goodness, look at her. I can't believe I'm going to have a teenager in the house! I don't know what I'm going to do!" Can you get any more unfair than that? Many of us with decent daughters are missing the good stuff because we're so programmed to notice and respond to the bad stuff. Forget notice -- we now anticipate it! Girls feel like they have to work 14 times as hard in order to make us feel like they're OK.

According to the book, Sarah has made it through ages 10 to 14 without encountering any problems. No drop in self-esteem; no change in grades; no issues with sex, drugs, alcohol; no all-consuming desire to rebel against her parents --

Sarah's not perfect. She is a regular kid. She talks back, she drops her clothes on the floor, she makes mistakes. She is a real girl.

Are you as close now as you used to be?

We are close in a totally different way. We're both very aware that she needs me less than she used to. I think the pressure is on me at the moment to yield gracefully, to know when I need to be the parent and when I need to let her take care of herself.

The book is more of a memoir of motherhood than a chronicle of pre-adolescence. Did you think there would be so much of you in the book when you took on the project?

I was really interested in the mom's role in all of this. Mothers and daughters have a very intense relationship. I wanted to see what [adolescence] was going to do to her, and I also wanted to see what it was going to do me. They're so tied up together.

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