Reviving Ophelia (9 page)

Most early adolescents are unable to think abstractly. The brightest are just moving into formal operational thought or the ability to think abstractly and flexibly. The immaturity of their thinking makes it difficult to reason with them. They read deep meaning into casual remarks and overanalyze glances.

The concreteness of girls’ thinking can be seen in their need to categorize others. People are assigned to groups such as geeks, preps and jocks. One girl’s categories included “deeper than thou,” a derogatory term for the sophisticated artists at her school. Another divided the world into Christian and non-Christian, and another into alternative, non-alternative and wannabe alternative.

Teenage girls are extremists who see the world in black-and-white terms, missing shades of gray. Life is either marvelous or not worth living. School is either pure torment or is going fantastically. Other people are either great or horrible, and they themselves are wonderful or pathetic failures. One day a girl will refer to herself as “the goddess of social life” and the next day she’ll regret that she’s the “ultimate in nerdosity.”

This fluctuation in sense of self would suggest severe disturbance in an adult, but in teenage girls it’s common. Psychological tests, like the MMPI, need different norms for female adolescents. Their thoughts are chaotic and scrambled. Compared to stable adults, they all look crazy.

Girls also overgeneralize in their thinking from one incident to all cases. One affront means “I have no friends.” One good grade means “I am an academic diva.” Offhand remarks can be taken as a prophecy, an indictment or a diagnosis. One client decided to become a nurse because her uncle told her she would be a good one. When I was in eighth grade, my teacher returned my first poem with the word “trite” scribbled across the top of the page. I gave up my plans to be a writer for almost twenty years.

This tendency to overgeneralize makes it difficult to reason with adolescent girls. Because they know of one example, they’ll argue, “Everyone else gets to stay out till two,” or “Everyone I know gets a new car for their sixteenth birthday.” They’ll believe that because the girl next door gets a ride to school, every girl in the universe gets a ride to school. They aren’t being manipulative as much as they earnestly believe that one case represents the whole.

Teenage girls have what one psychologist called the “imaginary audience syndrome.” They think they are being watched by others who are preoccupied with the smallest details of their lives. For example, a niece was most upset that her mother wanted to take binoculars to her soccer game. She told her mom, “All the other kids will know you are watching my every move.” A friend told me how anxious her daughter was when she wore jeans and a sweatshirt to her daughter’s school conference. A twelve-year-old told me how embarrassing it was to go to performances with her mother, who had a way of clapping with hands high in the air. Sometimes when her mother was particularly pleased, she shouted bravo. My client said, “I can’t believe she does this. Everyone in the place knows she’s a total dork.”

Teenage girls engage in emotional reasoning, which is the belief that if you feel something is true, it must be true. If a teenager feels like a nerd, she is a nerd. If she feels her parents are unfair, they are unfair. If she feels she’ll get invited to homecoming, then she will be invited. There is limited ability to sort facts from feelings. Thinking is still magical in the sense that thinking something makes it so.

Young girls are egocentric in their thinking. That is, they are unable to focus on anyone’s experience but their own. Parents often experience this egocentrism as selfishness. But it’s not a character flaw, only a developmental stage. Parents complain that their daughters do only a few chores and yet claim, “I do all the work around here.” A mother reports that her daughter expects her to spend hours chauffeuring to save the daughter a few minutes of walking.

At one time I would have said that teenage girls think they are invulnerable. And I could have cited many examples, such as girls refusing to wear seat belts or to deal with the possibilities of pregnancy. I still see glimpses of that sense of invulnerability. For example, one of my clients who volunteered at a rehabilitation center came in with stories of head-injured patients. One day, after a particularly sad story about a boy her age, I blurted out, “Well, at least now you are wearing your seat belt.” She gave me a surprised look and said, “Not really. I won’t get in a wreck.”

But I do see this sense of invulnerability much less frequently. It is shattered by trauma in the lives of girls or their friends. Most twelve-year-olds know they can be hurt. They read the papers and watch television. Psychiatrist Robert Coles writes that children in some parts of America are more frightened than children in Lebanon or Northern Ireland. Girls talk more about death, have more violent dreams, more spooky fantasies and more fears about the future. As one client put it, “With all these shootings, all the people will disappear.”

It’s important not to oversimplify this topic. Some children feel much safer than others. Lori, for example, with her lovely neighborhood and stable family, feels much safer than Charlotte, with her history of trauma. Even traumatized children sometimes forget to be scared, while protected children have nightmares about being shot. But experience largely determines whether or not a girl feels invulnerable. Becoming conscious of the dangerous world can happen overnight or be a gradual process. The same girl can be of two minds depending on the week. One week she’ll lock doors and worry aloud about danger, the next she’ll believe that she can fight off any attacker. But generally, adolescents no longer feel invulnerable in the ways they did in my childhood, or even ten years ago.

Girls deal with painful thoughts, discrepant information and cognitive confusion in ways that are true or false to the self. The temptation is to shut down, to oversimplify, to avoid the hard work of examining and integrating experiences. Girls who operate from a false self often reduce the world to a more manageable place by distorting reality. Some girls join cults in which others do all their thinking for them. Some girls become anorexic and reduce all the complexity in life to just one issue—weight.

Some girls, like Charlotte, work hard not to think about their lives. They run from any kind of processing and seek out companions who are also on the run. They avoid parents who push them to consider what they are doing. Charlotte was heavily swayed by peers in her decision making. She was a sailboat with no centerboard, blowing whichever way the winds blew. She had no North Star to keep her focused on her own true needs.

Girls who stay connected to their true selves are also confused and sometimes overwhelmed. But they have made some commitment to understanding their lives. They think about their experiences. They do not give up on trying to resolve contradictions and make connections between events. They may seek out a parent, teacher or therapist to help them. They may read or write in a journal. They will make many mistakes and misinterpret much of reality, but girls with true selves make a commitment to process and understand their experiences.

Lori was particularly good at looking within herself to make decisions. She thought through issues and decided what was best for her. After that, she was relatively immune to peer pressure. She was steering, not drifting, determined to behave in ways that made sense to her.

Schools have always treated girls and boys differently. What is new in the nineties is that we have much more documentation of this phenomenon. Public awareness of the discrimination is increasing. This is due in part to the American Association of University Women (AAUW), which released a study in 1992 entitled “How Schools Shortchange Girls.”

In classes, boys are twice as likely to be seen as role models, five times as likely to receive teachers’ attention and twelve times as likely to speak up in class. In textbooks, one-seventh of all illustrations of children are of girls. Teachers chose many more classroom activities that appeal to boys than to girls. Girls are exposed to almost three times as many boy-centered stories as girl-centered stories. Boys tend to be portrayed as clever, brave, creative and resourceful, while girls are depicted as kind, dependent and docile. Girls read six times as many biographies of males as of females. Even in animal stories, the animals are twice as likely to be males. (I know of one teacher who, when she reads to her classes, routinely changes the sex of the characters in the stories so that girls will have stronger role models.)

Analysis of classroom videos shows that boys receive more classroom attention and detailed instruction than girls. They are called on more often than girls and are asked more abstract, open-ended and complex questions. Boys are more likely to be praised for academics and intellectual work, while girls are more likely to be praised for their clothing, behaving properly and obeying rules. Boys are likely to be criticized for their behavior, while girls are criticized for intellectual inadequacy. The message to boys tends to be: “You’re smart, if you would just settle down and get to work.” The message to girls is often: “Perhaps you’re just not good at this. You’ve followed the rules and haven’t succeeded.”

Because with boys failure is attributed to external factors and success is attributed to ability, they keep their confidence, even with failure. With girls it’s just the opposite. Because their success is attributed to good luck or hard work and failure to lack of ability, with every failure, girls’ confidence is eroded. All this works in subtle ways to stop girls from wanting to be astronauts and brain surgeons. Girls can’t say why they ditch their dreams, they just “mysteriously” lose interest.

Some girls do well in math and continue to like it, but many who were once good at math complain that they are stupid in math. Girl after girl tells me, “I’m not good in math.” My observations suggest that girls have trouble with math because math requires exactly the qualities that many junior-high girls lack—confidence, trust in one’s own judgment and the ability to tolerate frustration without becoming overwhelmed. Anxiety interferes with problem solving in math. A vicious circle develops—girls get anxious, which interferes with problem solving, and so they fail and are even more anxious and prone to self-doubt the next time around.

When boys have trouble with a math problem, they are more likely to think the problem is hard but stay with it. When girls have trouble, they think they are stupid and tend to give up. This difference in attribution speaks to girls’ precipitous decline in math. Girls need to be encouraged to persevere in the face of difficulty, to calm down and believe in themselves. They need permission to take their time and to make many mistakes before solving the problem. They need to learn relaxation skills to deal with the math anxiety so many experience.

The AAUW study found that as children go through school, boys do better and feel better about themselves and girls’ self-esteem, opinions of their sex and scores on standardized achievement tests all decline. Girls are more likely than boys to say that they are not smart enough for their dream careers. They emerge from adolescence with a diminished sense of their worth as individuals.

Gifted girls seem to suffer particularly with adolescence. Lois Murphy found that they lose IQ points as they become feminized. In the 1920s Psychologist Louis Terman studied gifted children in California. Among the children, the seven best writers were girls and all the best artists were girls, but by adulthood all the eminent artists and writers were men.

Junior high is when girls begin to fade academically. Partly this comes from the very structure of the schools, which tend to be large and impersonal. Girls, who tend to do better in relationship-based, cooperative learning situations, get lost academically in these settings. Partly it comes from a shift girls make at this time from a focus on achievement to a focus on affiliation. In junior high girls feel enormous pressure to be popular. They learn that good grades can even interfere with popularity. Lori learned to keep quiet about grades. She said, “Either way I lose. If I make a good grade, they are mad. If I make a bad grade, they spread it around that even I can screw up.” Another girl said, “When I started junior high I figured out that I’d have more friends if I focused on sports. Smart girls were nerds.” Another, who almost flunked seventh grade, told me, “All I care about is my friends. Grades don’t matter to me.”

I saw a seventh-grader who was failing everything. I asked her why and she said, “My friends and I decided that making good grades wasn’t cool.” Her story has a happy ending, not because of my work, but because the next year, in eighth grade, she and her friends had another meeting and decided that it was now “cool” to make good grades. My client’s academic situation improved enormously.

This tendency for girls to hide their academic accomplishments is an old one. Once on a date I was particularly untrue to myself. Denny and I went to the A&W Root Beer Drive-In on Highway 81, and he asked me what I would like. Even though I was famished I ordered only a small Coke. (Nice girls didn’t eat too much.) Then he asked about my six-weeks grades. I had made As, but I said I had two Cs and was worried my parents would be mad. I can still remember his look of visible relief.

As Charlotte got lost in junior high, her grades fell. Partly this was because she didn’t work, and partly it was because she lost the confidence in herself that a student needs to tackle increasingly difficult material. She expected to fail and gave up at the first sign of frustration. Lori, on the other hand, liked challenges. She had found that by trusting herself and working hard, she could succeed. She was aware that her good grades didn’t help her socially, but she wasn’t willing to sacrifice her academic career for the short-term goal of pleasing her easily threatened peers.