There are a lot of posts in our Facebook group about friendship issues and girl drama. Relationship issues happen a lot during adolescence for both girls and boys. ALL girls and ALL boys are capable of doing or saying mean things. Even the kindest of kids can slip once in a while or unintentionally hurt someone’s feelings.
I wanted to just throw the suggestion out there to stop using this phrase… “girls are just mean”. There are actually psychological reasons to avoid saying this based on NLP (neurolinguistic programming) and CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy).
DISTORT-If your daughter hears you say “girls are just mean”, it creates a filter that she uses to interpret the behavior of her peers. ex. A delayed text is interpreted as a diss. Going to the mall with new friends is interpreted as exclusion.
DELETE– If your daughter hears you say “girls are just mean”, she begins to not even notice the NICE things that girls do, or she focuses on only the negative. ex. A girl sits beside her in PE but she only notices that the OTHER girls didn’t sit by her.
GENERALIZE If your daughter hears you say “girls are just mean”, she can internalize this and assume that all girls are mean, including herself. She can start giving up on finding healthy and fulfilling friendships.
Teen girls share with me how this phrase affects them, so I thought I would just pass this along. Although they don’t understand the psychological terms, girls definitely understand the impact.
