The best book for parents of teenage girls

Actual parents of teenage girls are welcome to disagree, but there's a reason why I titled the post this way.

Part of what I am working now involved a second evaluation of the books for the long reading list. I did that when I first completed it, but now there have been other life experiences, other books, and treating them all together meant that I didn't go into any of them in depth. As I went over them again, new patterns emerged, and eventually I will write about all of them here.

I want to treat three books together for this post, and the one that ended up being most valuable to me was not the one I expected.

Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls by Mary Pipher, 1994.

I read this many years ago. There were things that stuck out and that I remembered later, but mainly I remember making a note to myself that I needed to read it again before I had adolescent daughters. That never happened, but then when I was thinking about teenage girls, and myself, it made sense to look at it again.

It made less of an impression on me this time, probably because I never started parenthood to take it to the next level. That didn't make it bad, but I'd already read it, and maybe moved beyond it.

What stuck with me most this time was her analysis of parenthood, breaking it down along two continua of control and acceptance. Reducing it to very basic terms ant looking at the long range (because issues will come up at different times regardless), it goes like this...

Low control and low acceptance tends to result in delinquency and chemical dependence. High control and low acceptance would be authoritarian parents, and their children often lack confidence and are socially inadequate. Low control and high acceptance, or indulgent parents, can end up with impulsive, irresponsible, and not very independent teenagers. High control and high acceptance tends to produce independent, responsible, confident children.

I didn't love that phrasing, because control has very negative connotations for me, and I have a hard time viewing it as positive. Maybe if you are also accepting it keeps you from being strict about stupid things, but you are still firm when it counts.

The other interesting thing for me was that I had read two books really close together where adopted children were having a had time feeling connected, and it led to dangerous ambivalence. Reviving Ophelia is full of specific examples, and they had an adoptive family that dealt successfully with connecting. It was good to remember that could be done. I still appreciate the book, you can get good things from it, but it isn't the one.

Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence by Rosalind Wiseman, 2002.

Not only did this have good word of mouth but it inspired a hit movie; of course it was going to be great, right?

It wasn't bad, but it spends a lot of time trying to take an anthropological approach, and that comes through in the movie but there are two problems with it. One is that it felt to me like a conceit, trying to be clever. Not only was that mildly irritating, but for a parent who cares and is worried and is looking for guidance, I can't imagine that it would be appreciated.

Later on in the book there were parts that were helpful for discussing issues like drugs and rape and mental illness, and I think it can be really helpful there. If I was responsible for having those kinds of discussions, I could see looking up this book again.

Those were both books I had heard of in magazines and newspapers. The best one came from a Facebook thread, where a friend from school had a daughter who was being picked on by other girls, and one of the people recommended this book. After I read it, I could see why.

Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls by Rachel Simmons, 2001.

I think one thing that made this book effective was its sympathy for the bullies. I did not want to feel sympathy for them. No parent whose child is on the receiving end of shunning and abuse is going to want to feel sympathy for those girls, but it's also really common for those girls to switch places. There were girls who shunned first and then were shunned later. Can you have sympathy for your child when they do wrong things? Of course! So then you can also see the other side.

Simmons goes into the reasons for the aggression, girls are not given enough outlets. It's fifteen years old, so maybe some things have improved, but these are behaviors that were happening in the 50s and 60s, so odds are it's still relevant.

It hit home more shortly after finishing the book, when I was at the dentist. The hygienist and I were talking, and her daughter had been through a period of isolation, and we talked about how they handled that (parents and school did great, by the way, which was really encouraging), but now the girls are friends again.

Without her really saying it, I gathered that was an adjustment, because these are girls who betrayed her daughter, and made her really miserable, but the girls had moved on, so she had to. It's not easy.

I do think this book helps, so this is the book I recommend. This is the best one -- at least out of what this non-parent (who reads a lot) knows.