In the the article “Helping Girls Cope with Bullying and Frenemies,” author Signe Whitson describes the passive aggressive world girls live in. She denotes that parents should be aware of their child’s emotions and how another girl can strongly affect them. Whitson describes simple lessons that parents should teach their child that will truly help her with her troubles with her friends. Girl friends are always nice to have, a good support system, a shoulder to cry on, someone who will lift you up and give you confidence, and make you laugh, but at the same time they could be a devil in disguise. 

Whitson focuses on the common question: “What can adults do to help kids cope with inevitable experiences of friendship conflict and bullying?”

To Intervene or Not to Intervene?

It is very confusing when it is the right time to intervene. Parents have trouble deciding if they should protect their child from bullying and the pain that comes with a broken friendship or let them figure it out. Truthfully, no child should be left to deal with their pain alone especially when they lose a friendship. In the moment, calling off the friendship may have been the right decision because your child’s mental health and self-esteem can now improve, but your daughter just lost a person that was a piece of her life for so much time. This is when your child needs adult support and reassurance that everything will be okay. Bullying is a huge part of a girl’s life and most girls don’t know how to cope with it or even know that friendship should not be this hard. 

Teach Her to Know it When it Happens

Bullying is known to fly “under-the-radar” in a sense that it is very hard to distinguish when it is happening.  Many girls don’t know what they are experiencing it in their friendship until the pain, humiliation, and isolation gets into their heads. Even then, it is important that parents keep and open dialogue with their child and teach them typical behaviors that they need to look out for in a friendship...the warning signs. 

When girls know what bullying looks and feels like, they are more educated to make a decision to move on from friendships that are making them feel bad when using these behaviors.

Whitson lists the common behaviors that bullies do that adults and kids need to be consciousness of: 

1. Excluding girls from parties and play dates

2. Talking about parties and play dates in front of girls who are not invited

3. Mocking, teasing, and calling girls names

4. Giving girls the "silent treatment"

5. Threatening to take away friendship ("I won't be your friend anymore if...")

6. Encouraging others to "gang up" on a girl you are angry with

7. Spreading rumors and starting gossip about a girl

8. "Forgetting" to save a seat for a friend or leaving a girl out by "saving a seat" for someone else

9. Saying something mean and then following it with "just joking" to try to avoid blame

10. Using cell phones and/or social media to gossip, start rumors, say mean things, or forward embarrassing posts and photos

Help Your Daughter Cope with her Anger

Remember anger is a normal emotion to have. However, many girls are taught at a young age that anger is bad. They are pressured to be “good” all the time but that is a little difficult when their feelings get hurt. This is when your child needs to express how they feel no matter how hard it may be. Whitson provides an example of how a child should communicate her feelings: "Hey. I don't like the way you are treating me right now. I'm feeling angry about what you just said/did/pretended not to do, and I'm not going to let you treat me that way anymore.

Encourage Her to Show Strength

It is okay to feel sad, or hurt, or angry, but it is even better if girls know how to communicate what they are feeling whether that is to a close friend or a frenemy. However, when it comes to facing off with a frenemy, Whitson advices to parents ”teach young girls how to show resolute strength.” Teach your child how to be strong verbally in a sense that she knows how to control what comes out of her mouth and deflect a situation whenever their feelings are disrespected. As a parent, it is your job to be a cushion for your child where she can lean on you for support and express her emotions: a safe place to be vulnerable. 

Teach Her to Know What She is Looking For

A friendship provides a sense of belonging where girls should be comfortable being themselves and opening up. If your daughter feels like she can’t do that then the friendship should be questioned. In order to feel accepted and embraced, a friendly, heart warming conversation with your daughter is never too bad to remind her about the values she should look for in a friendship. Whitson acknowledges that in any real friendship, both parties should:

• Use kind words

• Take turns and cooperates

• Share

• Uses words to tell each other how she feels

• Help each other when needed

• Compliments each other 

• Includes each other 

• Is always there for each other 

• Understands how each other feels

• Care about each other’s opinions and feelings

• Stand up for one another 

• Is fun to be with

• Has a lot in common with each other 

When girls understand their feelings and how they should communicate them, a beautiful and supportive friendship will result. With help from their parents, girls will learn all the skills needed to form a healthy friendship by knowing what a quality friendship looks like. 

For more information on how Hilber Psychological Services can help you and your children to cope with their friendship conflicts and feelings, please contact us. 

- Written by Lily Schmitt and Tanya L. Hilber, PsyD

References 

Whitson, Signe. “Helping Girls Cope with Bullying and Frenemies.” Psychology Today. Web. 12, Jan. 2015. https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/passive-aggressive-diaries/201501/helping-girls-cope-bullying-and-frenemies

In the article “How to Help Tweens and Teens Manage Social Conflict,” author Lisa Damour describes the difference between a conflict and what is defined as bullying. She suggests multiple ways parents can address these problems. Also in her book “Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls,” she references how you as a parent can deal with stress and anxiety from experiencing a conflict with your child and another tween or teen. 

To begin with, Damour illustrates that middle school and high school are the prime times for bullying and conflict to occur. In school, “social friction and hurt feelings often come with the territory, with the risk of causing intense emotional stress both for the tweens and teenagers themselves...” (Damour).

“Conflict is unavoidable and can be a point of growth,” says Andrea Shaffer, a teacher and coach for conflict cases at the private preschool-grade 12 Chicago Waldorf Schools. Although conflict can be very mentally draining, once teens work out their conflicts, it is very rewarding. With friendship comes conflict. Each friendship endures a hardship that tests their friendship. As a teenager conflict is very hard to deal with alone. It is in these situations when parents are recommended to step in. Not only will parents help diffuse the situation, but also through the process, children will learn how to communicate clearly and express how they are feeling about the situation in a calm, non-blaming tone of voice. 

Parents are most helpful to their children when they take conflict seriously and “have strategies to coach them along as they work to resolve things on their own” according to Damour.

Don’t Confuse Conflict With Bullying

Damour alludes that “when our [a] child suffers a social injury, it’s easy to conclude that he or she has been bullied.” However, experts suggest that this word is commonly misconceived. Bullying is a term that is used frequently when aggression is in the eye. 

Social discord “rarely involves bullying,” explains Phyllis Fagell, a counselor at the Sheridan School, in Washington, D.C., and the author of the forthcoming book “Middle School Matters.” “Most commonly, conflict stems from anything ranging from a misunderstood comment to a spilled secret, to a lopsided friendship.”

When this occurs, it is difficult for many to diagnose when to intervene. Sometimes teenagers just need to work it out, while other times require adult, teacher, coach or counselor supervision. In either of these situations, it is important to remember that each child is emotional. Although one may be the main cause of the problem (the bully), they should both be treated fairly. As a parent, Damour explains that “you’ll want to take a measured, evidence-based approach to the problem” if your child is being bullied. This way you can develop strategies to help manage the situation such as sitting down and having a conversation, separating the two who are in the conflict, or taking it up to a more authoritative figure at the school.

Teach Healthy Conflict

In order to diffuse conflict, parents should coach and practice what their teen should say and do. From there, teens and tweens can decide their next move based on how comfortable they feel with the whole thing. It is dire to measure how serious the situation is. Either way, it is important “to stand up for yourself while being respectful of others” (Damour).

At any age, most people go directly to an unhealthy response and source of action when it comes to being upset with someone. Damour suggests that when “advising adolescents on how they might handle a disagreement, I first teach them about reactions to conflict and allow them to daydream their way through a bulldozer, doormat or doormat-with-spikes response.”

Most people want to get back at the person who caused them pain. Some people verbally rake someone while others post an unflattering image of the “friend” on social media and write a nasty comment about them. With this being done, the “friend” might respond. There is no telling how or in what tone they will respond in, but the whole goal of the picture on social media is to get a reaction out of the other person. By doing this, the two friends are forced to talk because one caused a commotion that needs to be dealt with. 

“Kids may need to be reminded,” says Ms. Fagell, “to keep arguments offline. Because once they’ve waged war in a group chat at one in the morning, it becomes much harder to achieve a peaceful resolution.”

Let Them Pick Their Battles

When it comes to two teens who are in an argument, it is best to either decide to guide your child in the right direction by diffusing the situation in a civil way or deciding not to engage at all. Although you may feel the urge to help your child or tell them what to do every step of the way, “conflict, even when handled well, takes time and tremendous mental energy” (Damour). In these types of situations, it is best to help your child weigh out the costs and benefits of engaging in conflict. Damour states that it is important to ask you and your child questions that will help them determine their next step: “Do they care about the relationship enough to want to work on it? Do they expect their pillar overture to meet with a similar response?”

“Contrary to conventional wisdom,” adds Ms. Fagell, “kids aren’t always looking to restore friendships. They may need permission to move on or need help creating a more comfortable, if distant, interpersonal dynamic.” They just need to find some closure.

Teaching your child to pick their battles is a risky step. In detail, they could go the easy way and just cut off their “friend” or they could do everything to hurt that “friend.” Either way, most tweens and teens will want to emotionally hurt the other person and make them feel the burden that they felt. But that’s not the goal. As Ms. Shaffer notes, “we don’t have emotional Bubble Wrap for children, but we do have ways to help them develop the emotional agility to navigate through difficult situations.”

For more information on friendships, teens, and tweens and conflict resolution, please contact us. To learn how we can help you or your child who may be struggling with being successful managing the social world, contact us or visit our website. For more information on therapy, visit Hilber Psychological Services.

- Written by Lily Schmitt and Tanya L. Hilber, PsyD

References

Damour, Lisa. (2019, Jan 16). How to Help Tweens and Teens Manage Social Conflict. The NY Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/16/well/family/how-to-help-tweens-and-teens-manage-social-conflict.html.

Damour, Lisa. (2017). Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions Into Adulthood. New York, NY: Ballantine Books.

Damout, Lisa. (2019). Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls. New York, NY: Ballantine Books.

In the article, “New Childhood Anxiety Treatment Focuses on the Parents,” author Matt Kristoffersen discusses how Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE) is an alternative to behavioral therapy used to treat childhood anxiety. He acknowledges that it all starts with the parents and how they perceive their child’s anxiety in the given situation.

Stated by the National Institute of Mental Health, “nearly one in three American children will experience at least some kind of anxiety disorder before reaching adulthood.” Although drugs and therapy techniques have shown to be proven successful in the past years, a recent study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, promulgates a new technique developed for the parents.

A team of Yale researchers randomly selected 124 children with anxiety and assigned them to a therapy-based group or a parent-only group for 12 weeks. In these meetings they were divided into two groups, one in cognitive behavioral therapy and one in SPACE therapy. They learned how to control their symptoms and confront their fears through therapeutic exposure. The researchers observed that children in the first group never spoke to a therapist about their specific anxiety during the trial. The researchers suggested that parents should support their child in a sense of letting them figure out how to cope with anxiety on their own, by using the SPACE treatment, rather than continuing to oblige to their child’s behavior. For example, “if a child gets anxious when there are guests in the house, parents may stop inviting people over. However, according to the study, children can grow accustomed to these accommodations over time, which can lead to greater difficulty with anxiety later in life.” In this case, parents should take a step back and “replace accommodation with words of support and with expressions of confidence in their children’s abilities to deal with anxiety on their own.”

In the first study administered in 2013, author Lebowitz prompted parents to follow a script of ways to be supportive and reassuring in order to reduce accommodations for their child with anxiety:

“We understand it makes you feel really anxious or afraid,” the script said. “We want you to know that this is perfectly natural and everyone feels afraid some of the time. But we also want you to know that it is our job as your parents to help you get better at things that are hard for you, and we have decided to do exactly that. We are going to be working on this for a while and we know it will probably take time, but we love you too much not to help you when you need help.”

Through SPACE therapy, parents were able to form a much closer relationship with their children than those of the children in the cognitive therapy-based group and help them work on their anxiety problem. Because of this study, “SPACE will provide an alternative for children with anxiety who may not respond well to traditional therapy or who refuse to participate.”

For more information on therapy for anxiety with the parents or the children, or any other therapy, please contact us at Hilber Psychological Services.

-Written by Lily Schmitt and Tanya L. Hilber, PsyD

Reference

Kristoffersen, Matt. “New Childhood Anxiety Treatment Focuses on the Parents.” Yale News. Scitech. Web. 26 March 2019. https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2019/03/26/new-childhood-anxiety-treatment-focuses-on-the-parents/?fbclid=IwAR1_yDjSIF9njsJ6ATplIrWwivPIqbj-OgqtehNYIxvfE85vrVkfTFoOj7k

In the article “Resilient Kids Come From Parents Who Do These 8 Things,” Lizzy Francis recognizes what it takes for children to learn how to be resilient when their parents do the following eight things.

When your child gets frustrated, whether it’s because he or she can’t put together LEGO pieces or does not yet understand a math problem, this is the time to teach your child how to bounce back from being discouraged and how to overcome their struggles. If taught properly, children will understand how to overcome their struggles and how to better handle their stress. When resilience is learned from a young age through numerous lessons, children will be able to manage their stressors better as adults.

According to Amy Morin, LCSW, a psychotherapist and the author of “13 Things Mentally Strong Parents Don’t Do”, she explains in detail of eight common ways parents can raise their children to become resilient.

1. Let Your Child Struggle

As a parent, it is your job to provide a guide for your child to navigate through life. However, this guide will only get them so far in life. It is up to them to take the skills and knowledge that you have taught them into their own hands to practice and be okay with making mistakes along the way. Francis notes that the parents who teach their child that hard work is important and that it may also be difficult to practice are those who raised a well-adjusted child. If they are more well adjusted then they will understand how to cope with stress and persevere through their struggles.

2. Let Your Child Experience Rejection

It is essential for your child to understand the word “no” and what it entails. No matter how much your child may want something or need someone to rely on, it is your job to stick to your word and not give in. Francis insinuates that failure can be one of the greatest life lessons that a child can understand.

3. Don’t condone a Fixed Mentality

It is important for you, as a parent, to not give in to your child’s helplessness. For example, if your child gets a bad grade on a test it is not the teachers fault for not explaining the material well enough, but your child’s responsibility to ask for help if they don’t understand. As much as you would like to take your child’s side, it is important to teach your child that things don’t always work out the way they think they will: that life isn’t fair. This idea will spur their sense of responsibility in order to not be in this situation again. No matter how easy it may be to advocate for your child, it is important to encourage the idea that life isn’t fair and that they are able to advocate for themselves. Don’t condone to letting your child put the blame on someone else.

4. Do More Than Tell Them to ‘Buck Up’ When Struggles Occur

Instead of putting the emotional strain on your child by telling them to just “deal with it,” validate their emotions first and then give them advice on how to get through their struggles. Tell them that you understand where they are coming from to empathize and validate the feelings. If they open up about their feelings to you now, then later in life they will have the confidence to communicate how they feel because they were validated when they were younger.

5. Help your Kids Learn How to Label Their Feelings and Emotions

Help your child feel comfortable expressing their feelings out loud. If they acknowledge their emotions out loud, then they are less likely to act upon them or “show” their feelings. For example, if your child says “I’m mad,” they are less likely to scream at you because words are more powerful communication.

6. Give Your Kids The Tools to Self Soothe

Although coloring books, play-doh, and lotions that smell good may calm some children down, they do not act as stress relievers for everyone. As long as you provide your child with an outlet, such as a sport, active task, or a musical instrument, your child will receive the skills it takes to calm themselves down. Then remind your child that these are helpful when they want to feel better. Not only will they learn how to take responsibility for their feelings, but how to cope with them in the future.

7. Admit Your Mistakes. And Then They Fix Them

Utilize your own mistakes to teach your child how to respond to failures. This will show that even parents make mistakes and that not everyone is perfect. Kids tend to forget this idea and put so much pressure to be as perfect as their parents. But in fact, even the most well-rounded parents tend to mess up sometimes. The important thing to note is that one should own up to their mistakes in front of their child so that they see that you are acknowledging the mistake and then going to fix it.

8. Always Connect Your Kid’s Self Worth to Their Level of Effort

When there is a common outcome that students strive to succeed, some may cheat their way up to the top in order to get that A. The idea is to teach your child that through hard work, practice, and honesty, they will get to the top instead of faking it until they make it. Morin states that “the kid who grows up knowing that it’s all about their effort, rather than their outcome, is going to be more resilient when they fail or when they get rejected.” These children who will grow up to be resilient are not the ones who received the stereotypical feedback of doing a good job because they are a girl or a boy but because they had an awesome support system cheering them on to go the extra length.

Whether your child is a boy or a girl, it is not only what you say to them (for a girl: good job because you studied hard & for a boy: good job because you are smart) it is also how you communicate your feelings in a certain tone and at the right time.

For more information on how to help your children increase their resilience or how to put these above steps into action, please contact us. For more information on therapy, visit FAQ at Hilber Psychological Services.

-Written by Lily Schmitt and Tanya L. Hilber, PsyD

References

Francis, Lizzy. “Resilient Kids Come From Parents Who Do These 8 Things.” Love and Money. Fatherly. Web. 26 Nov. 2018. https://www.fatherly.com/love-money/build-resilient-kids-prepared-for-life/
Morin, A. (2017). 13 Things Mentally Strong Parents Don't Do: Raising Self-Assured Children and Training Their Brains for a Life of Happiness, Meaning, and Success. New York, NY: William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins.