COMMENTARY: Parents looking to protect their girls from the mental health contagion must first push back against victimhood narratives.
“A tale of two girlhoods.”
That’s the caption I gave two photos I sent side by side to friends in a recent chat discussion about tweens and phones.
Taken surreptitiously from the carpool line, the first photo shows a gaggle of 11- and 12-year-old girls squished together and laughing on a bench swing waiting for their rides outside of my daughter’s school. Every single one of them is smiling. Every single one is making eye contact with another. Every single one of them has their hair halfway above their heads and their legs floating unevenly in the air. It is a snapshot of innocence in its twilight.
Despite being squarely within the average age range for receiving their first smartphones, there is nary an iPhone to be seen.
The second photo depicts the steps of the school on the other side of the street. Every single girl is sitting by herself, staring at the screen of her phone. Not a single girl is smiling. Not a single one is within five feet of another. Each one is like an individual monument to screen-induced isolation.
Apart from being born into a home with a married mother and father, it seems the new jackpot for today’s youth is being gifted a phone-free childhood and adolescence. As the evidence is increasingly making plain, early and heavy phone use among minors is like a digital siphon that sucks away happiness.
This is especially true for girls.
No one denies the mental health crisis roiling America’s youth; even the Surgeon General labeled it a formal epidemic with “devastating” impacts.
But the problem is particularly acute with girls and is increasingly a runaway one. One in three girls, UCLA notes, is depressed, as compared with one in 10 boys. Their depression is intense, with the same number of girls having seriously thought about killing themselves. Half of teen girls, the CDC reports, “feel persistently sad or hopeless.”
Our girls are most certainly not OK.
Jonathan Haidt, whose book The Anxious Generation I reviewed in these pages, pays close attention to the disparate impact of a childhood smartphone culture on girls and teens. He points to extensive research that finds that girls are more relationally oriented, making social media a landmine for female mental health. He has also pointed to the way social media spreads victimhood narratives like a brushfire among girls, who are bombarded by messages about their rights being taken away and their status in society being perpetually undermined by elusive political bogeymen.
Which is why parents looking to protect their girls from the mental health contagion must first push back against victimhood narratives.
About a year ago, my daughter, who is on the cusp of being a teen, noticed that the M & M’s package she was eyeing had something about girl power scrawled across the packaging.
“Why is so much advertising about women’s equality,” she asked me. “Do we not have equal rights?”
I could have replied with a litany of grievances from the feminist playbook.
Instead, I just stopped and said, “Listen to me. You are not a victim. You live in the most prosperous and free country in the world, at a time when women have never had more choices or options in history. You can do whatever you want, just like any man. You can be like Mother Teresa who had no children of her own but impacted the lives of countless. Or you can have seven kids and be on the Supreme Court. Or you can have none and be the Vice President. Just don’t let anyone make you think you are a victim.”
To combat the victimhood mentality that the smartphone culture inculcates in girls, consider giving them models to emulate. Instead of feeding them endless reels of emaciated models with that raspy creaky voice known as ‘vocal fry,’ feed them girly greatness.
At my daughter’s all girls Catholic school, they take a required course on “great moral stories,” where they learn about bold and courageous women of virtue that left their mark.
I fought tears when my daughter got in the car the other day and told me about one that had really inspired her. She was a woman from an African country who survived a genocide by hiding in a bathroom with other women for weeks. Her family, save one brother, were all killed.
“Immaculée Ilibagiza,” I said.
“You know who she is?” my daughter replied.
I told her I had read her book while converting to Catholicism and found her story so compelling that I bought every copy of the book I could find and gave them away one by one until I ran out.
She is the prototype of a victim. Instead, she travels the globe preaching forgiveness and the power of the Rosary.
The minds of tweens and teens are in their most elastic periods, according to neuroscience that Haidt documents with painstaking detail. He likens it to wet cement, and cautions that inputs during this time have a lasting impact.
That’s the opportune time to fill it with models in literature and film of feminine adventure, virtue and friendship. It’s the moment to give them Anne of Green Gables, A Wrinkle in Time, or Pride and Prejudice and let them watch Gone with the Wind, or A Little Princess, or Wild Hearts Can’t be Broken, instead of letting them scroll through Insta for five hours a day.
Or poetry. Give them Emily Dickenson.
Recently my daughter maintained her title of reigning middle school poetry champion by reciting Frost’s, The Road Not Taken. She did it with warrior paint on her face.
The road of girlhood less travelled by is still there for those searching for it. And choosing it really can make all the difference.