Girl World Conflicts
Help Your Teen Limit the Stress 

Raising a teen is tough work. Girl world conflicts add to the challenge. If your teen is experiencing the peer pressure of being ruled by a Queen Bee bully, you know how difficult it can be to help your teen be comfortable in her social scene of friends.  The world around today's teenagers is swirling at a whirlwind pace and showing no signs of slowing down.

A tug between parents and friends.

As your teen grows and feels more mature, she wants to make her own decisions.  Yet she still relies on parents when she is looking for a safe harbor—there when she needs to confide in you and when she needs to be reassured by you.  However, such occasions may be few and far between.  The tug between wanting to be accepted in her girl world In Crowd clique and wanting you to be proud of her can become more strained in these teen years.  And girl-world conflicts erupt at the most unexpected times.  Hormones probably add to the mix of emotional mood swings.

Learning how to handle her own girl world conflicts—things that may seem trivial to you—but are extremely vital to her, in her reality—is part of her maturation process.  Such learning includes how to handle conflicts among her friends and not becoming overwhelmed or anxious.  Your parenting job at this point in your relationship with your teen is to respect her growing individuality and support her as she practices making wise and appropriate decisions.

Why parents need to establish rules.

As parents, we know we need to make rules. Rules provide useful and safe guidelines for our growing children so that they can effectively navigate through the sometimes perilous period of life we call adolescence. Secretly your teen will be thankful for the rules even if she doesn’t tell you. That’s because the rules give her a safe reason to say “no” to something she really doesn’t want to do but still wants to save her reputation with her peers and not look foolish in their eyes. So it’s your fault. But that’s okay.

Your teen and you live in two different worlds—her teen world, including girl world conflicts, and your adult world.  Believe me, they’re different!  If you can remember your teen years, you may remember some of the occurrences that seem trivial to you today, but were vitally important when you experienced them years ago.  Life could be cruel.  Remember that.

 
A helpful approach to deal with these girl world conflicts, is to establish some contracts with your teens.  It lowers the stress levels for you and for her.  For example, create a contract for her computer use and a separate contract for her mobile phone use. A lot of conflict happens over cyberspace.  Let her know that it is expected that you will, on occasion, monitor her social media accounts and check the computer internet use history.  That is fair.  Knowing her passwords is fair.

The reason you set rules is to help your teen learn how to establish safe boundaries with technology and how to use it ethically. If you check her Facebook account and notice people asking where she has been lately, she may have established another account thinking you wouldn’t notice.  Be aware that kids are feeling a lot of peer pressure which often why these girl world conflicts erupt.  The strategies that you create will provide a more responsible environment for your teen, even if she doesn’t realize it for years to come.

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The author, Rosaline Wiseman, provide excellent insights about:

• The different roles girls play in and outside of cliques as Queen Bees, Targets, and Bystanders, and how these roles define peer treatment.
• Girls’ power plays—from fake apologies to fights over text messages.
• Where boys fit with girl conflicts and how you can help your daughter maintain healthy relationships with boys.
• Checking your baggage—recognizing how your experiences impact the way you parent, and how you can stay sanely involved in your daughter’s challenging, yet common social experiences.
  

The book offers concrete strategies to help parents empower your teen to be social competent and treat herself with dignity.  It is a very straight forward and realistic discussion of what to expect when raising today’s teens and is well worth the investment of your time and money.

Handling Teen Stress Overload

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