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What's Important to Girls and What Parents Can Do to Make a Difference
By Renee Spencer, LILSW
KEY RESEARCH PROJECTS
Over the past six to eight years, psychologists have become interested in adolescent girls -- what their experiences are, how they are faring in today's society, and what the passage into womanhood is like for them.
Two significant studies, and several best-selling books have resulted -- and have sparked immense concern about how our society treats girls. The studies are the American Association of University Women's landmark report, How Schools Shortchange Girls, and Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development, by Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gillgan, 1992, Harvard University Press. The books include Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, by Mary Pipher; Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap, by Peggy Orenstein, and Failing at Fairness: How America's School's Cheat Girls, by Myra and David Sadker, of American University.
In all of these, girls are talking directly to us about their experiences.
The AAUW report is the most extensive national survey on gender and self-esteem ever conducted. In this study, 3,000 boys and girls between the ages of 9 and 15 were polled on their attitudes toward self, school, family and friends.
The Harvard Project was a longitudinal study of adolescent girls -- that is, the same girls were studied over time. When the study began, the girls were between the ages of 7 and 18 and either attended middle to upper-class schools in New York and Cleveland, or were members of three girls' clubs in Boston.
"Reviving Ophelia..." reflects the experiences of a Nebraska therapist working with adolescent girls and her escalating concern about the rise in eating disorders, self-mutilation and depression she was seeing in her patients.
SchoolGirls is journalist Peggy Orenstein's year-long journey into the junior high classroom to observe, interview and test the results of the AAUW's study. Her insights put faces and voices of young girls to the devastating findings of how girls develop a diminished sense of self.
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