Girl Talk

SUNATA 2

Kelly Alford

Director – Durack College

I began my career in girls’ education in the late 90s. Fresh faced from the teenage years myself, I entered the education profession focused on opening my students’ worlds to the beauty of literature and the science of human movement. While this combination often raised eyebrows among the purists, I was passionate about literacy and health and couldn’t think of a better way to fulfil my interests and share my knowledge. I dived right in and loved it. For the first ten years of my career, I continued to share my passion and expertise and came to understand how girls ticked. And then something startling happened. Seemingly overnight, I began noticing a disturbing culture emerge. Unhealthy obsessions with academic progress, rising levels of anxiety, and a lowered sense of self began smothering our girls. But why now? Was it that I was a more experienced educator, working primarily in pastoral care roles, which invites closer insight to the woes of teen girls? Had becoming a parent opened my eyes to a different perspective of my students? Potentially. Yet my colleagues were sharing in my concerns. Educational conferences and professional development opportunities were increasing around the topic of ‘student wellbeing’. It seemed I was not alone in my observations and concerns. Around this same time, schools were facing another challenge – smartphones. As technology improved, allowing phones to do so much more than make a call or receive an SMS, there were issues with students accessing devices during the school day. For a while there was the ‘collaborative vs calamitous’ debate. It was argued that smartphones can be a very powerful educational tool; however, often the distraction and misuse of the device caused frustrations for staff. The idea that the smartphone could be held accountable for far more than a sneaky game of Tetris, instead of completing the revision questions, was always speculated, but now there is proof. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO 2014), mental health is ‘a state of wellbeing in which every individual realises his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community’ and is an integral and essential component of health. Dr Lisa Damour, American psychologist and recognised ‘thought leader’, says that except for during the summer months, today’s teens now, for the first time, feel more stressed than their parents do. They also experience the emotional and physical symptoms of chronic tension, such as edginess and fatigue, at levels that we used to see only in adults. The consequences of teens dealing with the levels of stress that adults are used to is worrying on several levels. A young person does not typically have the experience nor resilience, often developed through adversity, to manage the emotional and physical manifestations of stress. In her book, Under Pressure, Damour (2019) says we need to change the way we view stress and anxiety. We need to understand the difference between their healthy and unhealthy forms. If we appreciate that stress and anxiety are mental states essential for human growth and development, we may be able to turn the tide on the mental health crisis tormenting our young people – particularly girls. But how much stress is too much stress? Damour (2019) says ‘stress becomes unhealthy when it exceeds what a person can absorb or benefit from. The volume of manageable hardship differs from person to person and can even differ for a single person from day to day’ (p. 25). Having established that stress and anxiety are more prevalent among students now than ever before, it’s important to unpack the reasons behind why this is so. Let’s begin with school and girls’ heightened anxiety towards their academic performance. Girls tend to view their grades as a telling sign as to what they can and cannot achieve. They frequently believe that a grade is an absolute judgement on their ability. This puts a lot of pressure on them to excel academically – good grades reinforce their self-worth. When girls doubt and worry about their academics, they habitually find that studying actually soothes their nerves. The more nervous a girl feels, the harder she’ll work. The dangerous thing about a hyper-conscientious approach is that it almost always works. As Lisa Damour (2019) puts it, ‘Excessive preparation helps girls quiet their worries about their academic performance, it consistently yields excellent outcomes that leave them feeling proud, and it earns them praise from their parents and teachers. For students who are motivated by fear, this system is exceedingly effective. Until it become unsustainable’ (p. 145). But why is there so much emphasis on top marks? There is a pervasive belief in our culture that your future ‘success’ in life has a direct correlation to one’s high school grades. It’s simple. Top grades get you into the top courses at the top universities, which in turn gets you a top job, earning top money. Everyone knows that professional status and financial gain leads to happiness, don’t they? Anything less is, well, less. Much has been published about the ugly culture of impossible standards of success for girls and no place is this more prominent than the online world. The drive to achieve is fuelled in part by unhealthy social comparison and competition endorsed on social media. Teens spend most of their day at school – a source of much angst for some girls especially, and they spend a frightening amount of time online – a platform spruiked as a place to connect and communicate – when really, it’s a more sinister place.

After a long day at school, girls are turning to social media to construct their ‘duplicate persona’ online. A girl feels it necessary to ‘amplify the features of her life to make herself appear prettier, smarter, more accomplished, closer with her friends, happier, and more popular than she really is’ (Simmons 2018, p. 30). It takes no small amount of effort and comes at a huge cost. Few girls get enough sleep. This is touted as likely one of the simplest, yet most powerful, explanations for girls’ high levels of anxiety. The connection between sleep loss and anxiety is clear. When we get enough sleep, we can handle most of what life hands us; when we don’t, we become frazzled and brittle. Plenty of things keep girls up at night, but none more so than online activity. While the blue light from screens is a known factor in sleep disturbance, it is the content encountered on social media keeping girls up at night. Rachel Simmons, author of Enough as She Is says, ‘The Internet is a giant, sprawling petri dish for social comparison: take a girl’s feelings that she’s not pretty, successful, or social enough, combine it with her inimitable drive to improve herself, then add a relentless stream of others’ edited images. It’s no wonder girls see social media as a way to establish their life is so much better than yours’ (2018, p. 32). A girl’s social media brand is yet another highly demanding platform where she is expected to perform, achieve and compare herself to others. Simmons (2018) goes on to explain that when ‘she taps on her phone, she will be likely to visit a visual platform like Snapchat, Instagram or TikTok, where she will feel pressure to construct a physically flawless, hypersocial digital life through a carefully curated stream of videos and pictures’ (p. 28). Social media is known to put girls on a non-stop roller coaster of emotions, veering from surges of adoration to stomach-clenching lows of exclusion and insecurity. The rush or control, optimism, and even power you get from producing social media can swiftly evaporate while you wait anxiously for a response, or, worse, don’t get the one you’re hoping for. Dr Jean M Twenge, Professor of Psychology at San Diego State University, reports in her book iGen that teens who spend more time than average in front of a screen are more likely to be unhappy (2017, p. 40). She directly blames the arrival of the smartphone for the precipitous decline in teen wellness. Social media invites and promotes incessant ‘social comparison’ to which girls are particularly prone. What was once private and intangible information – say how many friends you had or where you went and what you did – is now publicly visible online. One can measure and quantify social success by its own metric of likes and followers. It really is another world and extremely treacherous to navigate. What girls need from parents and educators is not a conversation about what’s wrong with social media, but what’s wrong with the way many of them use and value it. As Simmons (2018) laments, ‘we can tell girls all day that social media isn’t a representation of reality – that it’s an illusion crafted by shrewd magicians of their own lives – but until a girl decides that social media can’t be the barometer of her own self-worth, very little will change’ (p. 44). Both Damour and Simmons agree that our current culture holds girls and young women to unfair and unwavering expectations. Despite the overwhelming ‘success’ girls are experiencing, they have never struggled more. Simmons (2019) believes we have ‘failed to cut loose our most retrograde standards of female success and replace them with something more progressive. Instead, we’ve shoved more and more expectation onto the already robust pile of qualities we expect girls to possess’ (p. 173). Recognising these irrational standards to which girls are held is the first step in addressing them. From here we need to work on letting our girls know that they are, in fact, enough as they are.

References

Damour, L 2019, Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls, Atlantic Books, London. Simmons, R 2018, Enough As She Is: How to Help Girls Move Beyond Impossible Standards of Success to Live Healthy, Happy, and Fulfilling Lives, HarperCollins, New York, NY. Twenge, JM 2017, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood, Atira International, New York, NY. World Health Organization 2014. Mental health: a state of well-being, WHO, Geneva. SUNATA 3