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Dear Prudence: My daughter is embarrassed by me
Q. Success through spandex?: I am a successful, work-from-home businesswoman who is an embarrassment to my tween daughter because I don’t look like the other moms at school. Specifically, I don’t wear Lululemon pants. She has asked me not to pick her up from school. How do I get my daughter to understand that her mom is a strong, respected, powerful woman whom she should be proud of? How do I get through to her that success isn’t defined by wearing the right brands but by having the respect of peers? Or should I just go buy myself a pair of Lululemons so she can have the respect of her peers?
A: This can’t be real. Can this be real? This can’t be real. And yet—anything that can happen … will happen. I have two suggestions: 1. Go full Auntie Mame and start picking up your daughter in ball gowns and ripped flannel and increasingly embarrassing costumes; teenagers can be painfully conservative, and this tendency ought to be gently teased right out of them. 2. Let her take the bus home. If she doesn’t like what the bus driver is wearing, she can try offering constructive criticism and see how other people welcome her input on their ensembles.
A: This can’t be real. Can this be real? This can’t be real. And yet—anything that can happen … will happen. I have two suggestions: 1. Go full Auntie Mame and start picking up your daughter in ball gowns and ripped flannel and increasingly embarrassing costumes; teenagers can be painfully conservative, and this tendency ought to be gently teased right out of them. 2. Let her take the bus home. If she doesn’t like what the bus driver is wearing, she can try offering constructive criticism and see how other people welcome her input on their ensembles.
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Also, that "respect of her peers" thing? This is a really bad time in a girl's life to teach her to hang her self-worth on what her peers think of her. I'm not sure there's a good time to teach that, but the tween years are really, really not.
Dear Prudie,
Really? You're skeptical of this? I mean, forget whether you experienced it. Do you not read/watch tv/watch movies?
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There is all kinds of stuff you can do to address these kinds of things! Sadly they are slow, long-term, complicated and exact techniques will need to be adapted depending on your precise child. And also just how bad her peers are and what other dynamics (such as class, oh GOD such as class, no seriously) are at play.
But what has actually happened to your daughter is that her brain has just woken up and realized that the respect and regard of her peers is NOW MORE IMPORTANT THAN LIFE ITSELF* without giving her any space to actually internalize this, and necessarily without any experience to modulate it.
Fuck the respect of her peers, ok. The LAST THING you want her to worry about is the respect of her peers.
(I actually do have thoughts, many of them, on where to go with tween-girls from this kind of place but they're really, really tailored to the exact kid because that makes such a huge difference, just . . . no do not go buy lululemons, and do not go on about the respect of peers.)
*no seriously: I used to walk fifteen minutes home up hill into the wind in -20C/0F and lower temperatures in jeans and sneakers and no mitts and no hat, just a ski jacket - that had to be a PARTICULAR BRAND of ski-jacket which was actually designed to be a ski-snowboard jacket by a company that worked out of Whistler and was not actually quite warm enough - because to do otherwise was social death and I PREFERRED TO RISK FROSTBITE, despite being fully educated on it, than that. This was totally normal behaviour and if anything I was an outlier TOWARDS being stubborn about comfort over acceptance. I swear you could hear SO MANY PARENTS sighing with relief when snowboarder-chic started including knitted hats and floppy mitts.
I was also subsequently employed by my mother and my aunts/adopted-aunts to find fashion-acceptable cold-weather stuff that was actually adequate for the cold weather, which sometimes meant "okay yeah just . . . this is the expensive bday present okay" and sometimes meant "I promise that this technique of layering three different jackets is as warm as her ski-jacket and yes I KNOW it would be more sensible to wear the skijacket but shut up and let her wear the layers already."
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Which is just to say: yes, you have to tailor things to the kid.
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Tweens are so hard - for both genders, just the bulk of boys go through it a couple years later and we, like . . .don’t see the shit they do to each other, somehow? Because we decide boys “don’t do drama” to the point of an almost Discworldian level absurdity that we fail to see it when it’s happening right under our noses.
But basically their brains suddenly make a HUGE LEAP in understanding social dynamics while still having the rest of the cognitive capacity and empathetic understanding and stuff as they had to start with, which is SO NOT SUFFICIENT to handle that social leap. Plus, you know, no experience! by definition.
And then we dump them together in a huge stew with some of the least adult help, supervision and intervention as they’ve ever had, and wonder why they all have emotional breakdowns. facehands So yeah, like there’s so much STUFF that can affect what exactly one needs to do - like the lululemon stuff could easily be classist crap the other girls are picking up from their parents (in a very non-nuanced way) and their peers and depending on the general social milieu this could be a non-issue or it could be indeed a huge issue affecting their social integration! (Because adults also suck. A friend-of-a-friend is stuck with this - being a lower-middle-class income with kids going to an upper-upper-middle-class private school because the mother works there, and there are real difficulties involved in making sure that the PARENTS don’t decide that her kids are People They Don’t Want In The House and thus tank the kids’ entire social arena . . . .)
But, like. Yeah. It’s big, it’s complicated, it’s all tangled up with adult stuff, and it’s being experienced by someone whose capacity for one kind of understanding is now genuinely too big for their capacity for other kinds to keep up.
My personal inclination would be to at least INCLUDE in anything else that one turns to in order to deal with it, honing in on “you know even if other people are judging people on the clothes they wear, it’s still a hurtful and even cruel thing to do, and you shouldn’t”, because that kind of empathic understanding is indeed one of the things that will fall out of the mental basket without help! But. Yeah. Just. Congrats: you have probably entered the most cognitively and emotionally difficult part of your child’s life and your experience as a parent. Invest in stress relief.
. . . not that this is an area of focal interest and concern for me or anything. cough
(Also: fingerscrossed for your daughter getting at least some kind peers, and while adults can't replace peers - unfortunately - the active support and involvement of admired adults can be a really really big boost/shield.)
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There are very few occasions on which it is even contextually appropriate to base one's judgment of a person on their clothes. Being costumed well for the character an actor is portraying; a formal event about fashion such as last night's Met Gala; military personnel adhering to uniform code; wearing a racist or misogynistic or otherwise inappropriate Halloween costume; these would be examples. And the teenage years, when people are frantically trying to find Their People and sartorial markers are the first thing they know to look for.
There's basically nothing to do with this period except wait it out, LW. Keep modeling what an adult woman cares about (accomplishments, empathy, critical thinking, whatever values you want your daughter to learn from you), and let the teenage nonsense wash over you. (I mean, listen to your daughter's concerns, because you care about her, and this is important to her, and it's not unknown for one's children to know more about a subject than oneself, like how my sister and I have been teaching our mother about systemic racism for a while now, but mostly just let it wash over you.)
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Tweens face a struggle wherein their brains actually make a big cognitive leap in terms of parsing interpersonal relationships, social status, and related stuff, but DON'T make a leap in terms of their ability to process empathy, think through complex future cause-and-effect, and deal with emotional consequences. Each individual tween will have this to a bigger or lesser extent. (Which I come back to edit and reemphasize: individual tweens can be in really different places on a spectrum of this stuff! but the big dense bit in the middle where the most have some overlap or proximity is still important to know.)
What this often means is that suddenly social status within peer groups particularly, and relationships with peers, become of massive emotional importance and also cites of huge anxiety. They also start being aware in general of how their peer connections and friendships and associations reflect on them in the eyes of others, and either advance or penalize them in a social sphere. Except see previous note about not yet having a big increase in the cognitive ability to PROCESS all of this?
This tends to have the practical results of tweens latching onto really obvious really shallow social markers and imbuing them with massive importance. It's NOT because they're mindless trend-automata: it's because their entire brains are screaming at them that this is SO IMPORTANT, MOST IMPORTANT, SURVIVAL IMPORTANT, and because it's the first time their brains have ever done this they have no experience or ability to process and handle those emotions and figure out which ones represent reality ("Janet is a cruel person who makes other people miserable, so I shouldn't be around Janet") and which ones are shallow and irrelevant ("Janet wears jeans that are too short and that is not Socially Acceptable, so I shouldn't be around Janet.")
While suddenly being aware that if their FRIENDS don't like Janet and they hang around Janet then their friends might STOP LIKING THEM because human relationships are associative and the idea of not having peer-respect/approval is emotionally devastating.
They're not "trend automata", they're stressed and anxious juveniles trying to figure out how the hell this "being integrated into a society of peers with all its incredibly complex social currents" works, with no map and poorly thought out confusing instructions that often conflict with one another (and that's not even STARTING on gender and class and race crap). They're doing their best to negotiate a really complex environment that's demanding a LOT of them, while also doing the equivalent of running a brand new shiny OS on hardware that can only. just. barely support it, so there are all sorts of glitches.
Ironically they're literally doing the opposite of losing all sense of self and relation: they're actually being TOTALLY OVERWHELMED with awareness of self and that self should exist and that they need to MAKE A SELF OMG RIGHT NOW and that self has RELATIONSHIPS and these relationships are IMPORTANT. What that means practically, though, is that the relationships in which they are most secure - which if you're lucky/have done your job right as a parent will include "with parents" high up on the list - are the ones that get the least concern from this overwhelmed brain, and so are often where the behaviours get most horrible.
They also tend to literally not make connections that seem obvious to an adult, because those thought-patterns and neural connections haven't been made yet: so like in the case of the girl in the letter, it is entirely possible it literally DIDN'T OCCUR TO HER that in asking her mother not to pick her up because her mother doesn't wear the right clothes, she's being super hurtful and judgemental - it didn't cross her mind. Because these are things you have to learn. They're not automatic. And in contrast to the kid under seven, the 11 year old is dealing with a way higher cognitive load because of all the things this other development of her brain has allowed her to NOTICE that the seven year old is not even aware exist, which means some stuff gets dropped.
That doesn't mean these kids have no potential to figure this shit out, or that it's natural and automatic that they'll be horrible, but unfortunately mostly what they need to NOT be horrible is to be taught how not to be horrible. To be walked through "so when you ask your mother not to pick you up because of this kind of thing you are doing something that is very hurtful, about something that is not important [ie what kind of pants your mom wears]". This knowledge is acquired, it doesn't just spring magically from the ether into kids' heads. And part of usefully teaching kids how to handle this shit is in fact being aware of and acknowledging that TO THEM, from the inside, all of this social and peer stuff feels like THE MOST IMPORTANT THING EVER and has potentially MASSIVE psychological and emotional effects, so just saying "be yourself and don't care what other people say" is literally as useless as telling a depressive "cheer up!"
Unfortunately as a society we totally screw kids this age over, because right when they actually REALLY NEED adults to help them figure out how NOT to be Awful in the ways they so often are, we . . . seriously decrease all kinds of adult presence in their lives, throw up our hands and go "gosh tweens are just awful" and shove them together in large peer groups for most of the hours in a day with no supervision and expect them to magically figure everything out themselves.
This sucks. But it also means that until as a mass culture we start to figure this out, any individual tween one is responsible for is going to be in a sea of kids who really aren't being helped with this stuff and may as a result be exhibiting the worst possible behaviours this set-up can give you, and as a result being an active detriment to trying to help the tween YOU're responsible for get through this phase more or less unscathed.
Basically: yes, tweens can actually be absolutely this horrible, and it can be very difficult to try and navigate a way to make the whole thing LESS horrible, but that isn't their fault and doesn't represent a total lack of potential or humanity on their part; it's OUR (that is, adult society's) fault and represents a failure on OUR part to give them the cognitive and emotional support they need to develop into kind and ethical human beings in a progressive and lifelong way.
(Okay I lied ONE MORE EDIT: this is actually the edited, condensed as possible, super tl;dr version. There are a LOT of places where things get even more complex for one reason or another that I've skimmed over, because human cognitive and emotional development is super complex. BUT FASCINATING. And we really do screw tweens over, as a society, which is unfortunate, as it makes it harder for them to become healthy/kind/good teens, which makes it harder for them to become good adults, etc. Not impossible by any means! but harder.)
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Idk, maybe folks are joking and I am not getting the jokes or whatever? And am probably biased by mostly hanging out with high school aged kids going through some tough things and being amazing and taking care of each other through them. So.
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*Which doesn't make it unimportant, just hopefully temporary.
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And that part of the reason it can be very tricky is that the tween's brain isn't WRONG about thinking that peer relationships and social understandings are important! So they do need to figure out how to fit in with other people in a generalized way and so on.
Anyway I will hush now. I just wanted to clarify that most of my babble here is the Grand Sweeping Overall thing which in many practical instances boils down to "take a deep breath, remember being 11 is hard, and hell maybe it's time for her to take the bus home."
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IME: highschool aged kids are genuinely (in general) kinder and better at being kind and supportive than tweens are, again mostly because they have a better capacity for it (and some more experience dealing with more adult levels of emotional overwhelm). I can't give you cites off the top of my head, but I also know from my reading/researching experience that this is supported by the literature. (And my anecdotal and observed experience as a tween/someone who worked with tweens/watched other people go through the period vs as a teenager/close to people who work a lot with teenagers, including teens in really hard situations.)
Second, while I can't speak for anyone else, I know any tone that might resemble that from me is less that and more wry commiseration? Less "hahah never sleep again!!!" and more "ahaha yeah welcome to babies trying to figure out sleep patterns, it's so much fun, not" - wherein if the LW were HERE, this would be followed up with "and okay here are some things that may or may not help, and this is the point where you need to go seek professional help", (along with a WHOLE RAFT of clarifying questions) except LW isn't here, so it stops at the wry recognition of HAHAH OH YEAH THAT RIGHT. And also facepalming at Prudie because it really does read from her like the equivalent of "wait, you're telling me babies DON'T SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT? Madness! Well I guess everything is POSSIBLE . . . "
So I see what you mean, but for me at least, and for my reading of it, it's one step off to the side from that. *hands*
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