Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [32]
A friend told me about talking to her eleven-year-old daughter about sex. She was embarrassed, but wanted to give her daughter more information than she had received. She struggled through the mechanics of sex and then shared her values about healthy relationships. She confessed that she had had sex before marriage. The daughter listened as her mother shared her sexual values.
An hour later she went into her daughter’s room. MTV was showing a nubile young woman clad in a leather bikini crawling all over a muscular young man. She mouthed song lyrics in praise of their sexual experience the night before. The young man had been too drunk to remember, so she was refreshing his memory with salacious details. My friend said, “I realized then that we were in different worlds with different languages. My daughter could no more understand my shame at being sexual before marriage than I could understand this girl in a leather bikini. It was a hard discovery.”
Girls tell me how radically their relationships with their parents changed when they hit puberty. Many said that they had once been “good little kids” but that with puberty they stopped being good. They lied, sneaked around, drank, smoked, yelled and disobeyed. These girls realized the choices they made were self-destructive, but they were in terrible binds. They believed that only nerds stayed close to their parents.
Girls, like Charlotte, who operate from a false self are more likely to break emotionally from their families. They are vulnerable to peer pressure to reject all parental advice. They are more likely to do things that cause great conflict in the family. Because they are operating from false selves, they have no way of keeping peer culture in perspective. They give up the relationship they most need, the relationship with people who would protect them from girl-diminishing experiences.
Girls who hold on to their true selves are more likely to keep their relationship with their families alive. Although they distance some, they do not totally abandon their families. Lori still loves and trusts her parents even though she has typical teenage reactions, such as wanting more time away from her parents and being embarrassed by their smallest flaws.
The role of parents has changed radically in the 1990s. Parents used to help their children fit into the culture. Now many parents fight against the cultural influences that they know will harm their daughters. This was true of both Lori’s and Charlotte’s parents. They wanted their daughters to have more time to grow and develop, time without sex, drugs, alcohol and trauma. They fought to preserve their daughters’ androgyny and wholeness in girl-destructive environments. Most parents today are not the agents of culture, but rather the enemies of the cultural indoctrination that their daughters face with puberty. They battle to save their daughters’ true selves.
SOCIAL SELVES—PEERS
As girls pull away from parents, peers are everything. Teens who hardly speak to their parents talk all night with friends. Peers validate their decisions and support their new independent selves. This is a time of deep searching for the self in relationships. There is a constant experimenting—What reaction will I get from others? Talking to friends is a way of checking the important question—Am I okay? The talk is endless, as any parent who shares a phone line with their teenager can attest. Cutting teens off from their friends is incredibly punishing. As one girl explained it, “Grounding teenagers drives them crazy.”
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