Day 7: The Trouble with Eleven-Year-Old Girls

I’m reading Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, and last night when I came across the following lines, I actually laughed out loud:

Hannah was invited to a sleepover that night. Sleepovers, as far as Toby could tell, consisted of the girls in her class getting together and forming alliances and lobbing microaggressions at each other in an all-night cold war, and they did this voluntarily.

Fleishman is in Trouble, p. 78

“This!!” I thought to myself, and made a note to tell Kim about it this morning.

Hannah is Toby’s daughter, and she’s 11 years old, just like most of our fifth graders by this point in the year.

Last week we found ourselves mediating conversations between girls, something we’ve been doing since the beginning of the year. Lots of “they said you were saying mean stuff about me” and “well, she said you were saying mean stuff about me” and Kim and I saying, “sounds like you’re all talking about each other to other people instead of to each other.” Later in the week, another student told me that her friend was a “great friend” because “even though she told __ that someone has a crush on him, she didn’t say it was me.”

During one of our sessions with Lina, our guru from Stop Parenting Alone, Allison asked for advice on the “girl drama” in her class (the fourth grade class breakdown is 17 girls and 6 boys, the opposite of what I had last year).

“First of all,” Lina explained, “we need to eliminate that phrase from your vocabulary. There is no ‘girl drama.’”

Instead, we needed to think about how our students are developing their five social emotional competencies:

• Self-management
• Self-awareness
• Social awareness
• Relationship skills
• Responsible decision-making

It’s hard to be a grown-up in an eleven-year-old’s life and watch them struggling with friends or peers, and not want to just jump in and save them, protect them, shake them, make them see that, no, she’s not a great friend if she shares your secret crush WITH your crush! It’s hard because even if we did do those things, they ultimately have to figure it out themselves.

So what’s our role?

To guide them. To help them navigate the struggles of fear and disappointment and power. To give voice to a couple of their options, but let them make their own choices and learn from them.

In the book, Toby proceeds to eavesdrop on Hannah’s sleepover. The “lion king” of the group asks his daughter a would you rather question, naming two boys: “Toby sat frozen at his hallway desk, inside this living nightmare, unable to discern what the stakes were, not knowing how to root for her” (Fleishman is in Trouble, 79). When Hannah chooses wrong, he tries to think of a reason to interrupt the girls, but knows that he can’t, that it will just make his daughter angry.

This week has been better in terms of our girl-drama-that-we-don’t-call-girl-drama. During indoor recess today, two girls sat drawing together while the other five practiced acrobatic pyramids together (this was actually quite impressive). There were no conflicts, just joy and laughter. I know that’s not how the rest of the year will be, but I’m hopeful. Some of them are learning to navigate the social waters, whether they’re using our help or not, and they’re doing a pretty good job.