After school is such an enlightening time if a momma is listening. One day my daughter came home and declared that she did NOT want to be popular. My husband was incredulous. “Why not? Who doesn’t want to be popular?”
“I don’t.” she declared with a huff. “To be popular you have to be mean.”
There it is. In her 11-year-old world mean = popular. Since we raised her with the Biblical values of treating others with love and compassion, she knew that she could never be kind and popular too. She was choosing Jesus’ way over the world’s way! While I inwardly did a little thankful dance, I stopped when I realized the flip side of this conversation.
Some girls had been mean to my daughter. Then my inner dancer gave way to my inner mamma bear.
“Who was mean to you? What did she say? What is her mom’s number? Where does she live so I can egg her bedroom window????” Thankfully my mental filter caught the last few of these questions before they escaped my mouth.
Our daughters are going to deal with mean girls. While it would sure be satisfying to help your daughter make up a detailed plan to extract revenge on the little monsters who hurt her, that is not what she needs from you or what my daughter needed from me.
So how do we help our daughters deal with mean girls? Here is my 4-step plan.
Side with your daughter. First of all, listen to the story without judgment. Sometimes we can jump in too early to try to explain away the mean girl’s comments or behavior. When our daughters have been hurt, they need to know that they have someone on their side. So our first job is to commiserate and understand why the comments or behaviors hurt your girl and express our sorrow that they were hurt.
Decide NOT to step in. My first reaction when I hear my daughter has been hurt is to let the parent or the teacher know what happened. I want to swoop in to fix things. But when I do that I inadvertently tell my daughter that she doesn’t have the ability to handle situations herself. I don’t want to handicap her with the view that she needs mamma to fight for her. There are times when it is appropriate to step in like in the case of repeated bullying. But for the most part, our job is to help our daughter figure out a way to deal with the situation herself. This is training her for a successful future.
Create possible scenarios. Here is where the conversation gets fun. I like to lead my daughter to create scenarios for why the mean girl said what she did. I start with crazy stories about aliens abducting her family and holding them for ransom unless she could get 5 girls to cry that day, and then just tell my daughter that she happened to be one of the 5. The crazier the story the better because it can relieve some of the tension that has built up. Don’t stop at one crazy story, though. Make the stories more and more plausible until you explain that the girl was probably embarrassed by someone in the previous class and was lashing out to make herself feel better because she doesn’t know how to handle embarrassment any other way. This helps your daughter see that even mean girls have feelings and their bad behavior, while not excusable, is understandable.
Pray for the girl together. When your daughter sees that the mean girl is mean because of some hurts she is going through or a lack of a person to teach her about Jesus and His love, then you two can pray for the mean girl together. Lift her hurts up to Jesus and ask for His healing for her. Loving and praying for your enemies is not just something only the super-pious do. It is something Jesus taught during the Sermon on the Mount. It was for all those who believed in Him. What a difference this step will make if your daughter can fight mean girls with the power of Jesus’ love! True warriors for Christ are built this way—on their knees.
Mean girls will fill your daughter’s life. Please take some time today to think about how you will teach your daughter to deal with them. How she responds now in the preteen and teenage years is likely how she will choose to deal with them in the future. What future are your helping to create for your daughter?
