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Erik Hare

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Blogs by Erik Hare

Bad Girls
4/8/2008 6:50:13 PM

My kids tell me just enough that I can divine things have changed. The world they are learning about will one day be theirs on their terms. But for now, it’s my job to help them make sense of it. That means I have to make some sense of it first.

When I was young, little boys were allowed to be what everyone assumed little boys were supposed to be. That was a rather physical being, full of energy and a desire to poke things that shouldn’t be poked or throw rocks at things that were breakable. Girls were supposed to be good little creatures, full of all the virtue that it was assumed would serve them well in life. Everything else was sanitized for our protection.

In the classrooms my children spend many hours in there is a different reality. I noticed this right away, but it’s never clear at first occurrence if something is part of a trend or just one more Anecdote from Hell. After seeing one child through Elementary School and the other about halfway, I think I can see a definite trend:

Today, it’s the girls that are likely to be the bad kids.

When I talk of being a bad kid, I don’t mean it in the way that boys were some … too many years ago. Where we got into fistfights, today’s girls are verbal abusers, often divided into Bullies, Toadies and Victims. There are many signs around calling for an end to bullying, and there’s a reason for it. It’s nearly epidemic.

That’s not to say that young boys don’t have the energy to find their way into trouble once in a while. What I have noticed is that in every class my kids have been a part of, the biggest troublemaker has been a girl. The trouble she gets into is a manipulative, social kind of trouble that drags other kids along by playing on their fears of being left out and made fun of.

Why is this happening? I can’t say for sure, but I’ve been developing a theory. When we were told as little boys that it wasn’t good to get into fights, it was clear that the penalties weren’t all that severe. Today’s boys have little interest in fighting at all, but are instead heavily socialized in a way that makes other forms of competitive behavior more devastating. That falls into the world where little girls have a distinct advantage.

In short, I think we’ve successfully feminized a very important aspect of our world, and the result is that problems have not gone away – they’ve merely changed.

I’m not advocating a return to the Bad Old Daze by any stretch. I do enjoy hanging around with boys that have found fun and healthy ways of blowing off steam, and they’re clearly better for it. They seem to be more likely to want to play with the world than control it. But there’s little doubt to me that the highly social world that has replaced the physical world I grew up in has its own challenges. Even if we’re all less likely to have stuff broken, we have our problems to deal with.

Why are the ones who get into trouble in this world usually the girls? Because they seem to have a more developed social sense; they mature faster. It all sounds wonderful until you see the bullying in action or your kid is the victim. It’s more about the world we live in than the nature of girls themselves, but these days we have a lot of bad girls.

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