Greater Good

Have you decided to consciously practice being more grateful—only to find that your spouse, or tweener, or someone close to you thinks it’s hoaky and won’t join you?

© 2013 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

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Two sixth grade girls in my daughter’s class recently got into a snit in the locker room after PE. Apparently, one girl (let’s call her Janet) was wearing boy-shorts with “love” emblazoned across the bottom. She claimed these ultra-cool undies came from Victoria’s Secret. The other girl said she’d gotten the very same underwear from Target.

They were fighting about status: Did Janet have bragging rights? Or was she upgrading her Target underwear to Victoria’s Secret sexiness “to get attention,” as my daughter thinks?

These girls are 12 years old. Why are they arguing about this?

I am in the thick of raising adolescent girls. In addition to my own two daughters, there are a dozen other girls—the daughters of close friends—whose backs I’m trying to protect. Because I love these girls and see how vulnerable they are, the locker-room argument about Victoria’s Secret underwear makes my blood boil.

You may have heard that Victoria’s Secret blatantly targeted teens and tweeners at their fashion show a few months ago, complete with an appearance by Justin Bieber. Now they’ve gone one step further with the launch of its “Bright Young Things” campaign to appeal to young teens. “When somebody’s 15 or 16 years old, what do they want to be?” company CFO Stuart Burgdoerfer quipped at a news conference. “They want to be older, and they want to be cool like the girl in college, and that’s part of the magic of what we do.”

Advertising and marketing does work like magic. That is what is so scary. An advertising campaign like this one affects young girls in deep and often harmful ways—and new scientific research suggests just how deep and harmful these effects may be. Drawing on this research, I’ve identified three of the more pernicious messages Victoria’s Secret is sending our daughters.

(1) Slutty is status. One of the brain changes that occurs during adolescence is a heightened attention to social hierarchy. Teens and tweeners begin taking risks in order to gain social status (like lying about where your underwear comes from). What’s more, they tend to take risks in the areas that have meaning to their peers: For the drama geeks, getting a big part in a play is status. For the “in-crowd,” partying is status. And for the fashionistas (and the Justin Bieber fanatics, and tweeners that look up to college kids), slutty-little-girl is now status.

(2) Your body is not good enough. When they put supermodels in high heels, little-girl costumes, and bubble-gum underwear on stage with Justin Bieber, they create an impossible ideal for our girls to emulate, which in turn makes them feel inadequate. Consider these statistics from the University of Washington’s Teen Health and the Media website:

• In a study of fifth graders, both girls and boys told researchers they were dissatisfied with their own bodies after watching a music video by Britney Spears or a clip from the TV show “Friends.”
• 53 percent of American girls are “unhappy with their bodies.” This reaches 78% by the time girls reach 17.
• In a survey of girls nine and 10 years old, 40 percent have tried to lose weight.

As our daughters go through puberty—a time of intense body changes—they start to care much more about their bodies. These biological and developmental changes are amplified by advertising. They don’t call it neuromarketing for nothing: When advertising sends our girls messages about what their changing bodies should look like—and it’s not what they do look like—the ad causes a dopamine rush in our daughters’ brains that, in turn, creates intense desire for what is being advertised.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my daughters to think of their ideal selves as uber-sexy barbie-dolls with “call me” on their panties, and I don’t want them to feel inadequate compared to this brightly-colored exemplar.

(3) Girls are objects—for boys. When I saw that fashion show I couldn’t help but think of the Steubenville gang rape, in which a teen girl was used as a sex toy and dragged, unconscious, from party to party. Where do boys learn that girls are objects, accessories for their entertainment? Look no further than the media, where objectified women are the norm rather than the exception.

The media’s influence is so great that a new study from the European Journal of Social Psychology shows that our brains tend to process photos of regular, everyday women as a collection of sexualized body parts, while our brains process photos of men as whole people.

I want my girls to have boyfriends who see them for the whole people that they are, boys who treat them as individuals, not objects or a bunch of sexualized body parts. I want my girls to have meaningful intimate relationships. When they are ready to be sexually active, I want them to feel loved and cherished by their sexual partners and empowered by their sexuality—not used and discarded like last year’s Christmas present.

I know that Victoria’s Secret is not our only, or even our biggest, problem when it comes to protecting our girls from eating disorders, rape, and devastatingly low self-esteem. Dozens of other companies taunt our youth with hyper-sexualized images, of course; the tween market is worth “$335 billion of spending power,” retail analyst Hitha Prabhaker told the TODAY show Tuesday morning.

Large consumer products companies, with their gazillion-dollar marketing budgets, are influencing our kids in profound ways. As parents, we can protect them by not letting them watch commercials and by not letting them shop in (or, frankly, even near) stores like Victoria’s Secret. We can—and should—write letters and hope that our righteous anger goes viral on Facebook.

But honestly, these tactics feel profoundly inadequate compared to the marketing machines that we face. Can we win a war by boycotting the companies that hurt kids, or by simply hiding our children from the enemy?

I hope so. But I welcome other ideas if you’ve got them—please post below. In order to stand up to Victoria’s Secret and other retailers preying on our children, I think we parents are going to have to be committed, creative, and well-organized. I hope comments on this post, and this blog as a whole, can help support that movement.

© 2013 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

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In my last post, I introduced the idea of “motivational interviewing,” a way to engage with adolescents to make them feel heard, understood, and, ultimately, receptive to our wisdom.

This technique, which has been proven effective in clinical psychology, is particularly useful when we want to influence our teens or tweeners to change their behavior.

I learned about motivational interviewing from UC Berkeley professor Ron Dahl, an expert on adolescents. From my conversation with Ron, and from reading his written work, I gleaned 10 tips for getting through to teens and tweens. For the first five tips, see this post. Here are the next five:

(6) Surf their resistance like a wave. Say you want your teens or tweeners to get to bed earlier, or to spend more time on their homework. It’s normal for adolescents to resist you on these things, especially if they are feeling pushed to do something they are not ready to do—even if they agree with you on some level. For example, they might recognize that they are not doing as well in school as they’d like, but they aren’t ready yet to commit to spending more time on homework and less time on video games.

Sometimes (often?) we parents cause kids to dig in their heels when we argue our own position more forcefully. This is like trying to be understood in a foreign country where we don’t speak the language: When we ask a question to a local who doesn’t understand English, we may get frustrated and ask again—but this time louder: “WHERE IS THE TRAIN STATION?” Similarly, with teens, it doesn’t help to make the same argument again, but louder. We’ll just annoy them.

Instead of trying to persuade kids, we need to accept their resistance as normal and take with a different tactic—like one I list below, or in my last post.

(7) Genuinely appreciate their position and their participation in the discussion. Used sparingly, affirmations build connections. You might be shocked (or depressed) by what your teen is telling you, and tempted to point out the mistakes that could ruin their lives forever. Instead, appreciate how hard the conversation might be for them, and thank them for their honesty: “I can only imagine that this is an awkward conversation for you. I’m so grateful that you are willing to talk with me about your sex life. Thank you for explaining why you’ve been sneaking out with your girlfriend. Your honesty says a lot about who you are as a person.”

Don’t overdo this one, though, or say anything you don’t actually mean, or you’ll come off as inauthentic and manipulative.

(8) Shift the focus of your discussion. Offer a little relief by changing the topic ever-so-slightly. Perhaps you’ve been talking about how your daughter’s boyfriend sometimes makes her feel unattractive by making jokes about her weight. You might temporarily shift the focus of your discussion by saying something like, “You’re pretty confident that you’re in love with Pete, though, and you say he’s ‘the one.’ Tell me more about that.”

(9) Side with their negative position. When my kids were toddlers, their dad and I used to laugh at how well “reverse psychology” worked, and if you are particularly skilled (meaning, you can do this without sounding critical or sarcastic) it might work with your teen or tweener, too.

For example, your teen might be ranting about how her other parent is really bugging her to try out for soccer; she wants him to back off and let her do her own thing. You could agree with her negative position by saying something like, “Maybe he should just leave you alone, even if it means that he isn’t involved in your college applications, which is what he’s trying to help you with.” Or you could say, “Yes, you both might be better off if he focused his energy on your brother.”

(10) Help them make a behavior plan if your teen or tweener indicates that they are ready to make a change. Do this only if you suspect that they won’t be able to make a plan on their own, and if they indicate that they would like your help. Have them list:

-the changes they would like to make
-the most important reasons for those changes
-the specific steps they plan to take
-the people who can support them—and precisely how those people can help
-the challenges or potential barriers to their success—and specifically what they will do when they encounter these difficulties.

Have them tell you their vision for their success—how will they (and you) know that they have been successful, or if the plan is working?

In what areas do you want to guide your teen or tweener toward better decisions? Which of these techniques do you think will work best?

Read Part 1 of this posting here.

Gold, Melanie A. and Ronald E. Dahl, “Using Motivational Interviewing to Facilitate Healthier Sleep-Related Behaviors in Adolescents.” In Behavioral Treatments for Sleep Disorders. Edited by Michael Perlis, Mark Aolia, and Brett Kuhn, Amsterdam: Academic Press, 2011, Chapter 38, pp. 367-380.

© 2013 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

Like this post? We hope you’ll become a fan of Raising Happiness on Facebook, or sign up for the Raising Happiness monthly newsletter.