It’s no secret that girls are dramatic. They can also be clicky and catty and down-right terrible to one another. I think the average parent knows this and does their best to teach their children to be kind and inclusive and to avoid gossip. At least I sure hope they do…. The world is far too cruel to not make this lesson a priority. I’d like to believe that we all want our children to grow up to be kind people and that as much as we don’t want our daughter to be the subject of bullying, nobody wants their daughter to be the mean girl either.
But there’s one practice that I have noticed is getting missed in this ‘life lessons’ section of parenting. I like to call it the “informant practice”. I’ve noticed it amongst young girls and grown-women alike. It’s a practice that happens when a person is friends with person “A” and they hear person “B” say something negative about person “A”. They think that in order to be a good friend to person “A”, they have to go back and tell them what person “B” said. It is a practice that is structured to appear like loyalty but is in actuality a betrayal.
You see, when someone is your friend, your job is to support them and protect them. It’s not to be their informant. When someone is your friend, you want only goodness for that person. To be honest, you really should want only goodness for everyone. When you take negative information back to a person who otherwise wouldn’t have known, two things happen. One, they get their feelings hurt because they are now aware of what negative things people say. And two, they now have negative feelings towards the person you told on. There’s no goodness in that. There’s no support or protection. You might as well have called that person the negative name yourself. You single-handedly allowed your friend to be hurt by words that they otherwise wouldn’t have heard and have pitted one person against another in an effort to strengthen your own friendship. That’s screwed up!
Lets explore an example: What happens when you tell your friend “Mary” that your classmate/acquaintance/coworker “Johnny” said that she was fat/a bitch/lazy/ unreliable? In your mind, you are being loyal to Mary. You want Mary to appreciate you for informing her of Johnny’s disrespect. You don’t want her to trust Johnny. While your friendship may be temporarily strengthened, Mary has now been affected by being called fat/lazy/a bitch etc. and her self-esteem will tell the story somewhere. In addition, Mary now carries negative feelings towards Johnny. So the friend that you were suppose to protect, who was feeling just fine earlier today, is now hurt and angry. Nothing good came of this except for some temporary, selfish boost that you received for being “the informant”.
A second practice that likes to piggy-back onto the “informant practice” is the “Don’t tell” practice. This involves sharing the negative information, as previously stated, and then saying … “but don’t tell them I told you.” Ahhhh…killer!!!! So now, you’ve handed me an emotional pile of shit that I didn’t have before and now I have no way to unload it or deal with it because you’ve obligated me to secrecy. Again …..super-screwed up!
It’s selfish. It’s immature. It’s painful. And I’ve seen it over and over again in elementary school , middle school, high school and in professional places of work. You may feel like this is a practice that your girls will grow-out-of or that it’s the harmless workings of the girl social structure. But I assure you, if we don’t teach them now, they will continue to do it as adults. It’s a practice that hurts people and offers no goodness and it needs to stop.
Now, if everyone at work is complaining that your friend is “always late”. -Or- All the kids at school are reporting that your friend has an annoying habit of giving people wet willies. You can certainly be a good friend and say “People are noticing that you’re late a lot -or- Hey, people don’t like it when you give them wet willies. But you don’t have to single-people-out or quote them in order to make your friend aware of a behavior that is undesirable.
In conclusion, we need to teach our girls, ourselves, that it’s not enough to just be kind. It’s not enough to avoid starting or spreading rumors or gossip. In order to be a good friend we need to protect our friends from the negativity that other people unleash. In order to be a good friend, we sometimes have to stomach what other people are saying … even if that lets that person get away with it. Because friendship and loyalty means sometimes taking a hit or swallowing hard so that your friend doesn’t have to.
Life is hard. Growing up is hard. Parenting is hard. We don’t need to make it any harder. If we teach our girls now, how to be a good friend, how to stop negativity, how to strengthen our interpersonal relationships from the start, then, we in turn make their lives happier and more productive and we make the world a better place.
