The Triple Bind: Saving Our Teenage Girls From Today's Pressures - Hardcover

Hinshaw, Stephen P.; Kranz, Rachel

 
9780345503992: The Triple Bind: Saving Our Teenage Girls From Today's Pressures
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0345503996 ISBN 13: 9780345503992
Verlag: Ballantine Books, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

An expert on adolescent psychology examines the hidden crisis confronting modern girls as they struggle with often conflicting goals--being traditional girls, competing with the boys, and dealing with a world without role models--and offers an insightful series of innovative, workable, and unusual solutions to the problem. 50,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stephen P. Hinshaw, Ph.D., is professor and chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is an internationally recognized psychologist and researcher whose work on troubled children has received ongoing media attention. Articles and interviews featuring him and his work have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and USA Today. He has appeared on Today, NBC Nightly News, ABC World News Tonight, and CNN.

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Chapter 1

Impossible Expectations

Sixteen-year-old Lupe leans forward, so eager to share her thoughts that she almost knocks her schoolbooks on the floor. “The expectations are impossible!” she tells me.

Her classmate Eugenia, a high school junior, agrees. “No one says what is expected of you, you’re just expected to know—and you have a pressure to exceed even that. I think you’re expected to be well rounded, be intelligent, be outgoing, but also do, like, community service and do extracurricular stuff, just have the whole package.”

“But sometimes that’s really hard!” Lupe insists.

Fifteen-year-old Jessica chimes in. “I think we’re supposed to know what we’re supposed to be doing with the rest of our lives. They expect you to know what you are doing at, like, sixteen or seventeen, and you’re supposed to have a big life plan, but sometimes you just don’t. I think also you get a lot of pressure from your parents to do well in school, and you get a lot of pressure from your friends because you want to go out and have fun, and you get pressure about guys, too. . . . You have to do everything!”

Her classmates nod vigorously as Jessica continues, her fervor building with every word. “And you’re supposed to handle it beautifully. Be completely graceful, poised, have a boyfriend you’ve been seeing for the past year, know everything, make sure nothing’s wrong, talk to your teachers, be best friends with them, everything has to be perfect. Love your siblings, love your parents, no fighting, and of course, you should be going out with your friends— but don’t party, ’cause you don’t want a bad rep. But you still want to have fun and be a kid—and you can’t. It’s so hard.”

Eugenia shakes her head. “And the second you make a mistake, everything comes crashing down. You feel like the world just kind of stops. I’ve known some people who have kind of gone down the tubes, they just can’t handle it anymore.”

“Yeah,” say the others.

Lupe sighs explosively and leans back in her chair. “It all goes back to the expectations,” she repeats. “First of all, they are impossible, and second of all, we don’t know what they are.”

Girls in Danger

At first glance, this conversation with a group of prep school girls in the Seattle area might seem like run-of-the-mill teenage angst. Sure, they’re worried about homework, parents, and getting into college—so what? Why should we worry about these routine teenage complaints?

The numbers tell us why—and their message is disturbing indeed:

• Up to 20 percent of girls ages ten to nineteen are experiencing episodes of major depression. Information from the general population about depressive disorders—which include withdrawal, tearfulness, lassitude, repeated negative thoughts, sleep disturbance, and self-destructive acts—shows that over the past fifty years or more, the average age of onset of female depression has fallen from the mid-thirties to the mid-twenties, with a significant portion of young women becoming depressed by their early to mid-teens.1

• As of 2005, about one-tenth of all teenage girls had made an attempt to end their lives. Whereas teenage girls once tended to make “nonserious” suicide attempts—attempts that were considered primarily a cry for help—an increased number are now genuinely trying to kill themselves. The teen suicide rate went up more than 300 percent between the 1950s and late 1980s. Although teen suicide rates fell somewhat during the 1990s and early years of the current decade, between 2003 and 2004, they spiked: the number of girls ages ten to fourteen who killed themselves rose by 76 percent, while suicides of girls ages fifteen to nineteen rose 32 percent.2

• Self-mutilation among teenage girls— cutting, burning, biting, and other forms of serious self-injury— appears to be on the increase. Because girls go out of their way to hide this practice, statistics are hard to come by. But almost every clinician will tell you that rates are increasing—dramatically.3

• Close to 5 percent of U.S. teenage girls and young adults suffer from some form of eating disorder—anorexia, bulimia, or binge eating—with some estimates placing that figure at more than twice that rate. When girls and women are specifically asked about binge eating, more admit to this practice than we ever suspected. And even “normal” girls are preoccupied with weight, diet, and body issues at alarmingly high rates and at distressingly young ages—according to some studies, as young as first grade.4

• Girls’ rates of aggression and violence are on the rise, while boys’ rates have shown either less of a rise or an actual decrease during the past fifteen years. Boys are more physically violent than girls throughout their lives, so it is particularly distressing to review the latest government statistics that reveal alarming rates of self-reported girls’ violence. Some experts contend that rates of official violence are distorted because of a tendency to include aggression at home (fights with siblings, for example) as “assaults” for girls, whereas the same acts would be given another label if boys committed them. But there is no doubt that girls have become more aggressive than previously, and that relational and social aggression (spreading rumors, getting even by forming coalitions against a target, and the like) continue to be a major issue for our daughters.5

These figures add up to a staggering sum: at least one-fourth of all U.S. teenage girls are suffering from self-mutilation, eating disorders, significant depression, or serious consideration of suicide —or are perpetrating acts of physical violence.6 And the rest of the girls, the ones who escape without a clinical label, are hardly home free. Too many of them are struggling with hatred of their bodies, obsessive dieting, sexual confusion, and the persistent sense that they just aren’t good enough: that no matter how much they work or how hard they try, they’ll never be able to achieve all that is expected of them.

If we only had to worry about serious clinical conditions plaguing 25 percent of our teenage girls, this would be alarming enough. But in my clinical and personal experience, virtually all of today’s teenage girls are struggling with challenges that threaten to overwhelm them. When I’ve spoken with these girls, both those at risk and those who seem to be doing fine, I’ve heard a persistent note of dismay. Listening to Lupe, Jessica, and Eugenia, I was struck not by how much they complained but by how desperate they were to please their families, their teachers, their friends. “Give us expectations that we can meet,” they seemed to be saying, “and look how well we’ll perform!” They didn’t mind working hard; they minded feeling that they were doomed to fail.

The underlying current of despair reminded me of some of the most famous animals in the history of psychology—Seligman’s dogs. Martin Seligman is a psychologist who set out to understand learning and motivation. So he put three groups of dogs into harnesses through which he could administer painful electric shocks. The first group of dogs was shocked while in the harness and later released. The second group of dogs was likewise shocked but had access to a lever that could make the shocks stop. The third group of dogs was also given access to a lever—but their lever had no effect. No matter how long and...

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Verlag
Ballantine Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2009
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345503996
ISBN 13 
9780345503992
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
228
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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