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30 APRIL 2009
NO 1430
Working with adolescent girls
There was a little girl, who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead
And when she was good, she was very very good
And when she was bad, she was horrid.
This nursery rhyme is only one of the many
that present "acting out" girls in a poor light. When rhymes like these
were written, girls were expected to behave in a particular manner and
when they did not they were deemed "incorrigible." As the years have
moved along, so has what is deemed good behaviour. Yet girls are seen as
bad if they stray from this norm, whatever the norm may be.
The next two verses of this same nursery rhyme are less well known and
yet are more revealing.
She stood on her head, on her little truckle bed,
With nobody by for to hinder;
She screamed and she squalled, she yelled and she bawled,
And drummed her little heels against the winder.
Her mother heard the noise and thought it was the
boys,
A-kicking up a rumpus in the attic;
But when she climbed the stair, and saw Jemima there,
She took her and did whip her most emphatic.
(Puffin Book of Nursery Rhymes)
The questions then become: is Jemima bad and therefore does she deserve a whipping? And what decides bad? Or is Jemima bad for good reason considering the behaviour of her mother and society's expectations of appropriate girlish behaviour? The answers unquestionably depend on your point of view.
Last week, a supervisor from one of the residential programs came to me to talk about the number of young women who had recently moved into the program. Every once in a while this happens; usually the proportion of young men in residential programs far exceeds the number of young women. When a group of young women is in a residential program, the whole milieu changes and the expected response from the caregivers is "Girls are a lot harder to deal with." This time was no exception and as we watched the four young women walking together, talking loudly, giggling, and generally being very noticeable, it occurred to me that this was true only because we are less experienced in the ways of the development of young women. "Dealing with them" really means trying to understand the root of their issues and knowing how to meet their needs. The difficulty, therefore, lies more with us than with them.
Self-in-relation model
The development of girls into young womanhood and then into adulthood
has been understood in the past to follow the same path that the
development of young men has taken. Only lately has this come into
question. The ideas that have spawned this questioning have come from
professionals and caregivers who have watched young women launch
themselves into the adult world in ways that are quite distinct from
those of young men. As a result, many questions have arisen regarding
the education of young women, and the ways in which women are different
from men. This article is a description of some of the experiences I
have had while working with young women in a residential treatment
centre. A brief and simplified feminist theory base is used as the
foundation of understanding the behaviour of the young women.
The development of the adolescent female has
been seen until recently as not being any different than the development
of the adolescent male. The advent of feminist thinking and the
beginning attempts at defining the social, physical, and emotional
development of young women as different from young men has begun to
change this knowledge base. Physical development has always been clearly
different; however, other areas have not been well understood. In 1976,
Jean Baker Miller put forth a new theory about women's development. It
is called self-in-relation and has as its premise the concept that all
infants start life as a being-in-relationship who is connected to the
primary caregiver and sensitive to this person's emotional state
(Miller, 1991). Thus, the infant begins life with a sense of self that
reflects what that person is actually doing to and with the child and a
sense of self that understands what is happening between
people, not just what they are doing (Miller in Jordan et al., Chap. l,
1991). Miller's premise is that all infants start life this way, but
only women continue as self-in-relation due mostly to cultural emphasis
and caretaker bias. Women are taught to be other-oriented while men are
taught the importance of self-development. Women develop, using this
self-in-relation, into individuals who have the ability to respond to
the process of the relationship and as such develop an internal sense of
self. According to Miller "the concepts of self are therefore
inseparable from dynamic interaction" (p. 14).
JANE MATHIESON
Mathieson, J. (1992). Working with adolescent girls in
a residential treatment centre. Journal of Child and Youth Care, 7,
2. pp. 31-32.
REFERENCES
Miller, J.B. (1991). The development of women's sense of self. In J. Jordan; A. Kaplan; J.B. Miller; LP. Stiver and J.L. Surrey (Eds.), Women's growth in connection. (pp. 11-26). New York: The Guilford Press.
Opie, I. and Opie, P. (1963). The puffin book of nursery rhymes. Middlesex, England: Puffin Books.
