Girls Development During Adolescence: Diminishment of Self Essay

Large numbers of American girls face a crisis during adolescence. Numerous studies document the disturbing trends that affect girls during this vulnerable time. Girls' IQ scores drop. Their grades in math and science decline dramatically. The confidence, curiosity, and willingness to take risks that mark their childhood years are replaced by unassertiveness, boredom, and a cleaving to the status quo. Girls at this age become prone to eating disorders, self-mutilation, and depression. Even girls without obvious signs of distress undergo a curious diminishing, as if all the interests and energies of their childhood must now be channelled into maintaining a narrow and alien definition of self. What happens to girls as they grow up? What causes this diminishment of self? What transforms them from the happy, confident people they are in childhood to the self-critical, sullen, and frightened adolescents they become? Psychologist Mary Pipher, author of Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls talks about the "isms" that meet girls at the threshhold of adolescence--sexism, capitalism, and lookism. Who girls can be is no longer a wide-open playing field. They find themselves judged by how well they conform to a specific gender role. An enormous source of information about what it means to be female is the popular media. Music and music videos, movies, television, magazines, and commercials, many of them aimed at teenagers, all carry a loaded message--to be successful as a woman means adhering to a highly stylized script that defines for girls what womanhood is. Modern girls encounter an incredible contradiction in the messages they receive at this vulnerable time in their lives. On the one hand they ar... ...lem. We are buying into the mentality that fuels those images. Each of us must have the courage to examine our own unconscious pact with the scripts society hands us. We need to recognize the ways our power has been co-opted by the rewards we reap through compliance with the status quo. In what ways does our own diminishment hold us back? Can we move beyond that diminishment and reclaim our right to be whole? Can we step outside the gender boundaries we have internalized into a place where we finally exist as humans, first, and men and women second? It is through claiming our own integrity that we give girls permission to expand beyond the status quo. It is our choice. When enough of us have moved beyond the cultural icons that define for us what masculinity and femininity are, those icons will fall away. There won't be an audience left to sustain them.