For Parents
Swimming Upstream: Mothers, Daughters, and Consumerism
Dr. Georgia Sassen
As a clinical psychologist, I had been thinking for decades, “If someone had done something for this woman when she was12,” or “If someone had known about this when this woman was 15,” she wouldn’t be in such pain now. As a result, for the past 15 years, the nonprofit I direct, Building Resilience in Kids, has offered support groups for mothers of 10 to 18-year-old girls. In these groups, called Girls on the Brink of Adolescence, mothers talk about their concerns for their daughters, such as early sexuality thrust on them by the media and sexualized culture and fears about predatory boys. Urban mothers talk about fear of physical aggression; suburban moms express fears of exclusion by cliques, and trauma at the hands of “mean girls.”
The sexuality issue is clearly connected to another one: rampant consumerism.
Girls want clothes so they can be “sexy” at 10, and mothers and daughters fight about what the girls can have. When sexuality is not an issue there are still purchase battles. Mothers cannot fathom why girls must have the specific brand names their friends have. In discussion, mothers discover that fears of exclusion and bullying are also driving the need to buy certain items. I sense fear of loneliness is also driving these purchases – for mothers as well as daughters.
Marketing to young children is also a problem, but marketing a product because it will offer entry to “the cool crowd” is a preadolescent and adolescent issue, at a time children are most dependent on peer acceptance. And for adolescent girls, whose relational antennae are more highly attuned than boys’, relationships are places of great intensity.
Recently, issues of bullying have received a lot of press, while issues of consumerism have gotten less attention but have become even more difficult to navigate in the past two decades.The things girls have to have today are five times the price of what girls had to have in 1990. From “gotta have that shirt,” we have moved on to “gotta have an iPod,” and now a $400 iPhone.
Worse, advertisers have succeeded in making each girl an advertisement for their product by having her wear a brand name like NorthFace or Juicy on her jacket.
And then there is viral marketing. This form of marketing has each girl tell the next what’s cool and what’s not, and the grape vine of girl culture is the perfect vehicle for this. Texting makes it happen faster, more often and even during school. Not that school is a haven from standard advertising: the Coke machine shines at the kids from the cafeteria, where they go for study hall and dance practice as well as lunch, every day.
Alison Pugh (Longing and Belonging, University of California Press, 2009) has shown that the fear of exclusion and bullying is central to girls’ needs to have the latest new thing. As a psychologist working with parents, it is clear to me parents’ fears of their child being bullied (and these days, bullied even to the point of suicide) drive their acquiescence to purchases they consider “over the top” or just plain unhealthy. If the daughter fears exclusion from the group, mother is likely to be brought back to her own seventh grade experience of being bullied; if the mother has any fears of her own of not getting on with the other mothers in town, her daughter’s fears may be even more convincing.
Given how often American families move, and given the lack of time for keeping up their own friendships, mothers’ own loneliness becomes part of a confluence of factors: fear of daughters’ loneliness, mothers’ memories of loneliness and ostracization, and mothers’ current loneliness or isolation conspire to make a mother afraid to say no to her daughter’s demands. Finally there is guilt. Mothers’ guilt -- for working too much, for not making enough to provide something other girls have, or for not being the perfect mother -- weakens their resistance to giving in and buying. Moms are in exactly the spot the marketers want them.
I interviewed a small sample of mothers of teens and preteens. Half the mothers had professions; the other half had not graduated college, though they worked. All of them struggled with their children lobbying for more things, things they had seen in the media or in another child’s hand. But one mother spoke of the need to talk to the daughter about why she feared she’d be ostracized if she didn’t have a certain cool new item. If her daughter was afraid of the meanness of certain girls, this woman went beyond the advice that “then she isn’t the kind of person you want for a friend.” She asked her daughter if all the girls succumbed to this girl’s power, and she encouraged her to band together with other girls to “speak truth to power” and resist the other girl’s hegemony (see Lyn Mikel Brown’s “Girlfighting: Betrayal and Rejection Among Girls,” New York University Press, 2005). She also commented that it is essential to first listen to the daughter’s fears, and never wave them away.
This is excellent advice, but hard to follow. Mothers can only offer this kind of listening and strength if they have the power of a group behind them - which leads us back to the mothers’ groups. Mothers are swimming upstream if they try to resist advertisers’ power. And they are asking their daughters to resist the corporations, which can be appealing to an adolescent. But mothers have to allay their own fears that they are raising a renegade who will “get in trouble” with this attitude. And they need a place to work through their own fears or memories of exclusion before they can help their daughters take this on.
Mothers’ groups provide a place to do this. Mothers can relate stories of times they helped their daughters resist, and it worked. They can acknowledge how hard it is to listen, and listen some more, and empathize and only then begin a dialogue with their daughters about the need to buy something so compelling. They need to take the time to negotiate, to acknowledge other areas where their daughters feel powerless and try to work on that before giving in to the purchases their children think will make them powerful. (See Susan Linn’s Consuming Kids, Anchor Books, 2005, on corporations’ targeting of children’s need for power.) Mothers need to reminisce about their own misguided ideas about what could make you powerful at age 14. None of this works in isolation; the best place to do it is in an empowering group of mothers. These groups may be led by a professional, or started by a professional and then continued by mothers on their own. Or they may be started at a community center or a school by a group of mothers.
Just as we want our daughters to band together to resist advertisers, we, their mothers, can’t go it alone, either. If you feel you are swimming upstream in your fight against consumerism, you need a school of fish to swim with. (See G.K. Batchelor, An Introduction to Fluid Dynamics, Cambridge University Press, 2000, for the actual physics of why this works for fish).
Originally Published In: Brandeis University's Women's Studies Research Center: Research Ezine