Christine Carter, PhD

Sociologist, parent educator and author, 'Raising Happiness'

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I Don't Care How Big the Market Is, Those Are My Daughters

Posted: 03/27/2013 7:36 pm

Video , Parenting , Parenting Teenagers , Moms , Teens , Sexualization Of Girls , Steubenville Rape Case , Steubenville Rape Case , Tween Lingerie Line , Teens , Victorias Secret PINK , Parents News

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Our 12-year-olds think thong underwear makes them cool.
Two 6th grade girls in my daughter's class recently got in a snit in the locker room after PE. Apparently, one girl (let's call her Janet) was wearing boy shorts with "love" emblazoned across the bottom. She claimed these ultra-cool undies came from Victoria's Secret. The other girl said she'd gotten the very same underwear from Target.
They were fighting about status: Did Janet have bragging rights? Or was she upgrading her Target underwear to Victoria's Secret sexiness "to get attention," as my daughter thinks?
These girls are 12 years old. Why are they arguing about this?
I am in the thick of raising daughters. In addition to my own girls, among my circle of closest friends there are a dozen daughters whose backs I'm personally trying to protect. Because I love these girls and see how vulnerable they are, the locker-room argument about Victoria's Secret underwear makes my blood boil.
You may have heard that Victoria's Secret came out blatently targeting teens and tweeners at their fashion show a few months ago: They hired pre-teen idol Justin Beiber to perform while supermodels dressed up as little girl's toys strutted around him. Literally AS the toys: one was a bike with pink streamer handles, another a pinwheel -- watch the video and see for yourself.
WATCH: Victoria's Secret Fashion Show

Between the cotton candy colors, bright toys and Beiber-fever, it is obvious to me why Victoria's Secret appeals to the bat mitzvah set. For spring break, Victoria's Secret launched the "Bright Young Things" campaign to appeal to young teens, according to Victoria Secret CFO Stuart Burgdoerfer. "When somebody's 15 or 16 years old, what do they want to be?" Burgdoerfer quipped at a conference. "They want to be older, and they want to be cool like the girl in college, and that's part of the magic of what we do."
Advertising and marketing does work like magic. That is what is so scary. This is what Victoria's Secret is teaching our daughters:
(1) Slutty is status. One of the brain changes that occurs during adolescence is a heightened attention to social hierarchy. Teens and tweeners begin taking risks in order to gain social status (like lying about where your underwear comes from). The interesting thing about this is that they tend to take the risks in the areas that their peers will recognize as status: for the drama geeks, getting a big a part in a play is status. For the "in-crowd," partying is status. And for the fashionistas (and the Justin Beiber fanatics, and tweeners that look up to college kids), risqué style is now equated with status.
(2) There is only one type of body that is acceptable. When they put supermodels in high heels, little girl costumes and bubble gum underwear on stage with Justin Beiber, they create an impossible ideal for our girls to emulate, which in turn makes them feel inadequate. Consider these statistics from the University of Washington's Teen Health and the Media:

In a study of fifth graders, both girls and boys told researchers they were dissatisfied with their own bodies after watching a music video by Britney Spears or a clip from the TV show "Friends."
53% of American girls are "unhappy with their bodies." This reaches 78% by the time girls reach seventeen.
In a survey of girls 9 and 10 years old, 40% have tried to lose weight.

As our daughters go through puberty- - a time of intense body changes -- their attention to body image is heightened. These biological and developmental changes are, in turn, amplified further by advertising. They don't call it neuromarketing for nothing: when advertising sends our girls messages about what their changing bodies should look like -- and it isn't what they do look like -- the ad causes a dopamine rush in our daughters' brains that, in turn, creates intense desire for what is being advertised.
I don't know about you, but I don't want my daughters to think of their ideal selves as uber-sexy barbie-dolls with "call me" on their panties, and I don't want them to feel inadequate compared to this brightly-colored exemplar.
(3) Boys should objectify girls. When I saw that fashion show I couldn't help but think of the Steubenville gang rape, in which a teen girl was so blatantly objectified she was used as a sex toy and dragged, unconscious, from party to party. Where do boys learn that girls are objects, accessories for their entertainment? Look no further than the media, where objectified women are the norm rather than the exception.
WATCH: Miss Representation Trailer

The media's influence is so great that a new study from the European Journal of Social Psychology shows that our brains tend to process photos of regular, everyday women as a collection of sexualized body parts, while our brains process a photos of men as whole people.
I want my girls to have boyfriends that see them for the whole people that they are, boys who treat them as individuals, not objects or a bunch of sexualized body parts. I want my girls to have meaningful intimate relationships. When they are ready to be sexually active, I want them to feel loved and cherished by their sexual partners and empowered by their sexuality -- not used and discarded like last year's Christmas present.
I do know that Victoria's Secret is not our only, or even our biggest, problem. Dozens of other companies taunt our youth with hyper-sexualized images -- the tween market is worth "$335 billion of spending power," retail analyst Hitha Prabhaker told the TODAY show Tuesday morning.
Large consumer products companies, with their gazillion-dollar marketing budgets, are influencing our kids in profound ways. As parents, we can protect them by not letting them watch commercials and by not letting them shop in (or, frankly, even near) stores like Victoria's Secret. We can -- and should -- write letters and hope that our righteous anger goes viral on Facebook. But honestly, these tactics feel profoundly inadequate compared to the marketing machines that we face. Can we win a war by boycotting the companies that hurt kids, or by simply hiding our children from the enemy?
I hope so.
But I'm also open to other ideas if you've got them.
© 2013 Christine Carter, Ph.D.
Christine Carter, Ph.D., is a sociologist and happiness expert at UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center and the author of Raising Happiness. She coaches and teaches online classes in order to help people bring more joy into their lives, and she writes an award-winning blog for parents and couples. Find Raising Happiness on Facebook or sign up for free Happiness Tips.

This Life

The Stories That Bind Us

Sarah Williamson

Families may want to create a mission statement similar to the ones many companies use to identify their core values.

By BRUCE FEILER

Published: March 15, 2013 11 Comments

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I hit the breaking point as a parent a few years ago. It was the week of my extended family’s annual gathering in August, and we were struggling with assorted crises. My parents were aging; my wife and I were straining under the chaos of young children; my sister was bracing to prepare her preteens for bullying, sex and cyberstalking.

Motherlode Blog: When Your Partner Writes the Book on ‘Happy Families’ (March 14, 2013)

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Sure enough, one night all the tensions boiled over. At dinner, I noticed my nephew texting under the table. I knew I shouldn’t say anything, but I couldn’t help myself and asked him to stop.

Ka-boom! My sister snapped at me to not discipline her child. My dad pointed out that my girls were the ones balancing spoons on their noses. My mom said none of the grandchildren had manners. Within minutes, everyone had fled to separate corners.

Later, my dad called me to his bedside. There was a palpable sense of fear I couldn’t remember hearing before.

“Our family’s falling apart,” he said.

“No it’s not,” I said instinctively. “It’s stronger than ever.”

But lying in bed afterward, I began to wonder: Was he right? What is the secret sauce that holds a family together? What are the ingredients that make some families effective, resilient, happy?

It turns out to be an astonishingly good time to ask that question. The last few years have seen stunning breakthroughs in knowledge about how to make families, along with other groups, work more effectively.

Myth-shattering research has reshaped our understanding of dinnertime, discipline and difficult conversations. Trendsetting programs from Silicon Valley and the military have introduced techniques for making teams function better.

The only problem: most of that knowledge remains ghettoized in these subcultures, hidden from the parents who need it most. I spent the last few years trying to uncover that information, meeting families, scholars and experts ranging from peace negotiators to online game designers to Warren Buffett’s bankers.

After a while, a surprising theme emerged. The single most important thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: develop a strong family narrative.

I first heard this idea from Marshall Duke, a colorful psychologist at Emory University. In the mid-1990s, Dr. Duke was asked to help explore myth and ritual in American families.

“There was a lot of research at the time into the dissipation of the family,” he told me at his home in suburban Atlanta. “But we were more interested in what families could do to counteract those forces.”

Around that time, Dr. Duke’s wife, Sara, a psychologist who works with children with learning disabilities, noticed something about her students.

“The ones who know a lot about their families tend to do better when they face challenges,” she said.

Her husband was intrigued, and along with a colleague, Robyn Fivush, set out to test her hypothesis. They developed a measure called the “Do You Know?” scale that asked children to answer 20 questions.

Examples included: Do you know where your grandparents grew up? Do you know where your mom and dad went to high school? Do you know where your parents met? Do you know an illness or something really terrible that happened in your family? Do you know the story of your birth?

Dr. Duke and Dr. Fivush asked those questions of four dozen families in the summer of 2001, and taped several of their dinner table conversations. They then compared the children’s results to a battery of psychological tests the children had taken, and reached an overwhelming conclusion. The more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned. The “Do You Know?” scale turned out to be the best single predictor of children’s emotional health and happiness.

“We were blown away,” Dr. Duke said.

And then something unexpected happened. Two months later was Sept. 11. As citizens, Dr. Duke and Dr. Fivush were horrified like everyone else, but as psychologists, they knew they had been given a rare opportunity: though the families they studied had not been directly affected by the events, all the children had experienced the same national trauma at the same time. The researchers went back and reassessed the children.

“Once again,” Dr. Duke said, “the ones who knew more about their families proved to be more resilient, meaning they could moderate the effects of stress.”

Why does knowing where your grandmother went to school help a child overcome something as minor as a skinned knee or as major as a terrorist attack?

“The answers have to do with a child’s sense of being part of a larger family,” Dr. Duke said.

Psychologists have found that every family has a unifying narrative, he explained, and those narratives take one of three shapes.

First, the ascending family narrative: “Son, when we came to this country, we had nothing. Our family worked. We opened a store. Your grandfather went to high school. Your father went to college. And now you. ...”

Second is the descending narrative: “Sweetheart, we used to have it all. Then we lost everything.”

“The most healthful narrative,” Dr. Duke continued, “is the third one. It’s called the oscillating family narrative: ‘Dear, let me tell you, we’ve had ups and downs in our family. We built a family business. Your grandfather was a pillar of the community. Your mother was on the board of the hospital. But we also had setbacks. You had an uncle who was once arrested. We had a house burn down. Your father lost a job. But no matter what happened, we always stuck together as a family.’ ”

Dr. Duke said that children who have the most self-confidence have what he and Dr. Fivush call a strong “intergenerational self.” They know they belong to something bigger than themselves.

Leaders in other fields have found similar results. Many groups use what sociologists call sense-making, the building of a narrative that explains what the group is about.

Jim Collins, a management expert and author of “Good to Great,” told me that successful human enterprises of any kind, from companies to countries, go out of their way to capture their core identity. In Mr. Collins’s terms, they “preserve core, while stimulating progress.” The same applies to families, he said.

Mr. Collins recommended that families create a mission statement similar to the ones companies and other organizations use to identify their core values.

The military has also found that teaching recruits about the history of their service increases their camaraderie and ability to bond more closely with their unit.

Cmdr. David G. Smith is the chairman of the department of leadership, ethics and law at the Naval Academy and an expert in unit cohesion, the Pentagon’s term for group morale. Until recently, the military taught unit cohesion by “dehumanizing” individuals, Commander Smith said. Think of the bullying drill sergeants in “Full Metal Jacket” or “An Officer and a Gentleman.”

But these days the military spends more time building up identity through communal activities. At the Naval Academy, Commander Smith advises graduating seniors to take incoming freshmen (or plebes) on history-building exercises, like going to the cemetery to pay tribute to the first naval aviator or visiting the original B-1 aircraft on display on campus.

Dr. Duke recommended that parents pursue similar activities with their children. Any number of occasions work to convey this sense of history: holidays, vacations, big family get-togethers, even a ride to the mall. The hokier the family’s tradition, he said, the more likely it is to be passed down. He mentioned his family’s custom of hiding frozen turkeys and canned pumpkin in the bushes during Thanksgiving so grandchildren would have to “hunt for their supper,” like the Pilgrims.

“These traditions become part of your family,” Dr. Duke said.

Decades of research have shown that most happy families communicate effectively. But talking doesn’t mean simply “talking through problems,” as important as that is. Talking also means telling a positive story about yourselves. When faced with a challenge, happy families, like happy people, just add a new chapter to their life story that shows them overcoming the hardship. This skill is particularly important for children, whose identity tends to get locked in during adolescence.

The bottom line: if you want a happier family, create, refine and retell the story of your family’s positive moments and your ability to bounce back from the difficult ones. That act alone may increase the odds that your family will thrive for many generations to come.

“This Life” appears monthly in Sunday Styles. This article is adapted from Bruce Feiler’s recently published book, “The Secrets of Happy Families: How to Improve Your Morning, Rethink Family Dinner, Fight Smart, Go Out and Play, and Much More.”

Parenting Tidbits

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Tween lingerie market