Girls' Development During Adolescence: Diminishment of Self

In Jacoby’s essay, one of her main points is that girls and parents stereotype masculine and feminine knowledge. High school girls may believe that science and math is for boys, while English and the arts is for females. Math is seen as “too hard” and a “waste of time” to young girls, ultimately resulting in them announcing to their parents that they will not be taking math or science for their last years of high school. Jacoby argues that if girls were to say they will not be taking English anymore, parents would be horrified and that parents would be less sanguine about the decision if the girls were boys. She also believes adolescent girls fear unattractiveness and avoid being typed as “brains.”

Depression is when an individual has feelings of hopelessness and has very little energy to accomplish tasks; many people have tremendous trouble sustaining an interest in life. In today’s culture, girls have become more depressed in adolescence compared to boys (Stice and Bearman). One of the major influences on why girls are frequently more depressed than boys, is that girls struggle to obtain the perfect body in their own eyes. Findings show that, compared to teen boys, teen girls have higher body shame. Fifty-three percent of adolescent girls reported being dissatisfied with their body after the study (Knauss). Low-self esteem, combined with depression, can potentially be very dangerous for young women.

Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, is author, Mary Pipher’s attempt to understand her experiences in therapy with adolescent girls (Pipher, p. 11). In the text adolescence is described as a border between childhood and adulthood (Pipher, p. 292). In her quest to understand adolescent girls, Pipher attempts to answer these questions: Why are so many girls in therapy in the 1990s? Why are there more self-mutilators? What is the meaning of lip, nose and eyebrow piercings? How do I help thirteen-year-olds deal with herpes or genital warts? Why are drugs and alcohol so common in the stories of seventh-graders? Why do so many girls hate their parents? (Pipher, p. 11-12). These questions are answered through self-reflection, stories from clients, and interviews with adolescent girls at different levels of maturation.

The age of adolescence has become universally known as an awkward period of growth and socialization. The article “Saplings in the Storm,” by Mary Pipher, was published in 1995 and gives an interesting look into some of the issues faced by adolescent girls, but gives little evidence to support her claims or ways in which to encourage the self-confidence in adolescent girls. More recently, there has been further research looking into the reasons as to why girls become more depressed, endure a decrease in self-esteem, and lose their curiosity after puberty.

Adolescent girls growing up in today’s society endure many more hardships than in previous years. Adolescence is no longer a time of endless sunny days spent on the back porch with a glass of country time lemonade and a smile extending ear to ear. Adolescence for girls is now generalized as a dark and depressing period of life that often seems hopeless and never ending. Mary Pipher PH.D tries to illustrate just how drastically life has changed over the years for teenage girls through her best selling book “Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls”. Although Mary Pipher was once a clinical psychologist, she articulates very well for everyone to clearly understand her ideas and perspectives. One way

My question is, then, to them and to you, is it really this serious? Is this “unnamed problem” truly as severe and as widespread as you claim it is? I wonder, although you clearly have lots of experience with adolescent girls, if perhaps you tend to see more of one side of this issue than the other. My thinking would be that as a therapist, you see the girls who do deal with this problem, but not the ones who are okay. You write about adolescent girls, “Just as planes and ships disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves. They crash and burn in a social and developmental Bermuda Triangle” (19). The way you seem to portray it in your writing is that all girls of this age deal with dilemma, nearly without exception, and it seems that you fail to recognize that there are, surely, some girls who don’t experience this. To repeat, I don’t disagree with the purpose of your writing, and I don’t ignore the problem at hand, but I do believe that you exaggerate on the severity of the trouble that adolescent girls are currently in as a result of our

In the article, “Changes in Self Esteem During Middle School Year”, it gives information about self esteem, and what effects it, which insinuates that self esteem is a recurring problem in middle schools. “...ethnicity, social class, gender, and social contexts can lead to changes in self esteem,” says the author. This quote shows that many factors influence changes in self esteem. These factors include dating, although it isn’t mentioned. Dating violence can strongly influence a person’s self esteem. “Gender can also effect changes in self esteem during the adolescent years. Girls consistently experience sharper declines than boys in self esteem.” This quote goes into greater detail about how gender can influence self esteem. Sometimes this

She explains that: … teen boys face many of the same challenges and are longing for many of the same things as girls: they fall in love easily, get their hearts broken and have very mixed feelings about the hypersexualized culture in which they live; they hunger to be more open about their feelings, both with their families and with their male friends, though they exist in a culture that discourages such emotional openness and they desperately want to maintain their social position among their guy friends regardless of the cost to them or others. (42) Because boys are taught to suppress their feelings many boys thus suffer from low self-esteem (43). Wiseman uses anecdotes and illustrations of boys dealing with real-life relationships and emotions to support her claim. She also provides statistics such as boys falling behind girls in regards to high-school GPA and college enrollment which she claims is a result of boys having low self-esteem (43). Lastly, she provides a solution by suggestion that parents should make a concerted effort to communicate more often with their sons about their emotional well-being

One social effect of conformity in young girls is low self-confidence, which often follows into adulthood. Mary Pipher, Ph. D., is a clinical psychologist and author of “Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls”. Throughout Pipher’s writings she recalls personal and patient’s experiences that have brought to light the “destructive forces that affect young women.” (268). Pipher explains that as girls grow up, “They lose their assertive, energetic and “tomboyish” personalities and become more deferential, self-critical and depressed. They report great unhappiness with their own bodies.” (267) Throughout adolescence they are taught by plays, movies, books, and society that a woman’s purpose is to please others. Her favorite example

love – basic human qualities that boys have inside them every bit as much as girls do – get methodically driven out of them by a

When the adolescents were rating the different characteristics the results were as followed, boys rated attractiveness higher than the girls and social status wasn’t important to either group. In the vignette portion of the research, when the social status and the attractiveness were displayed on pictures, it showed that both groups found attractiveness important. Social status was only important for the boys when the mate was attractive and the girls found social status was important whether attractive or not. Lastly, as stated by Ha (2009) “self-perceived mate value moderated the relationship between attractiveness and dating desire for both boys and girls.” Also stated be Ha (2009) “adolescents who perceived themselves as having high mate value showed more dating desire if the other person was attractive compared to adolescents who perceived themselves as having a lower mate value.”

Young girls now face increased pressure to use drugs and become sexually active. Influences from popular music, television, and movies, along with sexist advertising, are damaging their delicate psyches. On the other hand, girls today are accomplishing goals such as maintain a good grade point average and playing sports, however many of these girls are still hindered due to the fact that other individuals just view them as sex objects. Unfortunately, they may not reach their full potential unless serious changes are made in the way that young women are educated and treated. In addition, Dr. Pipher also stresses that boys need to respect girls and

The formation of a concrete sense of self is one of the milestones of adolescence. However, this task is anything but easy. The teenage years are full of turmoil and changes that can have a detrimental affect on a girl's sense of identity and

Dove’s Self Esteem project was made for young girls because more young girls struggle with having low self-esteem between the ages of seven to seventeen than most people realize. Not having good self-esteem takes a toll on young girls and causes them to miss out on many opportunities while growing up. Dove stated “six in ten girls avoid participating in fundamental life activities because of concerns about the way they look”. I found this very

Orenstein began her quest for an honest account of today’s hook-up culture as her daughter approached adolescence. Prior to this point in her life, she had only heard from friends about how teenage girls were treated in today’s culture, now she needed to know if this type of culture really did exist. Since she had been chronicling girl’s lives for over twenty-five years, it was an obvious place to start (Orenstein, P., 2016). She interviewed girls, psychologists, sociologists, pediatricians, educators, and journalist to uncover the ugly truth.