Yes, I Encouraged A Sibling Squabble

On helping girls hold onto their voices.

A few days ago, my 9-year-old daughter lost her shit.

We were all eating dinner. She asked her 12-year-old brother a question — some kind of follow-up related to the conversation we were having — and he didn’t answer her. He just shrugged, which he sometimes does even when a shrug is not appropriate. He probably did it just to annoy her.

Well, annoy her it did. In fact, she started crying. And yelling. She told him that it wasn’t okay for him to be rude, that he does things like this all the time, and that she was sick and tired of it.

Typical Me would probably have reacted by validating her feelings and trying to help her calm down. I’d work to reclaim some semblance of civility for the rest of dinner, try to smooth things over so everyone would get along.

But This Week Me didn’t. This Week Me said something like, “I hear you. And I think you are making a very valid point. A very valid point.”

My husband peered at me curiously, like he was trying to figure out if I had lost my mind. Was I actually egging her on? What her brother had done wasn’t that big of a deal. He’s a tween. He’s not always responsive in the ways we want him to be.

But the fact was, his slight had upset her. She was entitled to her feelings. And her reaction, while more outsized than usual, was something I realized I wanted to defend rather than quell.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading and talking to experts about how girls are socialized and how that socialization affects them over the course of their lives. One key thing we know — which I’m sure comes as a surprise to absolutely none of you — is that our culture rewards girls for being accommodating and punishes them for getting angry. Unfortunately, over time, these cultural pressures and expectations can have devastating consequences.