I read a disturbing thread on a message board today. It was about, well, bad parents, and what it’s like to have them–the abusive kind, the neglectful kind, the manipulative kind, the resentful kind.
I read the thread and took a deep breath and charged ahead with my day. But all day I kept trying to remember this quotation from one of Urie Bronfenbrenner’s books, so tonight I had to look it up. It goes like this:
“In order to develop normally, a child needs the enduring, irrational involvement of one or more adults in the care of and in joint activity with that child. In short, somebody has to be crazy about that kid. ”
You don’t often see scientists discussing parenting in terms like this. You’re much more likely to come across terms like “sensitivity” and “responsiveness” and “scaffolding”–terms that imply some kind of measurable behavior that parents can score high or low on. But “irrational involvement”? That may not be quantifiable, but it’s definitely something parents can relate to. I feel irrational about my child. I suspect most parents do. I don’t know what to do about the parents who don’t. Is there anything we can do? How do we teach that kind of connection, that emotional tie?
A few semesters ago I was grading papers from my Developmental Psychology course, and came across the following sentence (and yes, this is the kind of writing we get from college juniors):
Crick et al. tell us what is totally obvious, that girls are more manipulative and backstabbing than guys are.
My students had been assigned an article by Nicki Crick and her colleagues. It was a study of overt and relational aggression among elementary school children, in which the authors had found significant gender differences in both forms of aggression. My student clearly thought this was no news at all, and spent a good portion of his paper suggesting that not only was this research a waste of time, but that I was extremely lame for requiring my students to read such nonsense.
Those of us who study aggression encounter this kind of misconception all of the time. Boys fight, girls gossip. Boys “get it all out in the open” (how many times have I heard this phrase?), duke it out, and move on, while girls get angry with each other, steal each other’s friends or spread nasty rumors, and then hold a grudge for years. This is immutable law.
Except that it’s not.
There are quite a few studies that find girls to be more relationally aggressive than boys. What might surprise people, though, is that there are just as many studies showing no gender differences–in other words, that boys engage in relational aggression just as often as girls do.
One of the key differences in the studies that find gender differences and the studies that don’t has to do with age. Studies of elementary school-aged kids are more likely to find gender differences favoring girls. When researchers study adolescents–especially high school students–they are much less likely to find gender differences at all. (Some studies of children also fail to find gender differences, though!)
The age trend suggests a number of possibilities. For example, girls’ verbal skills (which mature sooner than boys’) might allow them to become relationally aggressive earlier. Relational aggression also requires some social savvy and an accurate awareness of the social hierarchy, not to mention the ability to know how to “hit” someone where it hurts. Maybe girls develop these social and interpersonal skills earlier than boys do, as well.
Regardless of what’s driving the inconsistencies in the research, the stereotype of relational aggression as a purely female domain should be put to rest. There are enough studies piling up that don’t find a gender difference–and even one or two that have found boys to be more relationally aggressive than girls.
That’s not to say that gender doesn’t play a role in relational aggression, how it develops, and how it plays out in the social arena. For example, research that Toon Cillessen and I have conducted found that popular relationally aggressive girls are often strongly disliked, but popular relationally aggressive boys are usually pretty well-liked. There’s something going on there that we really don’t have a handle on yet, and gender (and gender stereotypes, and gender roles) probably plays a big role.
But “Mean Girls”? Only “Mean Girls”? Nah. Make a movie called “Mean Boys”–and base it on the same premise–and I bet it would be just as good. And ring just as true.