Queen Bees and Wannabes, 3rd Edition

Description

“My daughter used to be so wonderful. Now I can barely stand her and she won’t tell me anything. How can I find out what’s going on?”“There’s a clique in my daughter’s grade that’s making her life miserable. She doesn’t want to go to school anymore. Her own supposed friends are turning on her, and she’s too afraid to do anything. What can I do?”Welcome to the wonderful world of your daughter’s adolescence. A world in which she comes to school one day to find that her friends have suddenly decided that she no longer belongs. Or she’s teased mercilessly for wearing the wrong outfit or having the wrong friend. Or branded with a reputation she can’t shake. Or pressured into conforming so she won’t be kicked out of the group. For better or worse, your daughter’s friendships are the key to enduring adolescence—as well as the biggest threat to her well-being.In her groundbreaking book, Queen Bees and Wannabes, Empower cofounder Rosalind Wiseman takes you inside the secret world of girls’ friendships. Wiseman has spent more than a decade listening to thousands of girls talk about the powerful role cliques play in shaping what they wear and say, how they respond to boys, and how they feel about themselves. In this candid, insightful book, she dissects each role in the clique: Queen Bees, Wannabes, Messengers, Bankers, Targets, Torn Bystanders, and more. She discusses girls’ power plays, from birthday invitations to cafeteria seating arrangements and illicit parties. She takes readers into “Girl World” to analyze teasing, gossip, and reputations; beauty and fashion; alcohol and drugs; boys and sex; and more, and how cliques play a role in every situation.Each chapter includes “Check Your Baggage” sections to help you identify how your own background and biases affect how you see your daughter. “What You Can Do to Help” sections offer extensive sample scripts, bulleted lists, and other easy-to-use advice to get you inside your daughter’s world and help you help her.It’s not just about helping your daughter make it alive out of junior high. This book will help you understand how your daughter’s relationship with friends and cliques sets the stage for other intimate relationships as she grows and guides her when she has tougher choices to make about intimacy, drinking and drugs, and other hazards. With its revealing look into the secret world of teenage girls and cliques, enlivened with the voices of dozens of girls and a much-needed sense of humor, Queen Bees and Wannabes will equip you with all the tools you need to build the right foundation to help your daughter make smarter choices and empower her during this baffling, tumultuous time of life. Review: Doesn't live up to it's reputation - In the third edition, 95% of the text is a rather bland, off-the-shelf set of generic and incredibly condescending parenting advice, in the standard American middle class individualist main stream. Really mothering advice, most of the book can be summed up as "it's all the mother's fault that your daughter is lying to you". The "Queen Bee" teen girl dynamics that made this book famous, is really just a single chapter. If this sort of parenting manual is your cup of tea - good for you. Even many confused teen girls will like this sort of explanation of themselves, as a sort of simplifying self diagnosis. Review: 13 year old says, #relatable - I just started reading this book yesterday, so I am only a little ways into it, but from what I have read so far it is SPOT ON. As others stated...it's a long book. But..come on...girls are complex people! I have been a middle school teacher for 17 years and I have two daughters...one is 13 and one is nearly 8. I wish I had read this book years ago to better relate to my students. I plan on suggesting it as a book group read for my faculty and maybe even seeing if some of the students want to join in. My 13 year old read a little bit of it with me and her eyes kept opening up really wide. She said it was all totally relatable and she was easily able to point out where many of her friends were with relation to their status in the clique. Her grade is known for a complex girls clique and it's something she's been dealing with since 3rd grade. It got so bad for awhile that she actually decided to try a charter school to get away from the clique but as it always is with girls, cliques were at the charter school as well. It's just what girls do. As she read she stuck up her fingers in a hash tag symbol and said #relatable, 13 year old speak for this is accurate ;). Some parts of it so far were hard for me to read. I'm one of the floaters (she calls them champions in this book...I'm not sold on that term...makes it sound too positive and there are lots of drawbacks to being a floater, trust me). One of the parts I read about floaters literally gut punched me and made me realize why I've often felt as though I'm an island of myself. My 13 year old daughter is a floater as well. This is a trait that serves her sell sometimes, but also leaves her without a best friend. That can be hard. I can attest to that never having a best friend myself. Don't get me wrong...I have tons of friends, but have never had a best friend due to my floater tendencies. I would think if I had been a queen bee or the mother of a queen bee that this book might be a bit harder to read. What I have read so far doesn't cast queen bee's in the most favorable light, though that is not the author's intention. Her intention is to raise awareness of the cliques and how to navigate them. She doesn't say queen bee's are bad people...they are part of a hierarchal system. I've worked with several queen bee students before and, although many of them are mean girls, they are all just trying to navigate social structures like the rest of us and just need some extra guidance and parenting in order to use their status in a more positive way. Unfortunately, from what I have seen as an educator and parent, many parents of queen bees are in the dark about their child and make the situation worse.