Teaching Her Media Smarts
As a teenager, your daughter has important work to do, in addition to going to school and doing everything else she does. Being an adolescent is a learning process that revolves around becoming an adult. Your girl will pass this period with flying colors if — at the end of her teens — she can joyfully answer the question, “Who am I?” to her satisfaction and to yours.
However before your daughter can do that with any certainty, she — like all girls her age — may find herself unclear about her identity. She may go through a few years of floundering during which she may engage in the following activities:
Experiment with various pretend personas, even negative or delinquent ones.
Try these personas out to see if any of them are a good fit for her.
Find one that is most suited for her and revel in it.
During this key trial-and-error process your teenage daughter truly needs you more than ever. She wants and seeks your leadership and guidance to become a successful teen.
Media Mis-messages
What gets in the way of your daughter building her positive identity is that the media have an entirely different goal. They give teens a bad rap because it makes for better news. You know their motto, “If it bleeds, it leads.” When it comes to teenage girls, their motto is, “We want salacious, not gracious.” So every time a kind and productive teen does some good for her community, her story is relegated to the backburner. But every time a young actress gets involved in something seedy or sleazy, the paparazzi are all over it.
Fact
American psychoanalyst Erik Erikson (1902–1994) contributed greatly to the field of child development and identity establishment. He coined labels for the various stages of growth and called the adolescent years a “psychological moratorium” — a time when girls may take time to acquire self-certainty and overcome self-consciousness and self-doubt.
The “Mess” Media
The mass media — consisting of newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, movies, and blogs — have become very powerful during the last few decades. In fact, these days, television, advertising, and the latest technology permeate every corner of life. For example, most homes have more than one TV and radio, as well as computers, video games, webcams, digital recording devices, and the latest requisite accoutrements. Thus, the mass media influence every facet of today's existence.
Whether you like it or not, your daughter will become ensnared in whatever fabric the mass media weave when they portray teens. In regard to girls, that fabric is often messy or just plain flawed. The media often portray girls as rebellious, disrespectful, self-centered, and superficial. Worse, they show girls as precocious or “slutty.” From middle school on, most girls tend to live in a world preoccupied with:
Friends
Clothes
Popularity
Grades
Girls want to be pointed in the right direction, but the mass media are not the place for that. Powered by a profit-making mentality, at all costs, they zoom in on your girl as a fresh new consumer with deep pockets and plenty of ditziness. They could not be more wrong.
Mass Media Mastery
You do not take your responsibility as a parent lightly. You know that forewarned is forearmed, and forearmed is unharmed. Therefore, you want your daughter to be prepared for the onslaught of deceptive advertising that she experiences each day via the mass media. In our culture, there is not only an ever-growing expectation and belief that teenage girls are flighty, but there are also marketing gurus at work that decree that it is to our economy's advantage that adolescent girls should be more concerned with their appearance, their relationships with others, and approval from men than about their own ideas, their own expectations, and their own achievements.
With every teen magazine that girls read, they are bombarded with the message that their minds are less important. It is their looks, their bodies, and their emerging “sex appeal” that matters most. In short, the mass media are devaluing teenage girls as persons and value them mainly as purchasers. Use this fact as a great tool for smartening up your daughter. Tell her that as far as she is concerned, it is a buyer's market. She is a hot commodity. The advertisers — whether on TV, on the radio, in print, or on the Internet — are desperately trying to market their products, services, and a certain lifestyle to her. While the commercials and ads can be considered a form of free expression, the methods they are using are often misleading. With your help, however, your daughter can examine closely the types of ads and commercials aimed at her, the overt messages behind them, and the hidden implications.
Alert
Girls nowadays are seen as a huge market by advertisers. Why? Because they have more money than in the past and because today's busy parents tend to substitute things for the time and attention they used to devote to their children. Parents want to make their daughters happy, so they give them what they want.
You will both laugh as you channel surf and check out some commercials. Flip through the ad sections of your newspaper and scan the glossy portions meant for girls. “Buy me, buy me, buy me,” all the advertisements scream. Soon your daughter will discover that there is a big imbalance, with her, an informed teenager, holding all the power. She is the one who can pick and choose. The marketers can only lose.
Besides making your girl savvy about the mass media, counter the wrong messages they send by starting a mother/daughter or father/daughter book club that focuses on writings about girls who face real challenges and do heroic things. Let her start an e-mail correspondence with girls from countries besieged by famine or other tragedies. But before you do, make sure she is thoroughly up on her computer ABCs.
Essential
Teach your daughter to tear out any keepers — the valuable stories — from her magazines and yours, but let her select which ones. Any article that deals with political issues, the environment, teen health, sexual harassment, or her hobbies may be what she wants to hang onto. Libraries call a collection of “miscellaneous resource materials” stored separately from books a “vertical file.” Let her start her own vertical file.
