Summary

The Triple Bind that girls face today: bull; Act sweet and nice bull; Be a star athlete and get straight A's bull; Seem sexy and hot even if you're not In many ways, today is the best time in history to be a girl: Opportunities for a girl's success are as unlimited as her dreams. Yet societal expectations, cultural trends, and conflicting messages are creating what psychologist and researcher Stephen Hinshaw calls "the Triple Bind." Girls are now expected to excel at "girl skills," achieve "boy goals," and be models of female perfection, 100 percent of the time. Here, Dr. Hinshaw reveals key aspects of the Triple Bind, including bull; genes, hormones, and the role of biology in confronting the Triple Bind bull; overscheduled lives and how the high pressure to excel at everything sets girls up for crisis bull; how traditionally feminine qualities (such as empathy and self-awareness) can put girls at risk for anxiety, depression, and other disorders bull; the oversexualization of little girls, preteens, and teenagers bull; the reasons girls are channeling pressure into violence Combining moving personal stories with extensive research, Dr. Hinshaw provides tools for parents who want to empower their daughters to deal in healthy ways with today's pressures.

Author Biography

Stephen P. Hinshaw, Ph.D., is professor and chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is an internationally recognized psychologist and researcher whose work on troubled children has received ongoing media attention. Articles and interviews featuring him and his work have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and USA Today. He has appeared on Today, NBC Nightly News, ABC World News Tonight, and CNN.

From the Hardcover edition.

Introduction: Girls in Crisis	p. ix
Impossible Expectations	p. 3
Blue Jeans and "Blue" Genes: Depression and the Triple Bind	p. 27
Life in the Pressure Cooker: Impossible Expectations and the Culture of Busy-ness	p. 47
No Place to Run, No Place to Hide: The Popular Culture of "Self-Erasing Identities"	p. 68
When Virtue Is Its Own Punishment: How Empathy and Verbal Skills May Put Our Girls at Higher Risk	p. 86
Bratz Dolls and Pussycat Dolls: Teaching Our Girls to Become Sexual Objects	p. 103
The Wired Child: How Cyberculture Interferes With Girls' Identities	p. 126
See Jane Hit: The New Culture of Violence Among Teenage Girls	p. 143
Is There a Triple Bind Solution?	p. 159
Conclusion: Coming to Terms With the Triple Bind	p. 177
Resources	p. 179
Acknowledgments	p. 185
Notes	p. 187
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Excerpts

Chapter 1

Impossible Expectations

Sixteen-year-old Lupe leans forward, so eager to share her thoughts that she almost knocks her schoolbooks on the floor. “The expectations are impossible!” she tells me.

Her classmate Eugenia, a high school junior, agrees. “No one says what is expected of you, you’re just expected to know—and you have a pressure to exceed even that. I think you’re expected to be well rounded, be intelligent, be outgoing, but also do, like, community service and do extracurricular stuff, just have the whole package.”

“But sometimes that’s really hard!” Lupe insists.

Fifteen-year-old Jessica chimes in. “I think we’re supposed to know what we’re supposed to be doing with the rest of our lives. They expect you to know what you are doing at, like, sixteen or seventeen, and you’re supposed to have a big life plan, but sometimes you just don’t. I think also you get a lot of pressure from your parents to do well in school, and you get a lot of pressure from your friends because you want to go out and have fun, and you get pressure about guys, too. . . . You have to do everything!”

Her classmates nod vigorously as Jessica continues, her fervor building with every word. “And you’re supposed to handle it beautifully. Be completely graceful, poised, have a boyfriend you’ve been seeing for the past year, know everything, make sure nothing’s wrong, talk to your teachers, be best friends with them, everything has to be perfect. Love your siblings, love your parents, no fighting, and of course, you should be going out with your friends— but don’t party, ’cause you don’t want a bad rep. But you still want to have fun and be a kid—and you can’t. It’s so hard.”

Eugenia shakes her head. “And the second you make a mistake, everything comes crashing down. You feel like the world just kind of stops. I’ve known some people who have kind of gone down the tubes, they just can’t handle it anymore.”

“Yeah,” say the others.

Lupe sighs explosively and leans back in her chair. “It all goes back to the expectations,” she repeats. “First of all, they are impossible, and second of all, we don’t know what they are.”

Girls in Danger

At first glance, this conversation with a group of prep school girls in the Seattle area might seem like run-of-the-mill teenage angst. Sure, they’re worried about homework, parents, and getting into college—so what? Why should we worry about these routine teenage complaints?

The numbers tell us why—and their message is disturbing indeed:

• Up to 20 percent of girls ages ten to nineteen are experiencing episodes of major depression. Information from the general population about depressive disorders—which include withdrawal, tearfulness, lassitude, repeated negative thoughts, sleep disturbance, and self-destructive acts—shows that over the past fifty years or more, the average age of onset of female depression has fallen from the mid-thirties to the mid-twenties, with a significant portion of young women becoming depressed by their early to mid-teens.1

• As of 2005, about one-tenth of all teenage girls had made an attempt to end their lives. Whereas teenage girls once tended to make “nonserious” suicide attempts—attempts that were considered primarily a cry for help—an increased number are now genuinely trying to kill themselves. The teen suicide rate went up more than 300 percent between the 1950s and late 1980s. Although teen suicide rates fell somewhat during the 1990s and early years of the current decade, between 2003 and 2004, they spiked: the number of girls ages ten to fourteen who killed themselves rose by 76 pe

Excerpted from The Triple Bind: Saving Our Teenage Girls from Today's Pressures and Conflicting Expectations by Rachel Kranz, Stephen Hinshaw
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