If mean girl antics start in kindergarten, maybe it’s time the adults do better

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It began as an ordinary scene: My girls, 5 and 3, were in line for the trampoline at gymnastics, while my husband and I watched from the bleachers. My oldest left her spot at the front of the line to join her sister at the back.

Suddenly, the trio of girls now in front of her spun around, hands on hips, like miniature chickens, and started pecking – sharp little words, fast and synchronized. My daughter pecked back. The middle girl’s face was suddenly millimetres from hers, sass fully loaded.

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My little chicken turned around, scanned the stands until her eyes found mine and burst into tears.

It wasn’t the first time I’d known young girls to be mean – but it was my first front-row seat as a mom. Since kindergarten began, my daughter has come home with stories of girls who either made her day or ruined it, of snack-time alliances and hurt feelings on the playground. My husband and I would look at each other in disbelief. She’s only 5. This can’t be happening already, can it?

“Well, no, this doesn’t surprise me at all,” said Tracy Vaillancourt, psychology professor at the University of Ottawa and a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in School-Based Mental Health and Violence Prevention. She has spent decades studying popularity, bullying and female friendship dynamics, and believes girls are socialized to demonstrate this kind of “mean girl” behaviour – not just when they are young but throughout their lifetimes.

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“The sad reality is what you’re seeing with your five-year-old will still be happening when she’s 55,” she said, pointing to her research that showed mean kids are 14 times more likely to be mean adults. The meanness, she said, is only getting worse with the prevalence of cyberbullying in teenage years.

Vaillancourt’s research traces meanness in females back hundreds of years, and she believes women are evolutionarily hard-wired to be cruel to each other in order to get ahead. “Female aggression had to be quieter, more underground … whereas men’s aggression was out in the open, physically competing for scarce resources.” She said that’s also why female meanness persists – because physical aggression isn’t generally tolerated in our society today, but there are no laws against indirect aggression.

What’s more, meanness is “highly contagious,” she said. It’s true: As my daughter experiences this in her social circles, the same behaviour is starting to appear in my living room. The threats of “then I’m not your best friend any more!” fly between my daughters more times than I can count. Most of the time, I roll my eyes and let it go.

That tolerance is exactly why female meanness blossoms and persists in little girls, said Deinera Exner-Cortens, an associate psychology professor at the University of Calgary and co-director of PREVnet, an online hub promoting healthy relationships in children and youth. Relational aggression happens as young as toddlerhood, she said, and can happen in boys, too, but isn’t as common. “We’ve socialized boys so that if they want to express hurt feelings or gain power, emotion isn’t the way that we’ve deemed is good for them to do that.”

Adults will often brush the behaviour off as “well, they’re just little kids, they’re not causing harm, girls being girls – we don’t need to take it seriously,” she said.

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But meanness works well – and kids know it. “Even in younger kids, they know the ones who are mean will be popular, not necessarily well-liked. But they will rule the school.” With my own daughter, the girls who exclude her are somehow the ones she seeks to impress.

The challenge, then, is how to teach that being a mean girl isn’t cool. And, as with most important lessons, it starts with parents doing the hard work, says Alyson Schafer, family counsellor and parenting author in Kingston, Ont.

First, she advises parents look at their own behaviour. Do they put their hands on their hips when directing their child? Do they gossip about other adults when the kids can hear? Do they treat restaurant servers kindly?

“If you have a bossy little kid, you have likely modelled somewhere that to be the one with power, you talk down and you push other people around,” she said.

Schafer said mean girl behaviour – excluding others, deciding where everyone will sit, dictating the activity – often happens on playdates, for example, because “parents seem to think it’s coffee time,” while the kids go off on their own. But, she said, playdates are where parents should be working the hardest.

“You have to be there, correcting, stating good values and positive affirmations … and engaging everyone all the time to be kind. Like, ‘Actually your friend gets to pick where she sits. Actually, there’s always room for everyone to play with the toys.’”

When Schafer hosted playdates, she would tell the other parent in advance that she wouldn’t be afraid to send their child home if they were being hostile or unkind. “I want my kids to know I have a zero-tolerance policy for that kind of behaviour.”

Days after the gymnastics incident, my daughter finally told me what had happened. She’d noticed that her little sister looked scared at the back of the trampoline line, so she gave up her spot at the front and explained why to the other girls. The queen bee of the group snapped “you’re not special just because you have a sister” – and the pecking began.

I told my daughter I was proud of her small but real act of courage. Supporting her sister was the strongest thing she could have done that day at gymnastics.

If meanness spreads easily, maybe kindness can too. And that starts not with the kids in the line but with the adults in the stands.