Violence Among Girls Lowest in 40 Years

Mike Males and Chelsea Lynd have written a piece in The New York Times Op-Ed section, The Myth of Mean Girls which has brilliant news for parents of girls.

Girls are being bullied. But not by each other. Not by boys. Those numbers are down drastically. Those numbers are down, down, down to the lowest point since the 1960s. Girls are being bullied buy the 24 hour news cycle and middle-aged do-gooders (like myself) who focus on, and raise alarms, about isolated instances of cyber-bullying and mean girl behavior that randomly and rarely gets out of hand.

I would write more about this, but I haven’t figured out how to highlight an entire sentence on my new Macbook. So, if you’ll just go up there and click on the word “The” you can read the piece yourself.

OR you can just sit peacefully with the new and radically awesome idea that your girls is probably safe, probably not going to be raped, beaten, kidnapped, or robbed. And that it’s unlikely she will bully, beat, or emotionally torture others to death either.

That’s great news. Sit with it until it sinks into your cells and it dissolves the old, outdated, media-induced fear.

It’s a freaking great time to be a girl.