From The Confessional: Mean Girls Are The Absolute Worst

We all like to joke about Regina George and her catty bullshit, but at our core, we know that mean girls are real and can cut deep. We knew them in third grade when they made fun of whatever hand-me-down shoes we wore or that we still wore pigtails when “pigtails were for babies.” We knew them as teens when we’d find out after the fact that the rest of the group had a sleepover and we were intentionally excluded. And that they made fun of us the whole night. And we know them today, as adults, because mean girls grow up to be mean women.

They are the moms at school pickup, refusing to let a newbie mom into their tight, snobby little circle. They are the women in our neighborhoods who host Lululemon parties and cookie swaps with everyone else and “forget” to extend us an invite so we sit home, watching the cars pile up in front of their house.

They are our in-laws, our cousins, sometimes even our sisters, and our former friends. Mean girls are 12, and they are 45, and they are 70.

There’s no escaping them, so we have to learn to toughen our skin, not let them break our spirit, and remember that we don’t need $100 Lululemons anyway and are just fine in our $20 Target pants, surrounded by people who love us for us.

And we have to teach our kids that ugly truth too—that they’ll encounter mean girls their whole lives. But most importantly, we must ensure that we don’t raise mean girls, and that instead, we raise kind children who are includers and givers and know how to be true friends. One of the best ways to do that is to model kindness ourselves—because they’re watching.

One of the most heartbreaking parts of motherhood is realizing that mean girl bullshit starts young. Like really young. How many of us have had our kindergarteners and 1st graders come home in tears because another child had been unkind to them? So yeah, the lessons on dealing with mean girls start early, and even worse, they pretty much never end.

Because the truth is, we never get over it. That feeling of one of your peers—or worse, someone you thought was a friend—making you feel less than cuts deep and doesn’t heal for a long ass time.

And then all of a sudden we are in our 30s, but it’s still happening. That mean girl making your kid cry probably has a mean mom at home. She probably was the who who made fun of your dingy hand-me-down hightops when you were kids. And now she’s raising one just like her.

They are on our street, at our kids’ schools, at church, and of course, there are mean girls at our places of work.

We want to believe someday they’ll grow out of it, but then we meet crotchety old women in their 80s, still dragging other women. So guess not.

And now, we have the internet and social media, giving bitchy mean girls yet another vehicle by which they can torment others.

If you find out your daughter is being unkind to other kids, that’s on you to fix. And you might want to start with yourself. Does she see you do that to other women? Does she hear you tear other women down for their looks, weight, clothes, money, job, or life choices?

On the other hand, if our kids grow up watching us be kind and lift one another up, and accept and embrace each other’s differences, they’ll learn to be tolerant and accepting and kind too.

It’s time to break the mean girl cycle. And it starts with us.