It’s Possible To Honor Teenage Girls

She’s nearly 13 years old. I’ve been told to brace myself.

Every message a parent hears these days is that young teenage girls are fragile and troubled, suffering in school, assaulted by a culture focused on sex, thinness, violence and drugs.

Certainly, the signs at home are unmistakable: a door slammed for no apparent reason; a shopping trip that dissolves in frustration when all the offerings in an entire megamall can’t seem to please her.

Cries of: I’ve got too much homework! I’m going to fail this test! I’m not good at this!

Certainly, too, I behaved the same way when I grappled with puberty, when friends meant everything, my body was changing in ways I didn’t recognize or understand, and the world suddenly seemed an inattentive and unforgiving place.

But it’s much harder now, the pundits argue, and some of their evidence is compelling. The streets and school hallways aren’t as safe. Tall, slim models are held up as the ideal of beauty, so dieting and body weight become obsessions. In television and videos, girls are too often objects of male desire or rage.

“Things that shocked us in the 1950s now make us yawn,” Mary Pipher writes in her bestselling book “Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Our Adolescent Girls.” She draws from her experiences as a mother and family therapist in a book that’s attained a cultlike status among some befuddled parents.

“The issues that I struggled with as a college student - when I should have sex, should I drink, smoke or hang out with bad company - now must be considered in early adolescence.”

So, too, a pervasive media seem to give us only negative images of girls this age. They are invisible, or sullen, or prone to stupid behavior. The last 13-year-old girl I recall in the news was portrayed as dumb enough to get drunk, get pregnant and have her boyfriend’s mother illegally take her across state lines for an abortion.

We parents are haunted by studies that purport to show that girls’ IQ scores drop and math grades plummet once they hit middle school, that their self-esteem disappears and happiness is elusive.

“America today is a girl-destroying place,” Pipher writes. “Adolescent girls are saplings in a hurricane. They are young and vulnerable trees that the winds blow with gale strength.”

What Pipher and others say is true. But it’s not the complete story.

For my daughter stood last week not as the vulnerable sapling, but as a strong tree, branches extended proudly, roots firmly in place.

It was the day she became a bat mitzvah. It was an antidote to everything negative and frightening about modern girls her age.

Consumed as we were with preparations, I didn’t realize this at first. Then, a few days before the service, my friend Ellen dropped off the cookies she had made for our celebration. And she said something so wise it will stay with me always.

Isn’t it amazing, she asked, that just when our daughters drive us crazy, they are able to make us so proud?

The pride comes not only to the parents, but because this is a rare, “public” coming-of-age ritual to the community. The bar mitzvah began centuries ago for boys as a signal of their adulthood, in the religious and secular world. At the age of 13, they were available for marriage and study or work, to leave their families and become self-sufficient.

Now, it seems, our society keeps kids in adolescence (and at home) well into their 20s. But, conversely, they are exposed to hard, adult realities at an earlier age.

And so the bat mitzvah becomes a unique moment to see an adolescent girl in a stunningly different light. Far from lacking in self-esteem, she stands there confident, able to display her abilities to lead a congregation in prayer.

Far from having her intellect demeaned, she is able to show what she has learned, offering her own reactions to an ancient text. Far from emphasizing appearance, the ritual respects thought and deed.

And in the eyes of the religious community, she becomes a full-fledged adult - granting at least to a slice of her life the mantle of maturity every teenager craves.

It is a singular moment, of course, and no guarantee that the door-slamming behavior won’t intensify. But it stands there as public proof of a girl’s growth and potential.

“As a culture,” Mary Pipher writes, “we could use more wholesome rituals for coming of age. Too many of our current rituals involve sex, drugs, alcohol and rebellion. We need more positive ways to acknowledge growth.”

I am grateful to have one. xxxx