The World of Adolescent Girls Today – Mary Pipher and Sara Gilliam

Salepage link: At HERE. Archive:

Twenty-five years after the publication of Pipher’s groundbreaking book Reviving Ophelia, the evidence suggests that many adolescent girls continue to struggle not just because of dysfunctional families, but because of a misogynistic, girl-poisoning culture.

Since the launch of the iPhone in 2007 and the enormous growth of social media, their depression and suicide rates have soared.

In this session recording, a mother–daughter team of copresenters will explore the impact of the digital age and the links between the decline in face-to-face interactions and the increase in adolescent girls’ levels of loneliness and despair.

1. Explore the vulnerability girls feel to social media messages on platforms like Instagram and Snapchat. 
2. Discuss the clinical implications of girls’ reluctance to enter the world of dating and their postponement of sexual intimacy even as they are exposed to hookup culture and online pornography. 
3. Discover how to reconnect girls to the nonvirtual world and help them regain their vibrancy, sense of self, and authenticity. 

Comparison of Key Cultural Changes Between Three Generations of Girls Growing Up in the Decades of the 1950s Through the Present, in Rural America

• Family and community relationships
• Communication and technology
• Global culture and information flow
• Identity, development of sense of self

Effects of Dysfunctional Cultural Trends on Teen Girls

• Disillusionment and self-destructive behaviors
• Self-harm and at-risk behaviors
• Intense anger with parents, especially teen girls toward their mothers
• Case examples

Depression and Self-Harm

• Increase in suicide rates and self-harm behaviors
• True selves vs. created online selves

Anxiety – Impacts and Effects

• Immediate coverage of mass shootings and the “lock down generation”
• social media:  body shaming and selfie-harm
• fear of violence and date rape
• short-term and long-term effects of chronic anxiety
• false selves vs. true selves
• loneliness, less actual social interactions
• decrease in dating and close relationships with parents and others

Interventions to Help Teen Girls Grow with a Healthy Sense of Self

• Connecting with others and the natural world
• Parental involvement in social media oversight
• Impacts of employment and challenges to succeed
• Embedding in a community
• Being aware, being honest