Boarding Schools for Girls

What your children fight about may have an impact on the relationship, according to a new study from the University of Missouri.

• If the children are fighting over physical and emotional personal space, such as becoming angry when a brother borrows a shirt without asking or when an older sister hangs around the friends of a younger sibling, the siblings will report less trust and communication.
  
• However, if the children are fighting about fairness and equality issues, such as taking turns and sharing chores, their fights had no impact on the quality of their relationship.

"Parents need to establish and enforce family rules about respecting privacy, personal space and property," she said. However, when children fight, parents should usually let them work it out because when parents stepped in, fighting usually escalates.

Professor Nichole Campione-Barr and her associates studied pairs of siblings ages 8 to 20 years old, in a report published in the journal Child Development.

Labels: relationships, siblings, parenting, fighting

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A new survey of more than 33,000 girls ages 12 to 17 years old has revealed that that one in four has experienced a serious fight or attack from another girl in the past year.

Researchers from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) found the following:

• 19 percent of the girls had been in a fight at school
• 14 percent had been in a group fight
• 6 percent had attacked someone else with the intention of hurting that person.

Using drugs or alcohol put a girl at higher risk for such fights, SAMHSA reported.

"The findings are all alarming," said SAMHSA spokesperson Pamela Hyde. "We need to do a better job of reaching girls at risk and teaching them how to resolve problems without resorting to violence."

Labels: fighting, violence

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The classic image of a school bully is a brutish boy who terrorizes other students for their lunch money, their homework, and whatever expressions of fear he can cause them to emit. And though faux-macho little monsters do exist - and continue to cause mayhem in hallways and schoolyards across the country - they're not the only bullies in town.

A 2005 report by the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) examined a phenomenon of girl bullies who inflict pain not with their fists, but rather through a mean-spirited manipulation of scholastic social networks. In "Girls Bullying Girls," the NASP notes that this type of behavior is neither new nor benign:

The term "relational aggression" is used to describe a type of bullying primarily used by pre-adolescent and adolescent girls to victimize other girls - a covert use of relationships as weapons to inflict emotional pain.

Researchers have found that, contrary to popular belief, girls are not less aggressive than boys, they are just more subtle or covert in their use of aggression. ...

Acts of relational aggression are common among girls in American schools. These acts can include rumor spreading, secret-divulging, alliance-building, backstabbing, ignoring, excluding from social groups and activities, verbally insulting, and using hostile body language (i.e., eye-rolling and smirking).

Other behaviors include making fun of someone's clothes or appearance and bumping into someone on purpose. Many of these behaviors are quite common in girls' friendships, but when they occur repeatedly to one particular victim, they constitute bullying.

Whether conducted in person or via online attacks - using e-mails and popular social sites such as MySpace to spread malicious information and embarrassing (often digitally altered) photographs - relational aggression can inflict severe and lasting damage on the target of the abuse.

Parents who suspect that their daughter is being bullied - or is being a bully herself - are urged to contact school officials and arrange for their child to be evaluated by a mental health professional.

Labels: fighting, bullies, bullying

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