Psychologist Laura Love on what to do when your child is the ’mean girl’

No parent wants their child to face bullying – but what if your daughter is actually the ‘mean girl’? Psychologist Laura Love unpacks how to handle it.

In the cult movie Mean Girls, Regina George’s vacuous, vain mum June seems to encourage her dreadful daughter’s nasty ways.

But in real life, discovering that a cherished child is the schoolyard’s Queen Bee and is causing pain hits hard for parents.

“It is devastating for parents to discover that their child is the mean girl at school,” says Laura Love, principal psychologist and founder of Tapping Into Minds, which has a particular focus on supporting girls.

“You can feel quite helpless but there’s so much we can actually do, which is great.”

Ms Love, a Queensland-based former school psychologist, said there were many tactics to deal with mean girl behaviour – bullying in person or online, patterns of aggression, hostile condescending, exclusion, gossip and manipulation to increase social power.

She said it started in the home, with parents encouraging simple conversations at the family dinner table or in the car to keep connected with their children.

“It’s keeping those conversations going so they can help their kids process things early rather than wait for them to become bigger, scarier problems,” she said.

“The most powerful learning happens in the home.”

Psychologist Laura Love specialises in turning mean girls into nice girls.

Dialling in to a child’s language around their friendships was important, said Ms Love.

If conversations about friends involved a lot of “gossiping and bitching ... throwing them under the bus”, that was a cause for concern.

“If that is happening, that’s a counterfeit trust, that’s not real connection,” she said.

“It’s important as a parent to ask, when they are tearing others down, ‘what’s going on for you when you do that’. Try and build empathy in them. I always tell my kids be the kindest kid in the classroom and focus on building that assertive communication and kindness.”

Ms Love said girls’ friendships became a “little bit dicey” around the age of eight, when they started to compete and compare themselves with their peers.

She said insular, “siloed” friendships that become cliquey and gossipy were a warning sign of mean-girl behaviour, which was actually a “mask” for anxiety and low self-concept.

Children needed to be encouraged to revel in their friends’ achievements and have a broad range of healthy, “uplifting” friendships across different areas of their lives.

It’s a bitter pill to swallow when your daughter is the mean girl – despite Hollywood movies making the phenomenon into a comedy.

“I like to encourage conversations between parents and kids about candle blower-outers,” Ms Love said.

“When you’re shining, achieving, something great’s happening in your life, does your friendship group, your main posse of friends, say hurtful comments? Are they upset by that? Or do they celebrate that with you? It’s hard to find that.

“Ask them about their friends, what their interests are, what do they like about them. It gets them to see how they’re connecting with others and become more others-focused, less self-focused.”

Ms Love said parents should also be mindful about the way they speak about their own friends and set an example of healthy connections in their work and social lives.

“If we’re modelling for them mean girl-type friendships, or angry, or resentful, or gossiping, we also need to probably change ourselves in that process,” she said.

“It all starts with that self-awareness and so I’m so mindful in my interactions with others. Am I just gossiping or saying mean comments about other people as a way to feel close to you? Because that’s not real connection and really being mindful to shift that conversation in a way that’s really helpful and healthy.”

Other tactics include:

– Ban social media for under-16s, which will become the law next year, to stop bullying behaviours following children into the home on their phones

– Keep a private record of bullying behaviours to identify a pattern

– Stay calm and avoid jumping to conclusions about a child’s situation

– Collaborate with the child’s school as early as possible to help turn a toxic situation around before it becomes too traumatic

– Engage a psychologist to support children with “deeply entrenched patterns of behaviour”

Ms Love said she was also an advocate for clinical emotional freedom techniques – or “tapping” – that involved tapping on the face, chest and hands while focusing on an issue or emotion to help parents and their children cope with their emotions and reduce stress.

“Change is definitely possible, it takes time and commitment but we can have a healthy way forward,” she said.

Originally published as Psychologist Laura Love on what to do when your child is the ’mean girl’