What Are The Stereotypes Of Teenage Girls

There comes a time in a young girl’s life when she breaks free of her childhood cocoon and spreads her wings, ready to fly into her teenage years. These sometimes dreaded years filled with intense school demands, busy extracurricular schedules, and a tough balance of family time with social time can take a toll on a young woman. Fragile teenage girls often depend on unreliable sources, including friends, love interests and the unpredictable media to determine their beauty and self-worth. Peers, families and the media need to support and represent the female gender in positive ways in order to ensure the confidence and success of today’s young girls.

Friend or Foe: Trusting Peers to Guide Teenage Years

As girls become teenagers, they gravitate

Many teenage girls feel like they need to be different from their parents: especially their mothers. “Growing up requires adolescent girls to reject the person with whom they are most closely identified. Daughters are socialized to have a tremendous fear of becoming like their mothers” (Pipher). Daughters seem to think that they become unable to talk to their parents about their changing bodies and lives. Other family issues, such as divorce, can overshadow a girl’s changing image and mindset, causing her to lose touch with her parents even more. “Divorce is particularly difficult for teenage girls, who are already stressed by cultural forces. When families break apart, they have too much coming at them too fast” (Pipher). Things like divorce take the attention off of young girls, causing them to feel forgotten or unimportant. Even amidst seemingly crazy family events, families need to show love and support towards their daughters to ease the process of growing up through encouragement and

Media and culture surround the nation. Social media, blogs, the internet and television outline the ideal woman, leaving those who do not fit into the perfect model out in the cold. Media platforms of all kind often lower the self-esteem of teenage girls, affecting their performance in both school and everyday life. Miss Representation, a documentary produced by Jennifer Newsom, explains to viewers the views of the media: “It’s always been hard being a teenage girl, but now the media disseminates limiting portrayals of women and pervades every aspect of our culture. Is it any wonder teen girls feel more powerless than ever?” Teenage girls often feel as if they must conform to the media’s standards in order to be accepted by those around them. Girls follow trends simply because everyone else does, not because they truly like the latest styles. The media needs to redefine its standards on the ideal girl by taking the focus off of the woman’s body and putting it on the qualities with more importance, such as intelligence and personality. Often, women depend on the media, but the media does not depend on women. Think about a radio advertisement or a television commercial. Does one hear more masculine voices or more feminine voices? See more men or more women? A 2014 graph from the Huffington Post shows a matchup of roles held by men and women in