must read if you have daughters

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	• Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of ... Rosalind Wiseman Three Rivers Press, 2002 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 94 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

High Marks

Teen years aren't what they used to be. Now kids contend with cliques, drugs, alcohol, peer pressure - all on a scale we never had to. QUEEN BEES AND WANNABES is an eye openning book. It's as eye openning as the first time I read MY FRACTURED LIFE and WHAT IT TAKES TO PULL ME THROUGH. Well recommeded to read the three in tandum for a full insight into the here and now of the pressures and temptations facing kids today.

Finally some answers

After having left the snuggly confines of a really caring and loving elementary school for the harse reality of middle school we were floored with how cruel the girls could really get. It was a ugly and rough first year with a lot of tears and silence on the part of our normally loving and outgoing daughter. This book tagged the root of our problem dead on 'the queen bee' and her den of tag alongs. After such a revelation we can finally start to plan our future and stand tough.

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must read if you have daughters

I checked this out of the library and am now buying a copy. I remember well the pain that was Jr. High. I wish my parents had had this information. I hope to do better with my own daughter. The 'landmines' were helpful and I particularly appreciated the dialog examples and plan to refer to them often.

Many books in one

This book is hard to review because it covers many different topics, and covers some much better than others. The title of the book refers to girls' social roles in middle school and high school, and this opening section of the book is excellent -- indispensible even.

But the book drifts to other areas, including the social life of boys, and here Wiseman seems far less authoritative. It feels more like she has tried to mirror somehow her discussion of girls, but the result is unconvincing.

Later on she gets into drinking, drugs, and sex, and this is where some reviewers have called her non-judgmental, but she is in fact very judgmental. She comes down hard on anyone who has a problem with homosexuality, and blames homophobia for a host of ills that afflict boys, and though their actions, girls as well.

I parted ways with Wiseman when she said that parents should simply accept the fact that underage girls can have healthy and responsible sexual relationships, and suggested that parents condone such a relationship. Wiseman's own arguments don't support this position -- she provides a seemingly endless laundry list of ways in which young girls are pressured to have sex when they feel they shouldn't, but then she concludes that *if the girls doesn't feel pressured to have sex* (and that's the crux of the whole situation), then it's a responsible decision on her part and can even be healthy for her. What I wish she had added is that most underage girls have no idea what they're getting themselves into when they start having sex, and just because they are not feeling pressured by the boy, that doesn't make the decision "responsible."

I'd recommend checking this book out of the libary and reading the first third to half, but it starts to come apart after that as Wiseman seems to stray further and further from her core area of expertise. By the end of the book I was skimming, both because the subject matter was less interesting and because her biases were coming out on every page.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, page 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

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