Girls learn meanness at home

PROVO — Every junior high and high school has them: vicious cliques of A-list girls who rule classmates with ruthless attitudes and beautifully manicured hands.

They stay on the top of the social ladder by stomping their designer shoes on the feelings of other girls. They gossip and torment rivals and exploit insecurities with the precision of a medieval hangman.

They're just plain mean.

But where do they get all their ideas for mental torture?

A new study published by two Brigham Young University researchers suggests mean girls pick up their tricks at home, taking tips from how their parents treat them.

The study, published earlier this month in the journal Child Development, provides correlative evidence that parents who attempt to control their children by manipulating the child-parent bond as a form of punishment have children who try to control their peers the same way.

Children — particularly young girls — who use the silent treatment, threaten to not be friends with their playground peers, give others the cold shoulder or constantly use old wrongs against their friends probably picked up those behaviors from their parents, the study says.

"This shows that moms and dads matter," said David Nelson, senior author of the study and BYU assistant professor of marriage, family, and human development. "When parents team up to be psychologically controlling, it's a pretty good predictor of daughters having this problem in school. If parents are relationally aggressive with their kids, they pass that on to their kids."

Psychological control is apparently registered as parental rejection, Nelson said, and almost always produces negative results.

The study centered on 215 preschoolers in Beijing, China, but researchers assert the findings are valid across cultures.

In addition to watching the children interact, researchers interviewed parents about the types of discipline they used at home.

While the study included both boys and girls, researchers found more dramatic results when girls were faced with manipulative behavior.

According to the study, young men tend to react to physical discipline, like spanking, much more than psychological discipline tactics.

The findings are hardly a surprise, said Robert Williams an Orem child psychologist, but they will allow therapists to confront problem parents with firm data rather than just speculation.