Reviving Ophelia at 25: A Conversation with Sara Gilliam

In which Dan interviews Sara Gilliam, co-author of the new edition of 'Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls'. Dan and Sara discuss the differences between adolescent girls in the 90s and now (5:15), over scheduling (14:00), how girls view school (23:30), and the effects of school shootings on teen girls (30:00). As always, we welcome comments and questions on Twitter @BigIdeaEd. Music today from Valencia Bey via Tribe of Noise.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Today's episode of What's the Big Idea is brought to you by Empathy. Oh yeah, empathy. Learning experiences that allow students to see through others' eyes and share others' feelings never go out of style. In a country that seems increasingly defined by our silos of opinions and points of view, developing empathy in our students not only improves school climate, but shapes a better country for tomorrow. Empathy. Check it out. Now on to the show. Earlier this year, my daughter turned seven. And somewhere between turning six and turning seven, she seemed to age by five years. Her abilities and independence and curiosity skyrocketed and left me both awed and wondering, where's my little girl going? Then, in June, the 25th anniversary edition of Reviving Ophelia hit bookstands. Subtitled Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, this is an update of the 1994 phenomenon, which spent three years on the New York Times bestseller's list. It felt like the perfect preemptive reading for a dad already wondering about exactly the things named in the book's chapter titles body image, depression, anxiety, just to name a few. This new edition wrestles with the notion that while much has improved for adolescent girls since the 1990s, new challenges have arisen, most notably social media. Reviving Ophelia gave me a lot to think about, but not just as a parent. My teacher brain was thoroughly engaged as well, and I found myself making margin notes about the implications of the book for teachers and schools. The author of the first edition was psychologist Mary Piffer, who had spent decades working with adolescent girls and drew her insights from those experiences. In the new edition, she has a co-author, her daughter, Sarah Piper Gilliam, herself a writer. I recently had the opportunity to speak to Sarah via Skype about the book, Adolescent Girls, and What Schools Can Take Away from Her Work.

SPEAKER_00 2:51

Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

SPEAKER_01 2:54

You write in the introduction to the book that many of your close friends were featured in the original Reviving Ophelia, and your mother actually called on you to edit for Teen Accuracy. What was it like growing up as a teenager and a young adult, growing up as someone whose mother wrote arguably the most influential book about adolescents of that generation?

SPEAKER_00 3:17

It I mean, for the most part, it was fantastic. Um, she and I have always had a very close relationship. Um, I feel my dad is also a clinical psychologist. So I grew up very literate in the language of mental health. And I think that that only helped me and my friends navigate our adolescence. And my and my mom was always kind of that safe parent for other girls to come and talk to. Um, we it was interesting when she was working on the book. She was she was working on the book during my senior year of high school. So I was almost out of the house. I was in in my mind, I was already an independent adult. But um we I remember butting heads over some some now kind of laughable things. She she was very anti-Madonna. She was very anti-MTV. Of course, MTV was my language and haunting grounds when I was 16 years old. So I remember pushing back a little bit on some of her kind of harsh condoning of pop culture.

unknown 4:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:15

As a parent, now I understand it more. Um I would say that I remain I remain much more liberal than she does about about maybe representations of women in in popular culture just because we're of different generations. But by and large, it was a great experience. And I think it was actually really good that the book achieved its success after I was out of the home. I mean, I think now again, she's a writer, she's not a Hollywood actress, but just dealing with fame, dealing with constant attention, phone calls as she did. Um, you know, that affects the family's dynamics. And it was kind of fun to watch from afar. I was off at college. I was I was starting my own life as an adult. I got to just really celebrate her, enjoy her, and not kind of be under underwater with all of the chaos those first couple years.

SPEAKER_01 5:02

Right. Okay. Because you actually studied the book in college, I recall you saying somewhere.

SPEAKER_00 5:06

Yeah, oh, every women's studies class in the mid-90s required reading. I think I had to read it in three different classes.

SPEAKER_01 5:15

A lot of the descriptions you have about teen life, of being a teenager in the 90s, rings true, I think, to a certain age demographic, including me. Maybe you and I are the same age, you know, notably things like getting away with a lot, but still having high expectations about the future, you know, exploring the early web and the stars we idolized and lack of diversity in our lives, and obviously some significant differences due to uh due to gender. But before we get to your the interviews and the focus groups, the girls you met, could you outline big picture? What are the most significant differences between adolescent girls in the 1990s and adolescent girls today?

SPEAKER_00 5:52

Sure. Well, we actually came up, we started earlier, we we talked about the 60s as well, my mother's adolescence. And she described herself and her peers as confident. Um, they were often in power, they were often caring for younger siblings. My mom started working, I think, when she was 13 or 14. She got her first job outside the home. There were, I guess, less stringent child labor regulations back then. So she was very self-sufficient, she was bright, she was confident, she was ready to take on the world. Girls of my generation, of course, I guess one thing I just want to note is I have to speak in generalizations this whole interview. There's no getting around it. Um, of course, there are girls in every generation that don't fit these descriptions. Speaking generally, girls in my generation were risk takers. And one thing that we know now, we have the benefit of hindsight, is that the early 90s were in many ways the toughest time to be an adolescent girl. Um, we and our parents were really struggling to make sense of popular media, popular culture, and how the messages that we were receiving from that were affecting our confidence and our mental health. Um, depression rates were incredibly high, drug and alcohol use were incredibly high, sexual assault rates were peaking. All of these things created sort of a volatile kind of stew that girls were coming of age in in the 90s. At the same time, we had riot girls, we had third wave feminists. So the the conversation was rich. Let's put it that way. There was a lot to unpack, there was a lot to experiment with. My friends and I were risk takers, we were rebels, we were gonna change the world, we didn't need adults telling us what to do. Soon as we, you know, 8 a.m. on our 16th birthday, we were at the DMV to get our driver's license and we never looked back. Um, so if we compare that to girls today, we see some some really surprising, and I truly surprising. When we started this revision of the book, we were not anticipating this. Some really big distinctions. Um, we called today's girls cautious, and there are a whole lot of reasons for that. First of all, this is the first generation of girls coming of age post 9-11. Um, and and if you throw the 24-hour news cycle into the mix, girls are quite aware of the state of the world, um, the global climate crisis, the global refugee crisis, you know, any number of things happening on a given day on our planet. Um, this is also the first generation of girls to come of age post-columbine, which happened in 1999. So, pretty much all the girls that we interviewed for this book have been doing active shooter and lockdown drills at school since they started elementary school. And we cannot underscore enough what an impact that has had on girls' mental health. In fact, it was a bit of a throwaway question in our focus group, sort of an if we have time, let's ask this at the end. How do you feel about school shooting? Are you afraid of school shootings? Every girl's hand shot into the air. Girls are living with this undercurrent of anxiety and fear. But I think that the most interesting thing that we we discovered and that we try to unpack in the book is um is this caution and this kind of lack of preparedness for the real world that's gonna come after high school, whether girls go to work or go to college or join the military, they are much less eager to interface with the real world as teenagers. They're living online. We know from very recent research that girls are spending six to nine hours a day online. And where boys tend to maybe doing be doing video games and watching YouTube videos and listening to music, girls are the biggest users of social media. Um, so they are looking at Instagram, looking at Snapchat, texting friends, um, and creating these online personas, right? And I can relate to that. I did that with these early chat rooms in the 90s. You get to kind of be who you want to be. You create a name, you create your this better version of yourself. And now that's just happening exponentially. What girls are not doing is lining up at the DMV to get their driver's licenses or rushing out to get a part-time job outside the home, or even doing volunteer work on the same level. Their typical MO on a Saturday night is to be home watching Friends or the Office on Netflix and surfing social media rather than my generation. You, you know, I wouldn't be caught dead at home on a Saturday night. We were at shows, we were at coffee houses, we were at friends' houses having sleepovers, whatever it was. So, what we're seeing then, and I'm maybe jumping ahead of where you're headed with questioning, but what we're seeing then is that when girls are finishing high school, they're really ill-equipped to interface with the real world. They at this point can text or call mom or dad from the bathroom between classes if they solve a problem or a need. And so when suddenly they've got a full course load or they have rent to pay, or they have a boss who is harassing them at their first job when they're 20, they just don't know how to navigate that the way we posit previous previous generations were able to.

SPEAKER_01 10:38

Interesting point there about social media and the early web. I mean, I remember this as well. And you we'd go weight into these chat rooms where you could be anybody, right? This the your online typing was not linked to a person because you could just make a new username every time. But today, of course, it is you. You are that person online. And how do parents see this? Have you had any discussions with parents about girls being unprepared for the real world and and the effect on the family dynamic and sort of their future?

SPEAKER_00 11:09

You know, what's interesting is we came to this conclusion as we were writing the book. So we had done all of our research, all of our interviews, and then we started the writing process, and then we hit on this hypothesis. So, in that sense, we haven't talked about it a lot with parents, although we've had people come up at book signings and events. Parents absolutely see it. I mean, one thing that's really important that was very important to my mom when she wrote the book was never throw parents under the bus, right? She um actually wrote the book. She started the book the week after her own mother died, and she was feeling very tender toward mothers. And she determined never in this book am I gonna make parents the enemy. And so I would say the same. I mean, I would say that the parents we spoke with, two on one, of course, love their children, want to protect their children, want to help their children access the resources they need, but they really don't understand what they're dealing with. And we we talked to several, uh, we did a focus group with mothers, for example, or a couple of them, where we said, so do you have any rules around social media? Have you come up with some family guidelines about devices? Or are you allowed to look at your child's texts whenever you want, or anything like that? And many of them said, Yes, we signed a contract when we gave our daughter her phone, or yeah, we have X or Y agreement, but none of them, literally none of them, had ever looked at their child's device. They didn't want to invade privacy, they thought it would be awkward or uncomfortable, which of course I'm sure it would be. I mean, without a doubt, it would be. But um, so so they, I would say there's this whole aspect of their daughter's life that they're really in the dark about. They really don't understand. If this, if these girls are six to nine hours a day online and the parents have never looked at what they're doing, you know, you think about how carefully you um you get to know your children's friends or who their music teacher is, or I want to come watch your sports practice and make sure your coach isn't being a jerk, whatever it is. You know, we're we're in no way being nearly that attentive with the time our children spend online. Now, I will say, because many of the women, the moms that we interviewed are roughly my age, maybe a bit older, um, say, you know, late 40s, early 50s, they had similar experiences to me. They they aren't, they don't understand why their daughters don't want to work or don't want to drive. Um, they joke about being helicopter parents, but I don't think that's it. I mean, I think that these parents are doing the best they can in a very complex time. They what parent doesn't want to support their child? You're not gonna ignore your child's text saying, Mom, I'm having a bad day. Can we talk for five minutes? Sure. The parents, the parents are doing their best, but I just think there's really a lot of confusion. And and I do think that one thing that we've done with reviving Ophelia is really start to look at this connection between social media use and mental health. There are a lot of people writing about both of those aspects of adolescence or of youth, but not really looking at this kind of intrinsic connection that's really confusing everyone right now.

unknown 13:58

Right.

SPEAKER_01 13:59

In the new edition, you have a new chapter about anxiety, uh, which as a middle school teacher I was very interested in. I almost went to that chapter first because that's one thing that uh we see a lot. In in this chapter, you describe a discussion group in which one girl by the name of Amalia says, quote, I work at a clothing store, I'm on student council and in a marching band, I never have time to sleep. Oh, and my parents want me to be a doctor. And you say that the other girls laugh knowingly. How prevalent is overscheduling in the lives of girls? And and what role are parents playing in that? Because you say that you know, parents often they want to support their girls, of course, but what's this line here between helping your daughter schedule her life and overscheduling her life?

SPEAKER_00 14:49

That's a great question. I and um yes, first of all, overscheduling for sure is an issue. And one thing that I that I think is really interesting, again, you and I are about the same age. I mean, when I was looking at, you know, as I say in the book, the questions for me about higher education weren't if but where. Like it was given that I would be going to college, right? That was not a discussion. Um, but I didn't feel nearly the academic pressure that girls feel today. And of course, now we have IB, we have AP, we have weighted grades, we have all of these things. It's harder and harder. I mean, it's virtually impossible to get into an Ivy League school. The cost of education is huge. So Lincoln, Nebraska, for example, where we did most of our focus groups, is a very middle class city. It's a middle-class, middle America city. That's by, you know, we did our work there, A, because my mother lives there, but also by design, because we really wanted to try to track with the sort of typical American girl. Sure. And um, those girls, unless they're from an extremely wealthy family, they know that their ticket to college is extremely high achievement and a very full resume. So, in that sense, I think parents, it's a chicken and egg. I think parents want to support their children. They want their children to have a good education. They know that our economy is challenging right now and their kids' best shot at a good life is getting into a good school. The pressure, the stakes are so much higher than they have been for previous generations. Um, and so I think, I think it just becomes a tumbleweed, right? Oh, I better pick up this other activity. Oh, honey, are you sure? Yeah, I can make it work. I can make it work. Um, yeah, but without a doubt, and I think, you know, I don't, I think again, no one is to blame. I think, I think that, you know, our whole system of higher education is really complicated right now. That's why it's a big topic in the presidential debates, figuring out how to make it accessible and reasonable for young people. Um, but I also think there is that other piece um that I've already mentioned about that girls know intrinsically, they understand that they're not necessarily ready for the challenges. There's something manageable about music lessons or band at school. It's in your comfort zone. It's people that you know. Um, it's expected of you. They they have this undercurrent about academic success and academic achievement and their futures, and they also are just anxious about how am I going to navigate my life once I leave the comforts of home. Yeah. And then one other, oh, one other thing I do want to mention because I think it's really important, and I think I think you'll think it's important too, is the whole other side of this is girls of color or girl, refugee or immigrant girls, DACA girls. There is also, we can't, we can't discount how much anxiety young people are feeling just living in this incredibly divisive time in our country. They're dialed into it, they see news headlines, they hear racist slurs in their schools, they see events happening around the country. And I actually think, you know, that's where we were on a fairly substantial upswing, beginning in my generation, of more acceptance of LGBTQ people, of diversity in all its forms. And now we're seeing this real backlash where fair enough, if you read the headlines and you're a young woman of color, of course you're anxious. Of course you're anxious.

SPEAKER_01 17:54

All right. Yeah, that that's that's that's a great point. That I think as we were growing up, there was this real surge in acceptance. The society changed very quickly, and now there's been there has been a switch back the other way, and a lot of disturbing stories from schools about comments being made. How did how did you find the girls for the focus groups for the new edition?

SPEAKER_00 18:17

Okay, so we did a few things. The first thing I did that was really fun, it was my favorite part of this entire project, was I bought a bunch of copies of the original Reviving Ophelia and I sent them to girls all around the country. Um, so that it's a little off-brand, but I did it through the magic of social media. Um, reaching out to friends all over the place saying, I'm looking for, I need, you know, I want bright girls who like to read who will be good editors, but beyond that, I want a real gamut of experiences. So we sent them the book and we asked them to mark it up. And we said, I was kind of hoping this would turn into this kind of creative artistic project. I was like, rip out pages, sharp. And they were so respectful of the book. But they did, they did write us a lot of margin notes, which really guided then our questions when we started holding focus groups. Um, the focus groups we did hold in Lincoln, Nebraska, and like I said, that was by design. We wanted to essentially look at the same demographic that the original Reviving Ophelia did, um, which is sort of middle-class, middle America girls. We we absolutely made a point to include more diversity because Lincoln is a more diverse city now than it was 25 years ago, and we wanted to be reflective of the community. Um, so we did we did different groups with middle schoolers and high schoolers, of course, because you can just have different levels of conversations about sex or drugs or whatever with those different those different ages. Um, and and so again, it was it was social media, it was reaching out, it was someone I know who has an exceptional daughter, someone I know who has a daughter who's struggling. One thing that was really interesting that happened, just sort of a juicy side note, is in our first middle school focus group, um, it was all new to us girls who had come in through recommendations. We did not know any of them personally. And it turned out that one girl had been the main bullier of another girl for years. And we had no idea. So here come these girls. And one girl, like two of the girls were clearly quite uncomfortable. And of course, we're talking about things like bullying and social, you know, bullying online and all of this. And as the time went on, things thawed out, things got better. And then later, the the bullied girl's dad messaged me on Facebook and said, Hey, just so you know, this was the dynamic today. We were like, oh my God, what are the odds, the city of 300,000 that we had like a girl and her chief tormentor? But what was really interesting about that, um, and this leads to a suggestion I have, is that things did get better. Like they started talking, they started interacting with each other. They both revealed the the bullier, for lack of a better term, was a very traditionally beautiful, you know, tall, slim, blonde, popular kind of looking girl. Um, and she revealed a lot of struggles that she'd had. She'd had challenges with her mom, she'd fought a lot with her mom, her parents had divorced, she came home to fighting every night. She had her own journey, right? And then the girl who had been bullied, who was a kind of a, I would say, a more quirky, counter-cultury kind of girl, she talked about her experiences. And when every focus group finished, every single one, the girl said, I wish we could just stay and keep talking. No one wanted to leave. And one of the things I really took away from that is we need to be having conversations like this with students in our schools. And I have a friend, just as an example, a good friend of mine teaches in the IB program, that you know, IB, I don't know. I do, yes. Okay, so she teaches in the one IB program, high school program in Lincoln. And she had noticed at some point that there was just a lot of kind of gre amongst her female students, a lot of infighting. And so she called, like, it was something like a women's summit. You know, she had this clever name for it, and she called all the women of the IB program together to sit around in her classroom and drink tea one afternoon and just hash it out. And it became a regular thing. Like it In a in it and framed very positively of we need to support each other, we we need to have each other's backs, like we we are gonna be each other's community coming through this program. But it was very clear to me that these girls are just hungering for an opportunity to talk about their stress and their fears and their lives in a very safe and authentic way.

SPEAKER_01 22:21

It contrasts nicely with social media, right? This face-to-face interaction.

SPEAKER_00 22:27

Exactly. And that's I mean, that's one thing that's really missing is if girls are home watching Netflix and Snapchatting with their friends, they aren't just not just having those experiences, but learning those skills of how do you sit down and have a real emotional conversation. And that, I mean, that's all I remember about adolescents, you know, is going to a park at midnight and swinging and talking about your future profession and you know, the all of your dreams for your life and releasing all that ennui of adolescence. And um they're not having the opportunity to do that. And that's that's a way that we grow and mature and develop. And so, yeah, it was so obvious how much how desperate they are for that actual, that actual connection. And another big suggestion that we have for parents is tell tell your girls, we will host, we will buy pizza, we will buy soda, like have your friends over, become that house that the girls hang out at, or the boys, you know, the kids hang out at, and uh put up the money for the food or the the outings or whatever it takes to get your children actually hanging out in person. It's it seems hilarious that we have to build this into our planning, but we do, we do.

SPEAKER_01 23:37

Yeah. My wife talks about that actually a lot growing up, having the house they all went to, the the one family and how important that was. How did your focus groups talk about school? Um, because a lot of students honestly they spend more time at school than they do at home, but with their classes and extracurriculars. How did the girls view teachers and counselors, other adults at school, and just generally the climate uh of their school?

SPEAKER_00 24:03

You know, to be fair, most of what we were asking, I mean, we were trying to get not the dirt, but we wanted to get the the challenges, right? Because this book is about the challenges. So in that sense, we weren't saying, tell us all your favorite things about school. We were saying, so just to be clear, like most of these girls love school. Most of them are bright, they they like learning and so on. Um they they talked about, let's see, that's actually a great question. Um you know, when they talked about school, they talked about peers. They didn't talk about teachers. Um, maybe a couple referred to a really great teacher who had taken them under their wing. Uh, we have one girl, she's in the fathers chapter who um has gotten into slam poetry and sort of uh environmental activism, and a lot of that was inspired by teachers and mentors at school as well as her own father. Um, but really, when they talked about school, what they were talking about was social dynamics. So it was really, to be honest, it was really more peer focused than anything.

SPEAKER_01 25:04

Oh wow. So if if you did have advice or if you had advice for schools to support adolescent girls dealing with identity questions and relationship issues and academic pressure, plus all the societal expectations for girls, what what advice would you have for teachers and school heads about supporting girls?

SPEAKER_00 25:24

I think some I think some really targeted messaging about um, you know, one thing I always think about, I actually just had to, we're working on our immigration process to Canada, and I had to dig out all of my transcripts. And I thought, you know, no one ever asks me my GPA. You know, I'm 42, I worked very, very hard in college and graduate school, and no one cares. No one cares what my GPA was. And so I think some really targeted messaging around it's important to do your best, but grades are not everything. Many, many colleges are good. You know, you can have a fantastic experience at a state university, at a community college. Maybe college doesn't feel right for you, that's okay. Really, really underscoring the many paths that students can take after graduation, I think is very important. Um, I think that, you know, there are a lot of great, and a lot of this came out of Reviving Ophelia, a lot of great girls' empowerment groups, those are no less important today. The the conversations are going to be different. For example, we took out of the book a lot about um academic inequity and inequality because in fact, there's a lot more parity now than there was 25 years ago. Girls tend to not, you know, dumb themselves down, girls are being called on more, girls more than boys are going on to higher education. So some of that, the needle has actually moved. But there's still a need for empowerment of girls leadership development and girls. Um, so I think schools that don't have any program focused on that, looking for girl up, um, girl, I think it's girls inc. Um, there are global groups, there are national groups, and opening chapters, opening chapters for for girls in your school, I think is great. Um, as I said, creating a space, having having a club or a gathering to have the kinds of conversations that we had with our focus groups. And of course, that's very tricky. Um you've gotta you've gotta have a lot of um scaffolding around what it isn't what isn't is not appropriate to share. You don't want a girl coming in and talking about her suicide attempts to a room of 25 other girls, right? You've gotta you've gotta be really careful, you've got to encourage someone I know versus I. You know, there's there's some tricky work to that, but I think that it can be done. I think that an artful teacher can find a way to to hold these discussions in a very positive, not in a event fest, not in a group therapy sense, but in a how can we support each other, what feels good, what what's working for us, what what ameliorates our stress, who wants to have a walking club or a running club? Like um, when I taught, so I taught seventh grade English language arts and I decided to host a creative writing club Wednesdays after school. Well, as it turned out, half of all of my seventh grade girls came to Creative Writing Club and no boys came. It was the oh my god, it was the era of twilight. I had so much like quasi-erotic vampire poetry read in my classroom. But what it really actually turned into was there was one, there was one boy who was was groping a bunch of the girls, and it became the safe space where they could say, Did this happen? That happened to me. I didn't know what to do. And we could do some planning as a group about how to handle when something like that happens. They could find support and camaraderie knowing they weren't the only one that it happened to. And it's really amazing. I mean, you know this as a teacher, it's a really amazing you can open one conversational door and walk out a totally different door.

SPEAKER_01 28:53

Yeah. How is the Be To movement changing the lives of adolescent girls?

SPEAKER_00 29:02

Um great question, and I'm not I'm not the best person to answer that. From from my perspective, I think um just the openness that it's fostering in terms of talking about sexual assault. My my mom speaks to this well because as a therapist in the 90s, she said girls would come in with a whole kind of gamut of say behaviors, school refusal, uh flunking out of school, promiscuity, drug use, whatever it was. And it might be six or seven sessions in before finally they would confess I was raped or I was assaulted. Um, there was so much shame and and shyness around talking about sexual assault. And so I from my perspective, one of the best things about the Me Too movement is it is it has changed the narrative and it has given women the voice and girls the voice to say, this happened to me too, it doesn't define me, I'm part of a sisterhood, I'm gonna push back at this. You know, from my perspective, anything that takes a vulnerability that we feel and turns it into a way of empowering ourselves is important, whether that's climate activists saying adults don't speak for me and I'm frustrated and I'm gonna walk out of school, or young women saying me too, it's it's changing the power of the narrative.

SPEAKER_01 30:25

Yeah. You mentioned school shootings earlier, and that's one thing that surprised me. I did I interviewed earlier this year, I interviewed three students who have done some work on um advocating for gun control and and educating their peers. And I was just so surprised at how eloquent they were in talking about school shootings and guns in America and and how is how is that you you touched on it already, but how how do you think that is shaping the way adolescent girls view their lives, view their country, uh, and just their future?

SPEAKER_00 31:00

I I think enormously. I think um, first of all, as I mentioned, just in their feelings of personal security, you know, one one woman we mentioned in the book is a freshman in college, she's 19, and she was scared to walk into those big freshman survey classes with 300 people in them. She said she would sit there and become consumed with thoughts of does one of these students have a gun in their backpack? Um, what a what a way to exist in our world. So there's so there's that piece where they're all acutely aware of where's the unlocked door in our school that could someone could get through, you know, or um they certainly all know what to do if there's an active shooter in their school. Um, on the other hand, and this is where um this is a this is a storyline that I pushed for with my mom as we were working on this book, I think this is a real beauty and benefit of social media. Um teenagers are sharing their stories of activism with each other. And so, of course, the the biggest example is the the Parkland shootings and some of, you know, um David, is it David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez, some of the people that have come out of that who have just been these incredible champions of young people and these incredible role models. And then as I I interviewed a young woman in the book who's gotten involved in um gun control in Ohio in her school, that came from seeing the tweets and messaging online of the Florida students. And so I actually think that social media and the online world is this incredible way to rally young activists. And for me, that's the most positive takeaway of all of our research is that young people, you know, young people have always led social change or been a part of it, I should say, been a large part of it. But I feel like they have tools. They have tools for organizing that they haven't had in the past, and and in a way that are kind of the secret secret club and secret language that adults haven't figured out. And um, in that sense, I do think that this generation feels emboldened and empowered, you know, around gun culture, around the environment, whatever it is, to say, I don't agree with what's happening. And instead of just sitting back until I'm older, I'm gonna jump into this conversation now.

SPEAKER_01 33:06

Yeah, I agree with that. And social media, it's such a double-edged, triple-edged, quadruple-edged sword.

SPEAKER_00 33:11

It is for me. I mean, I'm sure you experienced this as well. It's I mean, I before you called, I was looking at Instagram. I mean, it's I my my son's kindergarten teacher posts updates on Instagram. So I had to, I had an Instagram account that I rarely looked at, and now I dial in every day to see what's happening at school. I mean, it's the the train has left the station. I mean, is one thing. No part of me is is putting forth that we should banish social media from our children's lives, that we should all go device free, sure, in a perfect world, but it's not, it's not gonna happen. So now it's really a man a matter of management and intentionality and ongoing family conversations. You know, the needle moves so much. And so you can't just have one conversation about here's here are our family's values and here's how we're gonna use the online world because the conversation is gonna change every month.

SPEAKER_01 33:59

So, what's next? Um, the book was published in June. Um, what where do you see uh where do you take the conversation next?

SPEAKER_00 34:08

So, two places. One is that I'm gonna be um traveling starting in January. I'm gonna be doing quite a bit of speaking, which is parenthetically really fun because that's what my mom did for most of her career. She she wrote the book when she was in her mid-40s. I'm 42, so I'm a bit younger than her. And then she really had a vibrant speaking career traveling and working with schools, and that excites me as well. I feel like I'm kind of picking up her mantle. So I'll be doing some public speaking. I actually also just you you heard it here first, Dan. You are literally the first person that I've told this to, but I just kind of verbally um made a book deal last week um for myself. And I'm gonna be looking at the building blocks of youth activism. So I'm gonna really be focusing on um what one of my takeaways from Reviving Ophelia was that these girls, these activist girls that we profiled, and I interviewed more that just didn't make it into the book, but there were some commonalities essentially among their experiences that drove them to activism. And that got me thinking about what can parents do, what can educators do to foster not just this idea of, oh, you're senior year in high school, you do 20 hours of volunteering for a community service credit, but rather foster this belief that we are part of one global community and it is our job from birth to um to volunteer, to serve, to support our fellow human beings. And so I really want to rethink this notion of service and of compassion for this new generation of children and look at how we kind of in developmentally appropriate ways, how we instill that in young people moving forward.

SPEAKER_01 35:45

Wow. Well, I'm already looking forward to that book. I think that uh activism uh is the big thing of this generation. Um well, Sarah, want to thank you so much for joining me today. Uh, the book is Reviving Ophelia, Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, is a 25th anniversary edition published with your mom, Mary Piper. And even though, as you point out, it's not super school focused because you really make it about the girls and their family lives and their peer lives, but I think it's a really important book for educators to read. It certainly opened my eyes and parents as well, of course. But I think for educators, there's a lot in here that will help us uh better understand our students. So thank you for joining me today.

SPEAKER_00 36:26

Thank you. This was so much fun. I really appreciate your time.

SPEAKER_01 36:31

Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed that interview. And if you're a parent or teacher, and especially if you're both, I highly recommend Reviving Ophelia. It also makes for a great parent book club selection if your school has anything like that. Valencia Bay provides our theme song today, courtesy of Tribe of Noise Creative Commons. As always, we welcome comments and questions on Twitter at Big Ideahead. Thanks for listening, everyone. Check us out next time.