We have seen how girls make their own choices when it comes to popular music. A lot has to go on to get the large number of people in a generation enjoying the same stars and performers. For example we must converge the desires of one age group. And a space needs to be created that has the permission of parents. A balance needs to be sustained between personal desires, same age peers, and parental supervision. Surprisingly, even at a young age, girls find ways to create and balance these different relationships. Lets look first at the children and then their parents.
In the ‘latency’ phase of life (around 6 to 11 years old) girls and boys both want to play with their own sex. Boys play sports and games and parents typically support these activities. Since girls want their own activities, they happily let boys do their own thing. The big challenge for girls is dealing with their parents. Girls have their own dynamics in school but also at home. One form of play at home is ‘dare games.’ These involve collectively doing something daring, that parents normally forbid, and get away with it. The challenge here involves deciding what to do as the dare, creating a space where participants do something normally forbidden, and keeping secret within the group of girls something that is forbidden by adults, and then getting away with it. Dare games involve getting all these steps done in secret.
Sharon Lamb (2001) gives us a revealing example of how girls as young as six create a space for play despite the supervision of their parents. Lamb interviewed a girl called Madeline who talked about a game she played with a group of her girl friends. The dare game provided a thrill by, among themselves, doing something their parents said was wrong. This wasn’t something serious like a crime, but it was a deliberately ‘transgressive game.’ Its collective power was to make all the girls keep it secret from adults. This kind of game strengthens their shared belonging to their generation.
One day Madeline decided that she and her friends were going to wear their underpants over their pants. This was started in her bedroom. When they had all changed clothes, the next part of the dare was so rush out of the bedroom and do a little dance in front of Madeline’s father. This was significant not just from the girls being ‘daring’ with each other but also due to the father being unable or unwilling to talk to this group of girls. Would he tell them to stop what they were doing? He didn’t. The father displayed silent embarrassment at this game. The girls were having an adventure that converged the different parts of their lives.
The involvement of the father was a predictable calculation by the girls; they could be pretty sure that an adult man would not want to take responsibility for this whole scene. He would not want to be a disciplinarian over girls from other families. The girls guessed, correctly, that he would remain mostly silent, perhaps saying no more than it was time for them to go home. Embarrassing the father was another transgressive thrill. The girls correctly saw that men were a different category of person in their lives. Madeline showed how young girls can have fun. In this activity, girls are using a range of knowledge of men, women, and private life.
We can imagine how different would this have been had Madeline’s mother been at home at that time. The girls would not have attempted to do this when a grown up woman was present; she would have disciplined them as well as offering no chance for fun. Their dare game showed the girls how they could exercise personal power. They would save this knowledge for some time when they were older. Madeline gave them a good entertainment. The girls were strengthened by what could do now, and prepared themselves for future entertainment with their whole generation. Madeline’s leadership of this ‘dare game’ prepared girls for their older years of using their membership of a generation