Social media tears down girls. According to a UNESCO report, there is a direct correlation between how much time a girl spends online and increased emotional damage. A Facebook study found that a third of girls say when they feel bad about their bodies, Instagram makes them feel worse. Girls are 50% more likely than boys to report being cyberbullied. Plus — stop the presses! — TikTok is addictive.
How to combat such a widespread, happiness-destroying influence? In Chicago, one of the most powerful forces for good known to humanity is being sent into battle, a voice of comfort and wisdom going back to the beginnings of time:
Grandmothers.
“I come here every Tuesday to sit with the young ladies and do different projects — planting flowers, or making different objects they like,” said Delores Durham, 62, waiting in the office at Wendell Smith Elementary School on West 103rd Street in Pullman, bearing donuts. “Just having normal conversation to see where their mind is at. What goals they have in life. I’m just trying to be an encouragement to them. I raised two daughters on the West Side of Chicago myself.”
A volunteer who joined Grandmothers Circle last year, Durham was met by Erinn Boone, a licensed clinical professional counselor and coordinator of the program run by the Juvenile Protective Association, a venerable Chicago social service agency founded by Jane Addams in 1901. Originally the Juvenile Court Committee, its purpose was to provide probation officers to the first juvenile court in the nation, founded here in 1899 to keep children from being sent to adult jails.
That challenge — preventing the adult world from getting its hooks into kids — continues.
Durham and Boone go to greet nine sixth grade girls, ages 11 and 12, just finishing lunch on trays — chicken fingers, applesauce, cartons of milk. The girls barely register their arrival.
“Y’all energy seems real low today,” observes Boone. “It’s a very Monday kind of Tuesday.”
She hands around a piece of paper showing various emojis: happy, angry, bored, surprised.
“I need you all to tell me how you’re feeling,” Boone says. “Pass it around.”
The girls warm up. They are happy and tired. Goofy and tired. Quiet and tired. Boone detects a theme.
“Everybody’s tired — is it the weather?” she asks.
Or maybe something else. Students at Wendell Smith face troubles beyond social media — 94% live in poverty, according to the Illinois State Board of Education, and almost a quarter are homeless. The chronic truancy rate is 32%. And layered upon that, all the usual pressures facing middle-school girls.
“I was having a conversation with another school and we started talking about friendship, and how you can tell someone is a friend,” says Boone. “Then we started talking about rumors, and how rumors get started and drama — but I know that’s nothing you all deal with here, right?”
Not true, the girls object, snapping at the bait.
“How do rumors get started?” Boone asks.
“By not liking someone and trying to ruin their reputation,” says Taylor, 11.
“You have to trust the right people,” says Nev’aeh, 12. They talk about who can be trusted, who can’t.
“Everybody trusts me,” says Szyiah, 12.
To show how rumors degrade, Boone conducts a game of telephone, whispering a phrase to Danielle, 11, that quickly falls apart, passed girl to girl, eventually becoming, at one point, “I’m going to fart on your pillow,” nothing near what Boone had said.
“Social media is telephone times 100,000,” Boone says. They talk about what would happen if you trusted a friend with a secret, and “two days later it’s all over TikTok. Everybody knows. How would you feel?”
The girls suggest they’d be angry, embarrassed, sad, hurt.
“How would you handle it?” Boone asks.
“Maybe with a little violence,” one girl suggests.
They talk of mean girls and “keyboard bullies.”
“I love humanity but I don’t like humans,” says Boone. “Humans can be mean and nasty.”
Or warm and supportive. The Grandmothers Circle — only grandmothers now, but hoping to expand to include grandfathers too — began as a pilot program in 2023 and is now at four schools around the city. It is always looking for volunteers, “wise women” of any age, with or without children, who can volunteer a couple hours a week to help girls navigate life.
“I just love children,” says Durham, explaining why she signed up. “I want to give back to the community.”
The session ends, and Durham hands out doughnuts, which are a hit. Durham leaves them with a bit of grandmotherly advice.
“If you don’t like that person,” she says, “give ’em a smile and keep going.”
For more information go to grandmothers@jpachicago.org.