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An expert just told us the one thing parents get wrong about teenage girls and their friendships.

If you've ever watched your daughter come home in tears over a friendship drama, an immediate instinct kicks in. You want to swoop in, fix it and somehow extract the pain. When they crumble, our entire world collapses with them.

But according to child psychologist Clare Rowe, that protective impulse might actually be hindering them.

As founder of Rowan Associates Child and Family Psychology, Rowe has spent years observing the intricate world of girls' friendships — and she believes most parents are making one critical mistake.

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Video: Mamamia

"We know that girls develop social, emotional and verbal skills earlier than boys, and their friendships, even as adults, are so different. Our friendships are based on so much of a deep emotional connection," Rowe told This Glorious Mess podcast.

"Girls' friendships are based on secret telling, sharing feelings and personal stories. And that friendship, as we have with our adult female friends, is really powerful and beautiful, but there's a lot at stake when it goes wrong. There's a lot at stake for a girl if you lose a friendship."

When conflicts arise between girls, they rarely manifest as physical confrontations. Instead, Rowe points out, they take a different form entirely.

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"Girls use what psychologists call relational aggression, as opposed to physical, so that's the silent treatment, the gossiping and the starting a group without someone, the exclusion. It's not girls being mean. It's just how we operate."

This relational aggression can feel devastating to young girls — and equally painful for parents to witness. But rushing to solve these problems deprives girls of crucial skills needed for later in life.

The parenting mistake most of us make.

"The biggest thing is that we go into fix-it mode way too early," Rowe cautioned.

When our daughters experience friendship problems, our instinct is to protect them from pain.

"We don't have to rush up to the school. We don't have to rescue our kids from everything," Rowe said.

"I think the biggest thing for me, working with kids and families in mental health in general, is we need to teach young people to sit with discomfort, to be able to say that all negative feelings are valid, but they're also manageable."

Far from trying to shield our daughters from friendship difficulties, Rowe suggests we should view them as important developmental milestones.

"I personally don't think that female friendship difficulties can be avoided. Certainly, in teenage years, adult years, you might get out of it better than others, but I don't think it can be avoided, and it shouldn't be. It's a normal developmental process where it's a training ground for learning, taking perspective on things, boundary setting and problem solving."

Listen to the full interview on This Glorious Mess. Post continues below.

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A better approach for parents.

So what should parents do when confronted with a tearful daughter devastated by friendship drama?

"So we've got to let kids go through it, and it's hard because it's really awful when you're sitting with your daughter, and she's just in pain, sobbing her eyes out to you," Rowe acknowledged.

Rather than immediately stepping in with solutions, Rowe recommends:

First, validate their emotions: "If your daughter comes home, and she's telling you how awful her day was and everything's going wrong, is to sit with it for a while with her, and you can validate her emotions and say that 'that sounds really tough'."

Guide them towards their own solutions: "And then you can guide them and say 'what would you like to do about that? And what do you think you could do differently tomorrow?'"

Encourage perspective-taking: "How do you think that they're feeling at the moment? To try and get different perspectives and go from that point first."

Reinforce their resilience: "Teach kids that discomfort and pain are a part of life and are manageable, that they will get through it, and then you can reflect back on that and say, 'See you did, and now we just need to prepare ourselves for the next time.'"

Sometimes, the most helpful thing we can do is the thing that feels least natural—stepping back and trusting our daughters to find their way through the complicated landscape of friendships, with our support but not our solutions.

Feature Image: Mean Girls c/o Paramount Studios.

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