Mean Girls, Real Lessons

By: Stuart Knight (Founder and CEO) | May 4, 2026

So, my daughter recently found herself on the receiving end of her first bout of “mean girl” syndrome.  Being male, I was aware of this behaviour, mainly based on stories that I heard from past girlfriends telling me that most girls experience this at some point in their life. Let’s face it, they didn’t make a Hollywood film about the subject, and then subsequent sequels, because Chat GPT thought it would be a profitable idea.  It turns out that it’s a very real thing.

Now, one thing I will say is that I assumed my daughter would experience this modern collective of girl venom at a much later stage in her life, and was surprised to see it happening at the young age of ten.  It began with the usual taunts on the playground, and eventually escalated into a group chat being created by four girls with the title “Oliya Haters”.  Obviously, as a father, hearing this news immediately broke my heart, and conjured that Neanderthalic part of myself that wanted to protect my child by hitting people over the head with a club!

After calming down, and realizing I’m more valuable to my family out of jail cell, rather than in one, I forced myself to approach the situation as a mature adult.  Who knew I had it in me right?  So, after the usual “protect the perpetrator” conversation with school officials, I took matters into my own hands by reaching out to a few parents I knew, asking them to make sure their daughter ended the group chat… or I’ll rip your goddamn head off!  Ha!  Kidding.  Breathe Stuart!  Silly inner voice!  Thankfully, the parents I spoke with agreed that this behaviour was abhorrent, and promised to take action.

Of course, not all the parents responded this way.  Why, you ask?  Well, as shocking as it will be for some to hear this, not all parents are made the same.  Yes, just like doctors, teachers, lawyers, plumbers, accountants and deep sea divers, some are better than others, and the job of parenting is no exception to that rule.  However, with the examples I just mentioned, most people are able to admit it when they don’t measure up to their professional counterparts.  Sadly, I’ve discovered this is often not the case with the majority of parents I’ve met in the ten years I’ve been one myself.  More often than not, I meet people who see their act of making a human as something they were only able to pull off due to their god-like abilities, and for that reason the possibility of parenting poorly is unfathomable to them. 

Hence, the reason why some kids grow up to become assholes, and others don’t.  It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s the reality of life.  Now, let’s be clear on something.  My kids are fully capable of being assholes.  And there is no doubt in my mind that by the time they become adults, there will be areas of building their character that I missed, or just didn’t get right.  This reminds me of the time I heard the famous child psychologist Dr. Gabor Mate say, “I’m an expert in my field, and yet one day my own children will still need a therapist.”  I thought to myself, perhaps I’m not a total failure after all!  Now, one thing I can honestly say is that even though my kids are far from perfect, neither one of them would participate in a group chat that singled one person out as the one to be “hated”.  They simply know better.

And I like to believe that’s true for most people.  If you took a random sample of 100 people on the street, I genuinely believe that the majority of them know better, and given the choice, would act with integrity.  Sadly, we have yet to reach the stage of our evolution as humans where all of those in that random sample of 100 do.  For that reason, no matter who you are, what you do for a living or where you live on this big bouncing ball, you will always come across people spoiling it for everyone else.

With this recent incident involving my daughter, after a tiny amount of digging, it became clear that one person was influencing the other girls.  In fact, by account, the other girls didn’t feel comfortable participating, but not wanting to be left out, or shunned by the group, they went along with it.  Plus, because they weren’t the “instigators”, they felt as if they hadn’t done anything wrong, but were rather innocent bystanders.  I think this is something we can all relate to, even in our present day adult lives.  Sadly, as we get older, moments where our values and ethics are challenged, often fuelled by one or two bad actors, doesn’t go away, and we are left staring into that proverbial mirror, forced to think about who we want to be.

Whether it’s at work, on the street you live on, within your personal family or friends group, we all face situations where we feel pressure to act in a way that isn’t necessarily congruent with who we are.  And like mean girls on a group chat, we are faced with the decision between adhering to a lower level of consciousness, or choosing to live with greater awareness.  I’ve come to find that going along with the crowd definitely does provide short term gains, however making the latter choice, while harder, comes with much longer term benefits.  And I believe those benefits will be most felt the closer we get to our final breath, reflecting back on the way we chose to live our lives.

Today I encourage you to ask yourself whether you are going along with poor behaviour in any category of your life?  If so, is it possible that you have convinced yourself that you are absolved of any responsibility, simply because you are not the instigator of the poor behaviour in question?  If your answer is yes, please know that you are not alone.  We’ve all been there, not wanting to make those tough decisions, and will continue to face such scenarios well into the future.  

It’s not a question of whether you will find yourself there, but instead who you choose to be when you arrive.

Much Love,

Stuart

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