Dear girls: be kind, even when it’s the harder thing

High school has a way of making everything feel like a competition nobody signed up for.

And the thing about competition is — it’s sneaky. It doesn’t always show up as outright meanness. Sometimes it’s a comment that sounds like a compliment but isn’t. Sometimes it’s silence when someone needed you to speak up. Sometimes it’s just… not trying.

So I want to talk about kindness. Not the soft, greeting-card version. The actual kind that takes some nerve.

Why is kindness harder in high school than anywhere else?

High school is basically a pressure cooker where everyone is figuring out who they are while also being constantly watched. That’s a rough combo.

When you’re that exposed, self-protection kicks in hard. And sometimes self-protection looks like getting mean first, so nobody else can get to you. I get it. That doesn’t make it okay, but I get it.

The problem is, meanness compounds. One snide comment leads to another, leads to a group chat, leads to someone sitting alone at lunch who didn’t have to be sitting alone at lunch.

What do you actually do when someone says something mean to you?

You don’t have to sit there and take it. Nobody’s saying that.

But you also don’t have to reload and fire back with something worse. That’s not strength — that’s just a different kind of hurt bouncing around the room until somebody ends up crying in a bathroom.

Walking away is underrated. It reads as unbothered. And unbothered is the most powerful thing you can be at sixteen.

If something is genuinely wrong — if it’s harassment, if it’s repeated, if it’s making school feel unsafe — that’s different. That’s when you loop in an adult and you don’t apologize for it. But in the general day-to-day nonsense? Walk away. Let it go. You don’t have to have the last word every time.

Is being kind the same as being a pushover?

No. And I need you to really hear that, because I think this is where girls get it twisted.

Kindness is a choice. It’s active. A pushover is just someone who doesn’t know what they want or is afraid to say it. Those are completely different things.

You can be kind AND tell someone they crossed a line. You can be kind AND say no. You can be kind AND have an opinion that’s different from everyone else at the table. Kindness doesn’t require you to shrink.

In fact, the girls who are genuinely kind — not performatively kind, actually kind — are usually the ones who also have the spine to tell you the truth when you need to hear it. That’s the version worth being.

Why does rooting for other girls feel so complicated sometimes?

Because somewhere along the way we picked up this idea that another girl’s success takes something from us. And it doesn’t. It just doesn’t.

When someone in your grade gets the lead in the play, or gets asked to prom, or gets a scholarship — that’s not your thing being taken. That’s just her thing happening. There’s room for both of you.

I know that’s easier to say than to feel. Jealousy is a very human thing and I’m not going to tell you not to feel it. But there’s a difference between feeling jealous and acting on it. One is being human. The other is a choice.

Choose to clap for her anyway. Not because you’re faking it, but because you’re deciding what kind of person you’re going to be. You get to decide that.

This connects to something I wrote about raising girls to be both strong and kind — because those two things are not in conflict, even when it feels like they should be.

What does kindness look like on an ordinary Tuesday?

Not a grand gesture. Almost never a grand gesture.

It’s noticing when someone is off and asking if they’re okay. It’s not laughing at something that’s actually not funny. It’s saving a seat. It’s not sending the screenshot.

It’s also being kind to yourself, which is the part nobody talks about enough. You can’t pour from an empty cup — yeah, I know that sounds like a bumper sticker — but it’s true. If you’re tearing yourself apart every time you look in the mirror, it’s going to be a lot harder to show up generously for anyone else.

Some of the meanest behavior I’ve ever seen from teenage girls comes from girls who are in serious pain. Not an excuse. Just a thing worth knowing, because it changes how you respond to it.

Does kindness actually pay off, or is this just advice adults give?

Honestly? It pays off, but sometimes not right away, and that’s the annoying part.

What I can tell you is that the girls who build their social lives on being mean — on exclusion, on gossip, on cutting people down to stay on top — tend to find themselves pretty alone eventually. Not always in high school. Sometimes high school actually rewards that behavior, and that’s a real flaw in the system.

But past high school? Kindness is quietly the thing that keeps people in your corner. It’s the thing people remember. Not the homecoming thing, not the GPA. How you made them feel.

Research backs this up, too — strong social connections built on trust and warmth are consistently linked to better mental health outcomes over time. Which, when you’re sixteen, sounds abstract. But you’ll get there.

In my post about what I want girls to know heading into high school, I said this same thing a different way. It keeps being true.

One more thing

Being kind doesn’t mean you have to be friends with everyone. You don’t. Some people are not your people, and that’s fine.

It just means you treat everyone like they matter. Because they do. Even the ones who are making it hard to believe that right now.

Kindness isn’t a personality trait you’re born with or without. It’s a practice. Some days you’re going to be really good at it. Some days you’re going to say something you wish you could take back.

That’s okay. That’s being human. The point isn’t perfection — it’s that you keep trying to do right by people, including yourself.

But what do I know? I’m just some blogger on the internet who really, really wants you to be okay.

📌 Pin this post