A good friend told me tonight that her 13-year-old has become Goth…makeup, hair, black clothes…and while her grades are still good, she’s already gotten suspended from school for cutting class and is hanging out with the underacheivers. She’s worried about her daughter. I’m worried too, having dealt with a rebellious daughter myself.
So if you were Goth in your youth, please share . Tell me what the appeal is…why would you want to encourage the negative attention of your peers at an age when kids are so brutal to each other? What is the whole appeal of the clothes, hair, eyeliner, music? What can my friend do to keep her daughter headed toward a successful life while not stifling her individuality? Is this a reaction to stresses on the family (their 7 year-old-son has just been diagnosed as bi-polar after 3 years of problems, middle child is ADHD).
What can this girl and I talk about when I go visit that will let her know that I’m an adult she can lean on when things get tough with her parents? (I’m like an auntie, though a bit of a distance away…we’re not close, but we kind of bonded the last time I saw her).
I wasn’t a goth, but I was the kind of kid that talked to everyone at that age.
Being goth is a way to be different. Around this age is when most kids start really caring about what they wear, how they look, etc. Nowadays the cool thing is to wear either Hollister/ A&F/ Gap/ and some skateboarding fashions, etc or more urban styles and nice sneakers. Goth breaks this mold. It lets them reject popular fashions and people they view as sheep. But while goth kids (speaking from experience, this is not fact!) may do drugs, cut class, like ‘weird’ things, all the ‘popular’ kids do that stuff too. So if the kid quits cutting class and doesn’t seem depressed, her dressing like that shouldn’t be a problem. She will most likely grow out of it. While I’ve never dressed goth, the way I’ve presented myself changed a lot over the years. It’s what kids do. The parents should just sit down with their kid, explain that her dressing like that is perfectly OK, but cutting class is definitely not. But if the parents show disapproval of the dress or say things like “Why don’t you wear some yellow?” etc. it will probably make her want to do it more.
Goths are great. They really want to be different from everybody else, so they all dress exactly the same. They’re just this decade’s versions of the guys with green spiky hair.
You could see (re-see) the movie BeetleJuice. Winona Ryder’s character taught me everything I know about Goths (and it could be all wrong for all I know). Pretty good movie though.
This topic has sparked some interesting discussions between my 15-year-old sister and myself. She dresses in a style that, while not actually “goth”, is similar enough as far as most of us are concerned.
Her point is that she likes dressing the way she does, hanging around with the friends she has, listening to that sort of music, and shopping at Hot Topic. She says that she isn’t going to act just like everyone else just to make other people happy, because if people actually bother to get to know her they’ll realize that she’s really not a scary person. She says that she likes to go into a class wearing her dark eyeliner and black clothing and slouch in the back of the room, then surprise the teacher by being the smartest student in the class.
That’s what she says. But I honestly think that it’s not so much that she really likes wearing black and listening to music that sounds like screaming tortured weasles. She’s just trying to prove that she’s an individual, and that she’s not the same as preppy, overachieving big sister.
So to summarize, assuming that my sister is a typical example of someone trying desperately not to be typical, I believe that the appeal is in the fact that being “goth” is so different from the norm. I wish I had advice for you, but I really don’t. But good luck!
I wouldn’t be concerned about her doing the whole goth look. I’d be more concerned that she’s hanging out with the underachievers/“losers”*. It is perfectly possible to be gothy and be an achiever. I was the girl with blue/purple/green/whatever nailpolish, burgundy hair and black eyeliner (with my catholic school uniform :D), but also the girl who had one of the top 5 highest ACT scores in my grade, got a “capable of doing better” comment for my Honors Biology class when I got a 94% for the semester** and had quite a few AP classes.
Although I never wrote poetry. I’d never sink that low.
Yes yes, I’m obviously taking liberties with the description.
** Yes, I’m serious.
I’m goth-ish. To give you an idea, my high school senior picture features me in a black lace dress, wearing a piece of clunky, evil-looking silver jewelry. My wardrobe still features lots and lots of black. I’m interested in vampire stories, my favorite makeup is black eyeliner, and my hair is currently an unnatural color (red-black. . .it’s very close to my natural color, so I don’t think anyone’s really noticed at work, but it’s visible in sunlight).
I’m not part of the goth subculture, mind, but I do sometimes dress the part. I do it because I like the way it looks. Goth-y clothes are pretty. Black goes with everything. I look cute in black eyeliner. Vampires are interesting and creepy. And I tend to not care about what everyone else thinks of my personal style. For all the goth-ti-tude, though, I’m suprisingly tame. There’s nothing behind it but my own personal tastes (though, to be fair, the zillion times my dad said, “why don’t you wear something other than black” didn’t really help my attitude).
Then again, I don’t really think of myself as “goth.” There are a lot of people who embrace the subculture. I don’t think it’s any different than embracing any other subculture.
Hah! That’s great! I’m going to call all my EBM and Industrial music that. Brilliant.
(Enormous WAG) Goth is appealing to teenagers because it’s a pretty safe way of being countercultural and different. And it’s all angsty, which also tends to appeal. I’d be worried about the bad friends but not the goth thing. Lots of decent goth kids around.
I don’t have personal experience, though- I didn’t become goth-ish until after high school.
I know an 18 year old girl who is goth. her mom used to be quite the fundie(boycotting pepsi and all) but she is cool with it. It looks good. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look good if you are over 30. She is a good student and person so its just a way of representing yourself, though hot in the summer.
freido, this has always bothered me. I was a punk when I got out of high school (In Catholic School, they slap you around for dressing like that), and I heard people accuse me of being a hypocritical nonconformist. The dress was never about being different from everyone else. It was about being different from most people, but very like some other people. It was a uniform and its purpose was the same as any uniform: to recognize people who are on your side.
I was goth all through high school. I had black clothes, multi-colored hair, black eyeliner, spiderwebs on my face, smoked after school, listened to The Cure, Bauhaus and Siouxsie and Ministry and Sisters and all that type of music. I actually liked the music very very much, it was very important to me. I hung out with some of the biggest underachievers in school. (I also was in the most advanced classes, got excellent grades, scored 99th percentile on most standardized tests, and got myself into UC Berkeley.) For me, goth was a way of advertising my utter rejection of all the high school popularity bullshit and my way of saying I AM DIFFERENT FROM YOU AND I DON’T CARE.
But, I also was institutionalized for taking drugs, cut myself and poked myself with pins to make myself bleed and occasionally burned myself with cigarettes. About fifteen years later I have finally been diagnosed as bipolar, and the evidence makes it clear that I have had this disorder since early childhood. (Also my parents were reaching the worst part of their marriage before their ultimate divorce.) I think that had much more to do with my drug taking and other forms of self-mutilation than being goth.
Goth nowadays is practically mainstream. All the kids are doing it. Cutting class is normal for teenagers. I think the best thing you could do for her is let her know that you’re proud of her for her individuality and her unique style as well as her intelligence. Emphasize that her ability to be successful in school as well as a “rebel” makes her a very special person. In my experience, people believe what others tell them about themselves. Instill a sense of pride of her intelligence and academic ability. Tell her how smrt she i to do well in school and keep so many opportunities open for herself. She will most likely strive to be the person you describe her to be. You know what I mean?
Not if the teacher has been paying attention- I’m a teacher, and I expect the Goth kids to be the smarters students in the class, because that’s what I’ve seen from Goth kids in the past.
I like the Goth kids. They write good if excessively angsty poetry, they aren’t afraid to do more than regurgitate what they think I want to hear when they write, and they are, in general, the least likely to be pointlessly cruel to their classmates. I’m always pleased when I see one in my class.
Yeah, I know, it’s so weird to me. I was a goth in high school and I distinctly remember one day when I was wearing combat boots and someone asked me “Haven’t you heard the war is over?” Pretty clever. I was also called a “corn chip” on several occasions and, while I understand what the intention is behind the name, I still have no idea what that actually means.
Whenever I see somebody wearing that dark brown/black lipstick, I always think that person looks likes s/he has been kissing a turd. Goths aren’t “different.” If they were different, they wouldn’t have enough of a group identity for there to be such a concept as “Goths.”
And yet she has become yet another buffalo in the Goth herd. I find the irony amusing.
I went through this with my stepdaughter. She wasn’t going Goth (yet) but she and I had a talk and I pointed out that her “rebellion” and “finding her own image” was nothing more than dressing and acting like everyone else, and that there was nothing original in it. I could almost see the lightbulb go on over her head. From that point on, she always dressed just a little bit differently (and better) from everyone else.
Read 