it like being a girl today? Well, as you must have noticed, it’s not like when we were kids. It’s different in good ways and bad. On the plus side, many girls are soaring. A huge battle has been won for the rights of girls; they can aim for a life which even their mothers couldn’t have, let alone their grandmothers or the women of centuries before. Today around three out of every five girls will turn out just fine.1 They will power along through their growing-up years, with just the odd minor challenge that we all need to help us grow, and head off into a happy adulthood. If you are reading this book, then you are the kind of parent who is motivated and open to ideas – and your daughter will likely have a great start.
But your daughter will have friends whose lives will not go at all well. One girl in five, during her teenage years, will encounter problems, usually with her mental health or – somewhat less often – with behavioural issues such as substance abuse, lawbreaking or risky sexual behaviour which will put her in jeopardy. And because the mid-teens are the peak time for hormonal activity and neurological meltdown, this age is when it will probably show up. If a girl is going to go off the rails, you will know it by fourteen.
Fortunately for this one-in-five girl, her family will mobilise. They will get help and make changes. Caring teachers, the family doctor or a counsellor might help. And that girl will ‘come good’. She will pull out of the dive she is in and become stronger and more secure. Kaycee, who features early in this book and is the heroine of my Raising Girls talks, is a real-life instance of this. Everyone in her family made changes and her life was turned around.
So that’s four out of five girls who are going to be okay. But if you’re keeping count, that leaves one more. One in five, still a huge number of girls, don’t do well. They have problems starting in their teens, and those problems don’t go away. They will have impaired lives right into their twenties and beyond. Mental health professionals have been on full alarm mode for several years now because this is an awful lot of girls having a really terrible time. This is new, and it’s a big problem. Something has gone wrong.
We’ve all seen this happen to girls we know. Once-rare conditions like eating disorders, or self-harm or out-of-control anxiety are now present in every classroom in the western world. Schools have teams of psychologists now. They build ‘wellbeing centres’ and have wellness programmes, but it’s a euphemism for ‘don’t commit suicide’. In some schools I have visited, if a girl disappears during the day a counsellor is sent, quickly, to the railway station to check she isn’t standing on the platform in a state of acute distress. These are precious kids and it’s terrible to see the pain and danger they are in.
But why is this? For years I struggled to try to get across to parents what the girls I was talking to were experiencing. But here’s my best attempt – it’s like being out in an open wasteland, alone and exposed. There’s a cold wind blowing. It’s getting dark, and predators are circling. Girlhood has never felt more lonely.
Even though they have loving and devoted families, many girls today feel emotionally abandoned because their parents and teachers simply no longer have enough time or peace to really connect with them. So they are left to the wolves of the peer group, the internet, and a corporate machine that wants them insecure so they will buy more stuff. We adults have not provided what they need – in fact home and school combined have often piled on pressures and expectations that makes things worse.
From 40 years of working with families I have become convinced that a big part of the problem is the way we live. We have, little by little, slipped into an overbusy, overloaded and overwhelmed life, with some crazy values and ways of spending our time. Our daughters need something more, which we are no longer providing – rich and varied adult connection, mentoring and chances to contribute. Instead, they have taken to the online world for affirmation and comfort, but it isn’t a good or caring place. Instead of finding encouragement that they belong, they are blitzed with media and have become much more pressured to achieve in every way, look good, be amazing and be perfect. The rushed way of life of today is not what humans were designed for. We feel it as adults, but our children – from the littlest toddler girl to the most sophisticated looking (but inside oh-so-fragile) teenager – are being hammered.
We have to change how we live in order to save our girls. We need more heart and time if we are to help our youngsters grow strong. It begins when they are little babies, and continues until when they are fully adult. It’s made up of small things you do every day, which this book will help you to put into action.
Once you put some fences around your life and embrace happier, slower rhythms, then girlhood will be much more natural, smooth and happy. She will love and laugh through her growing-up years, and even the teens will be more adventure than angst. We will teach you all about these stages and how to make them happy and rich in the pages that follow. But the real magic is built into your girl. You just have to release it.
As we free our girls from the monster machine that life has become, we set ourselves free too. Kids change us, and for the better. So your daughter – and her friends – can learn to fly.
Good wishes and my love goes with you,
Steve Biddulph
There are two girls that I would like you to meet. Their names are Kaycee and Genevieve. Both are 17, and both are in Year 12 at school. They are great kids, friendly and bright, you would enjoy talking to them.
These two have known each other since nursery. They were best friends all through primary school and everyone thought they would be that way forever. But around the time Kaycee and Genevieve moved up to secondary school, something went wrong between them. The reason is hard to say, I am not sure they could even pin it down themselves, but today, if they pass in the school corridor, there is that awkward feeling that comes from having once been friends, but no longer being so.
Kaycee and Genevieve’s lives have taken very different paths. I’m going to tell you their stories, because they make really clear the dangers, and the hopes, of girlhood today.
Kaycee’s Story
Let’s meet Kaycee first. On first impression Kaycee seems a very grown-up 17-year-old. She wears carefully applied make-up and ultra-fashionable clothes, and she speaks fast and in a clear voice. This much confidence in a teenager may be quite genuine, but if you know young people well, you might wonder if Kaycee has possibly become ‘too old too soon’. And there is something else that you might notice. It’s in her manner. Her expression is world-weary. When she speaks she sounds rather cynical and hard. For a 17-year-old, she doesn’t seem to be having a lot of fun.
Back when Kaycee was 14, something big did happen. It wasn’t the stuff of newspaper headlines, but it was a significant experience that affected the direction of her life.
Halfway through Year 9, Kaycee was invited to a classmate’s birthday party. The parents hosting the party had implied a somewhat higher level of supervision than they actually provided on the night. So the party went pretty much as it would if 40 or 50 kids of varying ages were left in a house at night with lots of alcohol and no adults in sight: loud, chaotic and out of control. Kaycee found it very exciting; in particular because a boy whom she knew, Ciaran, aged 17 and two years above her in school, was there. Kaycee and her friends had often admired Ciaran at school, with his good looks and cool demeanour, but tonight there was something different – he was noticing her. Then, amazingly, it got better still. He sat with her, and they talked and had a few drinks. They talked and snuggled a little in the garden. She could hardly believe her luck (it was all she could manage not to take out her phone and text someone!). After a while, Ciaran stood up, took her by the hand and led her upstairs to one of the many bedrooms in this big, fancy house apparently devoid of adults. They had sex.
It all went faster than Kaycee had imagined