Growing a Girl

Growing A Girl: Seven Strategies for Raising a Strong, Spirited Daughter,
Dr. Barbara Mackoff

If there's a girl under the age of twelve in your life, please read this book!

You may already be familiar with the myriad studies, books, and articles that detail the startling crisis of confidence girls experience between eleven and thirteen. There are plenty of resources on helping a girl come through this difficult period with her strength and spirit intact. Dr. Mackoff found a lack of materials that would provide parents of young girls with strategies to counter the cultural conditioning that contributes to this tragic phenomenon. Her response is this book, the result of three years spent researching and developing these strategies.

This is a passionately written, well-researched, and fair-minded piece of work. You won't find a shred of male-bashing philosophy here. (I appreciate the affirmation that men and boys are neither the enemy or the ideal, but friends and allies.)

Instead, the most insistent messages throughout are these: that regardless of the unresolved nature vs. nurture argument, experts agree the biggest difference between boys and girls is how they are treated; and that the most important thing about "raising a strong, spirited daughter" is to honour her individuality, rather than forming expectations about who she is based on her gender. In this expanded definition of femininity, girls are equally free to be absorbed by storytelling or chemistry, to love building or nurturing, to wear velvet or denim, without value judgments that favour one over the other.

Be warned, you may find yourself uncomfortable as Dr. Mackoff challenges our cultural conditioning. As a parent who has tried to be very deliberate in leaving sexism out of my parenting, I winced as I recognized myself in the pages, especially in some of the theories of sex differences.

Although the book is a guide to parenting girls from birth to age twelve, I'll be using many of these strategies in parenting Malcolm well, too. A valuable investment!


P.S. If you're interested in theories of innate gender differences and the nature vs. nurture argument, check out these articles:

The mismeasure of woman: Men and women think differently. But not that differently (The Economist)

The Gender Similarities Hypothesis (Janet Shibley Hyde, University of Wisconsin-Madison)