**Inside: Discover 5 ways to nurture your daughter’s confidence, authenticity, and self-love to positively impact her relationships and life.**
**Table of Contents**
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Many young girls who visit my office are high achievers, juggling sports, community involvement, and an active social life. It looks like their college résumés will practically write themselves. Yet, there’s another, often overlooked, internal set of accomplishments that truly concerns me, and it’s glaringly absent, leading to significant anxiety and depression that’s hard to detect unless you know where to look.
From a young age, many girls are conditioned to be pleasers, fixers, and to be ‘nice.’ The problem isn’t with teaching girls to be respectful and polite but lies in the implications of these labels if left unchallenged within families.
**What’s the downside of being labeled as nice?**
It turns out, quite a bit. Often, ‘nice’ becomes synonymous with being selfless, modest, quiet, and striving for perfection. Girls don’t have to wait until they grow up to feel society’s pressure to have it all and be it all.
Studies show girls feel compelled to please peers and adults and report higher levels of stress and unhappiness as teenagers. We risk forgetting about their true selves when we put too much emphasis on achievements rather than their being.
So, how can we guide our daughters to live authentically and feel confident in their own skin? Here are five key strategies for parents to nurture strong, confident girls:
“I’m having a hard time with my friends,” is something I hear from 90 percent of grade-school girls who come to see me. When we talk about addressing the issue by speaking directly to their peers, they often respond with shock: “Tell her what I’m thinking?! She might get mad at me!”
Somehow, we’ve inadvertently suppressed their ability to communicate openly, leading them to develop less healthy ways of dealing with conflict, like relational aggression. This involves covert actions like excluding, ignoring, gossiping, or manipulation.
By guiding our girls to speak up assertively and respectfully, we offer them tools for healthy conflict resolution. This teaches them they can stand up for their own thoughts and beliefs without undermining someone else’s character.
Encouraging girls to assertively express their needs and opinions, especially when they differ from our own, validates essential self-advocacy skills and instills the courage they need to remain true to themselves.
Emotional intelligence involves recognizing and managing our own and others’ emotions, encompassing skills like emotional awareness, problem-solving, and emotion management. When girls are pushed to always keep the peace and avoid conflict, they miss out on developing these essential skills.
When taught that feelings like anger and sadness are unacceptable, girls naturally shy away from expressing their full emotional range. Suppressing feelings harms their emotional well-being. Adults who embrace their own emotions can model the positive management of emotions for their daughters.
Allowing girls to express anger and sadness healthily—validating these feelings and teaching safe ways to express them—helps build critical coping skills that last a lifetime.
Seven out of ten girls worry about their looks, particularly their weight. This is no wonder, given society’s obsession with unrealistic beauty standards for girls.
Parents, however, can combat these destructive cultural messages. By staying aware of harmful stereotypes, they can actively challenge societal images and engage in open dialogues about media portrayals.
How are girls depicted in shows and movies? Do these portrayals match your and your daughter’s reality? Focusing on girls’ talents, strengths, and hard work instead of just their appearances helps teach what truly matters.
If I earned a coin every time a girl couldn’t list a single one of her strengths, I’d have a full jar. If we, their parents, don’t talk to them about their unique qualities, who will?
As parents, it’s important to notice and highlight our children’s talents. Engaging them in varied activities can help them discover what excites them and identify their unique gifts.
**PIN IT:**
Prioritizing perfection over persistence sets our daughters up for stress and disappointment. Ignoring their efforts and focusing only on achievements sets the stage for perfectionism and risk aversion.
Research shows girls more often believe success is about innate ability rather than effort, even though effort plays a crucial role. Encouraging a growth mindset by valuing hard work helps girls enhance their performance and builds resilience.
When girls are willing to take risks and face potential rejection or failure, they confront challenges directly. Parents can share their own mistakes and learning experiences, illustrating that achieving mastery is a winding journey, not a straight path.
Often, adults remain unaware of the subtle pressures affecting girls and how they might unintentionally contribute. By shedding light on these issues, we can ignite small changes leading to significant improvements.
In my practice, I’ll always meet girls facing life’s challenges. Imagine if they could tackle these with a strong voice, confident emotions, perseverance, a solid sense of self, and the tenacity to never give up. It would be incredible. Let’s work to empower all our daughters to reach this potential. Look out, world!
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