Author: Rachel Simmons

Notes

• It’s not always about your child. She must learn what we have and do not have control over
  • Examples: Racism, sexism, stereotypes
  • Be aware of such injustices. Learn to manuver around them
• Model self-regulation
  • Example: Not panic when your child gets poor grades
• “I wrote ‘be more confident’ in my previous …. I have a change of heart.” - Simmons

Principles

• Model serenity in the face of uncertainty
• Calibrate parental expectations
• Manage your own parental anxieties

Tips

• Identify facts. Be deliberate in parenting
• Do not make colleage the goal
• Do not “help her” lose weight; Call out unnaturally thiness in advertising and on-screen
• Tone down the Girl Power talk
• Illustrate that failure is part of the journey with Failure Resume
• Set realistic goals, e.g., take small risks before taking big ones
• While counseling both emphasize and encourage making decisions
• Practice self-compassion
• Mindfulness; observing what you’re feeling withou judgement
• Self-kindess; saying something kind to yourself
• Thinking about others who share your experience
• Identify your self-critic as a separate entity
• Even grown-up children have tantrums; react accordingly
• Teach not everything can be fixed

Assertions

• Role models have made the Supergirl a baseline – creating unrealistic expectations
• Social media is damaging to a girl’s mental health
• Making college the most important goal is harmful and disincentivize courage taking
• Females care more about pleasing others, seeking feedback, performing and looking good
• A full schedule harms by confusing plan for purpose
• We send the message that a failure to have a career goal by high school is a failure in life
• Even in the 21st century, a fat female body is still expected to meet an unrealistic expectation of beauty
• A lack of confidence is not her fault
• Confidence can be learned - by hearing no repeatedly
• Defensive perssimism (“I’m going to fail”) is commonly practiced by girls
• Girls are more prone to rumination, which is largely cultural
• Girls struggle at finding kind words for themselves
• Our culture expects impossible standards of girls

Claims

• Academic performance does not suffer when parents do not emphasis acheivements
• For girls, there epidemic of poor mental health and lack of confidence
• Children who gets rewarded for an activity los intrinsic motivation for that activity; girls especially vulnerable
• Researches attempting to linking social media to well-being have been inconclusive
• Girls are prone to social comparison and feeback seeking online
• Body is the number two worry for young girls
• Affulent girls are more vulnerable to body image issues
• There is a confidence gap between males and females
• Girls are at greater risk for emotional problems
• Girls practice co-rumination which undermines their emotional well being
• Girls report more shame then boys
• Black girls are known to lose the least self-esteem during adolescence

Unanswered questions

• What is the right level of expectatio for any given family?
• Why extrinsic rewards harm females more?
• Is it because males are, as an unwritten rule, evaluated via the single metric of wealth? i.e., society and parents align on a single metric
• How to address the paradox of empowerment and self-blame?
• Where is the fine line between thinking hard vs rumination?
• Where is the fine line between self ciriticism and lack of confidence?
• Where is the fine line between asking for help and learned helplessness?
• When to preservere vs when to give up?
• Is this a form of Optimal Stopping Problem? N-Armed Bandit Problem?
• When to accept what one cannot control, when to have courage to change things