Cultivating Strong Girls
Written by A. Simon, November 2019
Copyright - Minnesota Kid’s Yoga Co. LLC
“She has fire in her soul, and grace in her heart”…
As a parent, you want your child to live their best life. You want to teach your children to be confident, happy, and courageous. You want them to keep their chin lifted when faced with adversity. Finally, you want them to understand self-worth.
Moms & Daughters
Moms and daughters have an espeically unique bond. Sometimes they are kindred spirits (aka the best of friends); other times, they have conflict due to similar personalities. Either way, moms love their daughters, and daughters love their moms (which may be trying during those teenage years). As a mom, you want your daughter to be strong. Maybe you want her to be physically strong, but more-so mentally strong. Why? Because women know the hardships girls face at young ages. Girls can be mean. They can say harsh things. They can act without thinking. Girls can be emotional, and too often take things to heart — all of which can have adverse affects on girls as they get older.
Therefore, mom’s take teaching their daughters to be emotionally strong very seriously. Why? Because we want to protect them from heartache! In a world that is full of scary things, as parents we try to help kids avoid those things…it’s a natural human instinct to protect our young. The question is, should we?
Teaching Girls to Fail
A recent article written by Child Mind, stated that when we don’t let kids fail, we make kids vulnerable to anxiety. When we don’t let kids experience failure, they don’t learn to try new things and in turn, get better with practice and determination. Worse, if kids don’t fail, they instead learn to avoid difficult tasks altogether. When kids don’t adventure into new activities, they lose out on new experiences that make life enjoyable! Curiosity and wonder is an important life skill to acquire. Without it, kids miss out on a world of opportunities.
“Failure is not the end of the world, it’s a lesson.” Empowering Parents also states that kids need to feel discomfort, so that they can learn to cope with the emotions, and to self-soothe. Similar to babies learning to sleep alone (by at first crying, and later learning to self-soothe), kids need to learn to be emotionally strong on their own too.
Girls in particular, need to know that failure is a part of life. Women are natural worriers, and also natural perfectionists. They tend to want things to be fixable. However, CNN reported that girls need to learn to put things into perspective, rather than worry that things are bigger than they are. They need to get over the failure and the need to fix it, and instead should find new ways to accept failure and move on.
Creating Emotional Strength in Girls
The New York Times listed several helpful ways that parents can empower girls naturally to be curious and not afraid. These include some of the following ideas:
Create a risks list (and talk out fears associated with those risks.
Create a positive mantra or a catch phrase your daughter can say to herself in times of need.
Take a virtual hot air balloon ride, or in other words, have her take a step back and analyze what’s emotionally upsetting.
Teach healthy talking habits which incorporate positive self-talking rather than negative.
Talk about failure stories with your kids. Let them know adults fail too.
Teach your daughter to embrace the bumps and hardships, and to move beyond them — teach her resilience.
Come up with a list of self-affirmations to help her find her own strengths and talents.
Cultivating a Strong Girl
In short, a strong girl, isn’t a perfect girl. She doesn’t have to be the smartest, most successful, or most adventurous. She can be shy. She can enjoy reading a book at home, or gardening with grandma. She doesn’t have to be the girl running for class president or leading the volleyball team in a record number of spikes. She also doesn’t have to be the girl that travels the world, and writes a best-selling novel. However, the key to a strong girl, is a girl who loves herself. A strong girl knows her own values, and recognizes her own talents and strengths. Teaching girls to be nothing but themself early on, is key to teaching girls to live a life that makes them happy and fulfilled. Strong girls will change the world, in the smallest or greatest of ways, not because they have to, but because they do so by not trying to be anyone but themselves.