Читать книгу Raising Girls in the 21st Century - Steve Biddulph - Страница 8

In the last ten years there has been a big change in the lives of girls. And it’s affecting them at every age, from babyhood to teens. While the same wishes and dreams are there for girls journeying towards womanhood that we had in our day, the world is forcing changes on them that are on a whole different scale. In particular, things are beginning to happen when they are younger.

This is a key point to keep in mind about girls’ situation today, and it was first made by Maggie Hamilton in her book What’s Happening to Our Girls? To understand our daughters, we have to realise that their childhood is not like ours. To put it bluntly, our 18 is their 14. Our 14 is their ten. That’s in terms of the pressures, the behaviours, and what they are supposed to be, and act like, according to the peer norms that exist today – and our failure to protect them, for we are partly responsible. We – and that’s all of us, parents, relatives, friends and society – are not supporting girlhood in the way we once did. We haven’t put enough adult time and care around our daughters, or taught them well enough.

In the last ten years a greedy corporate world has realised that girls, and especially pre-teen girls, are a soft target. Companies saw that there were enormous profits to be made in exploiting their anxieties (or in fact creating those anxieties) about everything from skin to weight to friendship to clothes to even making it into adulthood. In boardrooms and advertising agencies, magazines and media outlets, the war on girls began. And it succeeded. Everywhere she looks, today’s young girl sees messages that make her feel she is not good enough, that imprison her in cramped and narrow ideas of how she is supposed to look, think and act. Never before has girlhood been under such a sustained assault, ranging through everything from diet ads, alcohol marketing, fashion pressures, to the inroads of hard pornography into teenage bedrooms.

The result is that many girls have lost four years of childhood peace and development. They are being forced out of childhood when they have not yet completed it, or even fully enjoyed it. The result is girls in enormous pain and confusion. They try to act grown-up but they can’t. They are filling up the mental health clinics, the police stations and emergency rooms, the alcohol and drug treatment programmes in numbers never seen before.1

If we are awake to what is going on, we can prevent this. Partly it’s through the love we give, partly the environment we create for them with support and interests, and partly the protection from the stupid and exploitive media messages from the world around them. I have a favourite saying that has often helped me: ‘We can’t stop the birds of sorrow from flying through our lives, but we don’t have to let them make nests in our hair!’ We can live in this world, but we don’t have to swallow everything it offers us. We can choose for ourselves and for our daughters the experiences that make us strong, happy and alive. That’s what Genevieve and her parents did …