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Chapter Two

The Chance to be Wild and Time to be a Child

“Even as young as two, the world puts limits onto girls. We have to encourage our daughters to be adventurous and brave, to help them stay in touch with their wild nature. And we have to fight the forces that want to steal their childhood away.”

Get a group of parents together anywhere in the world today, and start them talking about girls. Within three minutes I guarantee you will hear these words: ‘They are growing up too fast.’

These parents aren’t talking about the age-old feeling that our children are up and gone before we know it, but something new and much more concerning. In just one generation, many childhoods have been snapped in half by new forces, unprecedented in history. Effectively, girls have lost four or more years of childhood. You will see the effects of this everywhere you go – ‘adultified’ girls of twelve or thirteen with cleavages self-consciously displayed and faces covered in make-up, dressed to kill (possibly from pneumonia), stressing out over how boys might judge them. And being neither happy nor free.

Mothers and fathers everywhere say that ‘fourteen is the new eighteen’. And given what we know about the massive changes in the brain in those four years, and all the learning that takes place – how very different we are at eighteen from fourteen – that has to be a problem.

Think back to your own teenage years. At eighteen you were starting to make choices about sex, drugs and alcohol, your own safety, and so on, which were complex and difficult. You were dealing for the first time with unpleasant or unscrupulous people, outside the safe circles of family and friends. And you were finding it a challenge. Even at eighteen, being eighteen is hard. But at fourteen (or these days, more often, twelve) girls are so ill-equipped – unpractised in separating emotion from thought, their confidence based entirely on bluff, their brains still not properly formed. They will struggle to deal with these choices, and so, increasingly, their lives may fall apart at this vulnerable age.

Let’s be clear – most girls still turn out fine. We help them, support them and arm them against the excesses of the culture, and they turn into wonderful strong women. Three out of five girls still do this. But one in five does not. They go so far off the rails that their adult life is really impaired.

Another one in five goes through some sort of a crisis, which galvanizes their family to action, and they pull through. But that still means way too many girls having way too hard a time.

A girl needs to be strong. Where that comes from is being tuned into her own nature, trusting her feelings and instincts. Having physical confidence. And growing slowly, getting all her abilities – mental and physical – unfolding as they were intended to through millions of years of human development. And it’s very early on – in the years from two to five – that we can make the most difference to her resilience. This is where we can sow the seeds of a girl who enjoys being the age she is, and isn’t rushed into fake grown-upness. If you grow slow, you grow strong.

HOW FREE AND WILD WERE YOU?

For younger mothers and fathers aged in their late twenties and thirties, some of these changes were already starting in your own childhood. We are not assuming here that the past was good. It’s important to look at what you bring to this stage from your own background.

Can you remember the time in your childhood when you were most happy and free?

What age was that?

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What was great about it?

What did other people do, if anything, to make it possible?

Was there a time in your childhood when you felt you were NOT happy and free? What age was that?

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What happened to make you feel that way?

What could others have done, that they did not do, to have helped you at that time?

It may be that this has reminded you of sad or hard times in your life. Breathe deep and notice that this was a long time ago. You are here now. Well done for having got through those times and becoming a loving and involved mother or father, wanting to do it better for your own girl or girls. Or it may be that you realized people really did pretty well in raising you. And you appreciate that more.

There is nothing better to help us be a sensitive parent than remembering what our own childhood was like. If you do that, you will know so much more about how to be the mother or father your daughter needs.

KEEPING HER FREE

It’s important to think about how great girlhood can be, and not settle for less. Girlhood – before puberty comes along – can be a wonderful time of life. Unworried by concerns about the opposite sex – or totally dismissive of them – free in her body, bold in her actions, able to be creative without fearing judgement, loving the world of animals and nature, affectionate with friends of both sexes, enjoying her parents’ company. How we wish this time would last for ever. And there is no reason why it shouldn’t.

But we parents have to do two things to make sure this is the case. First, we have to encourage and nurture her exploratory and wild self, so that it grows strong and lasts all her life. And second, we have to fence out the toxic messages that have sprung up around girls in recent years. This means we have to be choosy about what media we bring or let into our own home and even think about how our own attitudes can affect her without us knowing it. (For often the problems girls have also affected their mothers first.) Only by doing both these things-’powering up’ and ‘fencing out’, can we create the conditions for a strong happy woman to grow.

The age range from two to five is where this needs to begin. But you can work to correct this at any age. Remember when you filled in the profile of your daughter’s girlhood back at the start of the book? If you rated this second stage – exploration – at three stars or less, then there is plenty you can do at eight or fourteen or even later to help her bring her strong, ‘wild’ self to life.

In fact you may need to do some remedial ‘rewilding’ of yourself to be really happy as a mum or dad, and pass on this permission to your daughter as well.

Let’s make a baseline assessment of how exploratory, adventure-loving and confident your daughter is. You’ll notice we’ve combined two kinds of adventurousness – outwards, physically, in the world, and inwards in creativity and mental freedom. Of course, having both is brilliant.

Tick which of these best describes your girl:

□ 1. She is very anxious, neat and buttoned up. She is happiest playing with an iPad as it doesn’t mess up her clothes.

□ 2. She sometimes does creative or adventurous things. But not a lot.

□ 3. She loves to play, outdoors or inside: she gets noisy, makes a bit of a mess and loves having adventures.

□ 4. We haven’t seen her for three days, but she sends a smoke signal from a ridge at sunset, so we know she’s OK.

Now, role modelling has to come into this. So we have to ask a second question:

How about you when you were a child?

□ 1. I was very anxious, neat and buttoned up. I did embroidery, but only between the lines.

□ 2. I did occasionally do something creative or adventurous. But it got me into trouble.

□ 3. I loved to play, get noisy and make a bit of a mess, and had many adventures.

□ 4. I hitchhiked across the country at seven, and wrote a book about it called Truck Drivers Are My Friends.

(Please note, this is not to say that every girl, or boy, should be loud and highly active. Some kids are naturally quieter and more into fine motor activity which is just great. The question is: do they feel free. Are their spirits soaring, or afraid?)

The years from two to five are very formative. So we have to really decide what we want to teach them. Sexism really sets in, often without us realizing it. It happens because we shepherd girls – much more than boys – into a restricted and narrow world. We teach them to be neat, clean, quiet, well-behaved and high-achieving (in ballet or music or schoolwork). We create uptight, cute little conformity machines, and wonder why they often implode into anxiety, self-harm and binge-drinking by mid-secondary school.

In the UK, schools don’t help this because politicians (not educators) have imposed testing and assessments and all kinds of irrelevant pressures on even the youngest kids in reception class, or kindergarten. And it’s easy for children to get that feeling at home too – that you have to be the best. Which is crazy. Life is not a competition. And even if it was, children grow smarter, stronger, and have better sensory systems and a greater love of learning if they are allowed to play free until the age of seven. At least.

THE CURSE OF PERFECT

Writers such as Oliver James in the UK and JoAnn Deak in the US (see recommended books) have expressed serious concern about girls’ growing perfectionism about their own performance – about being, essentially, too good. It begins in primary school, with schoolwork, appearance, behaviour and sporting achievement; as they enter their teens it can result in girls controlling the shape of their bodies through diet and exercise to unhealthy levels. It can end in total mental collapse.

New research has revealed something very startling – that the most anxious girls today are often those with educated and affluent parents. A concern that our girls perform well academically is turning into something that actually undermines their success, and makes them very unhappy young women.

We’ve long known that boys are often disadvantaged in early schooling because they don’t like having to sit still, and are slower at achieving reading and writing skills because their brains develop more slowly. But it’s likely that girls suffer an equally harmful consequence of formal learning too young. Because they are ‘good’ at school, girls may get lots of reinforcement – not for being themselves, or doing or making what they want – but for pleasing and conforming to what the teacher, or mum or dad, thinks is good. They develop what psychologists call an ‘external locus of control’ and think that their happiness depends on the approval of others. That’s why it is so vital that we keep the under-six years free from formal learning, and allow children’s natural capacity for self-directed play to develop, leading to strongly motivated, active and creative learners.

Your daughter needs, at this age, to feel FREE. That the world is hers to explore, that it is a rich and beautiful place and she can gain the competencies to navigate it safely. ‘Free’ doesn’t mean free to be selfish or mistreat others, or to be heedless and stupid (or wander in the traffic). You’ll sometimes have to sort her out on that. But it does mean trusting that intelligence grows, people skills develop, strength and confidence, even wisdom and inner peace, arise from being in direct contact with the living world through play. On the outside, and inside, in her own mind – you need to get your daughter exploding into an exploratory life. As feminism puts it, a girl’s place is EVERYWHERE.

HOW NATURE BOOSTS HER INTELLIGENCE

A couple of years ago a strange thing happened. Two books came out with the same title, Wild.

One was a true story, which became a wonderful film, about a young American woman who had been very self-destructive, addicted to men and to drugs and full of insecurity. When the wonderfully named Cheryl Strayed’s mother suddenly died, it triggered her descent into a free-falling lifestyle that seemed set to kill her. She finally decided to heal herself, not through therapy, but by walking thousands of miles along the Pacific Crest Trail. And it worked.

The other book was by a British woman, also a superb writer. Jay Griffith described how important it is to spend time in wild nature, let it fill your mind, and get away from the artificial and deadening environments of cities, buildings, electronics, deadlines and rush. Griffiths lived among indigenous people all over the world to research the book. She followed this book with another, called Kith, which argued that children need a home territory, a landscape, a place with both natural and human dimensions, which they are free to roam in during childhood. That having a home territory you are bonded to is the basis of wellbeing. In a world where we often move from city to city, and live in apartments far above city streets, this is quite a challenging idea.

It’s hard to do justice to these books in a few words, but they won worldwide acclaim, in their own way, for depicting how womanhood could break out of its chains, and how girlhood should never be chained in the first place.

One of the most important things to know about your daughter is that she is a wild creature, and needs to stay that way to be healthy and reach anything like her full potential. By the age of one or two, she will be well ready to venture out into the world of nature, put bits of it into her mouth, climb, poke, chase small lizards, collect feathers and build twig houses, and get in touch with her inner elf. (That’s not a misprint!) These are not just diversions or pleasant interludes from the real business of childhood – they are what childhood is for. Our eyes, ears, hands, limbs, feet and, ultimately, our brain need the complex and richly sensory world that only nature can provide. Rough ground makes our feet and limbs grow stronger, our brains more agile.

Please understand: the message isn’t just ‘it’s healthy to get outdoors’. It’s that in the complexity and richness of the natural environment, a child’s senses begin to work at a significantly more refined and detailed level. (Just one example – 20:20 vision is simply the normal level – it’s possible to have 20:10 vision. And there are comparable increases possible in smelling, hearing, touch, and sensorimotor awareness). When this begins to occur, then your daughter’s brain also perceives more holistically, and sees the relatedness of the environment. A surprising number of the world’s best thinkers and researchers were immersed in nature to an unusual degree, and their brains are different and better as a result.

BUSTING THE STEREOTYPES

The ideal of the neat, tidy, pretty, domesticated girl of times gone by still seems to be hanging on in our idea of girlhood. And in fact it’s being made worse by the new fashion-and-frills dressing habits of our crazy consumerist time. If your clothes are cutesy pink and fluffy and cost a bomb, then you aren’t going to be playing in the mud.

Personally I think the words ‘kids’ and ‘fashion’ should never be seen together. Kids should dress for warmth, mobility and the kind of individuality that they can create themselves without ever going near a shop. Dressing our kids up to be cute can be fun for adults, and a little won’t kill you, but it’s the razor’s edge of turning a girl (or boy) towards self-consciousness and focusing on how they look, which in this era of massive anxiety about looks will be total poison to their mental health.

And then there are toys. We got rid of the little ovens, washing machines and toy irons that girls had in the 1950s, but substituted false eyelashes, pouty fishnet stocking dolls, pink pretty princess outfits (‘some day my prince will come’) and cut-to-the-crotch dancewear. Not exactly progress.

My sister actually had one of these, a toy iron! You could put a battery in it and it lit up the ‘on’ light. That’s all it did! So she could have fun practising ironing. Just like mother!

It isn’t a bad thing for kids – of both genders – to play at being grown up. Making food, building houses, playing at being families. But when toys are made that way – and there is a girls’ aisle and a boys’ aisle in the toy store – then we have a problem.

The real solution to sexist rubbish foisted on girls (along with not buying it) is to make her so strong and free, so early, that she just laughs at this stuff at eight, or fourteen. So the answer is – girls need wilding! You learn this through making messy artwork and building stuff in the backyard, gardening, and making things from mud and leaves. And mum and dad joining in. Through dancing and leaping about in the living room to loud music with mum and dad and friends. In having and keeping animals, fish and tadpoles, and growing every kind of plant. And whenever possible, being in the rain, woods, and on the beach. Encourage her to be messy, uninhibited, alive and moving about. Never complain about the state she gets in. Choose her clothes to be dirt-proof and damage-resistant, water-excluding or so sturdy it doesn’t matter. And whenever you can, get outdoors into natural places and let her run free.

So here is a quick assessment on the natural wildness opportunities your daughter has (tick any that fit):

□ 1. My daughter is frightened of soil. She rarely ventures outdoors.

□ 2. We live in an apartment or flat where there is very little nature around.

□ 3. We have a garden or a park nearby, and do go there sometimes.

□ 4. We get out into nature whenever we can, have a pet, and do a lot of playing outdoors.

□ 5. We live in the countryside, and she plays in wild woods and I have to get twigs out of her hair.

And on inner wildness:

□ 1. Our family is neat. We are quiet. Our goal is achievement. That takes discipline and there is no room for messing about.

□ 2. We do occasionally let our hair down and it’s actually quite good fun.

□ 3. Our daughter/s are very happy making a creative mess with paints and paper and glue and bits of stuff. They get it all over themselves, but it’s nothing a warm bath won’t fix.

□ 4. Our kid’s favourite activity is wild dancing to loud music in the kitchen and living room. Everyone goes mad. When we go to mountain tops we end up shouting our names very loud.

If you ticked 1 or 2 on these two lists, don’t panic!

That’s what this chapter is to help you with. Please note – wildness should not be confused with being chaotic, disorganized or lacking routines. Kids and families do work best with boundaries and structure. You can only be truly wild when you know not to cut yourself, and there isn’t cat poo on the bathroom floor – at least, not from last week. And especially if you don’t own a cat!

EVERYONE CAN DO IT

Not everyone can live beside the woods, or the beach, or in a village where you can walk safely about with friends when you are seven. Where you can light a fire and make toast, or create your own shelter and wait with your dad to watch a badger emerge from its den at dusk. But can you see how wonderful and enlivening and freeing such a childhood could be? And begin to bring even some of that into your daughter’s world? Even in the city, adventure is there. And nature can be found somehow, even just on holidays. So have that kind of holiday or weekend whenever you can. Many women remember being a child, totally blissed out on their first time on a lonely beach, or a hilltop they walked up with mum or dad, where they could see for miles around, and the wind blew in their hair.

“Our daughter would play with sticks, pebbles, pieces of leaf and strange insects for hours in our garden. (And we lived in a place where there were snakes, large lizards called goannas up to a metre long, swooping kookaburras and sometimes hawks or eagles.) Her attention span was so great that it wasn’t even a ‘span’ at all, it flowed all day long. She would make up stories, voice the dialogue between the characters, breaking off only occasionally to bring something to show us or to get something to eat or drink.”

Jasmine, 37

Can you see how, added together, these experiences might immunize her – even just a little – against the stupidities of social media or putting on make-up and fretting about being hot enough for boys?. From being cruel to friends. From needing to take drugs to feel good at fifteen.

And of course, the best wilding she can receive she learns from you, her mum and dad. If you demonstrate a free and exuberant nature, laugh, sing, dance, love nature, love music, love life, then she will just catch that as naturally as breathing. She will see a competent, caring, protective person, who is nonetheless unfettered, unconventional, untamed. Who takes joy in the moment and draws her out of reticence into exuberance.

THE VERY HELPFUL ROLE OF DADS

Dads have proven to be very valuable in helping girls be explorers. It’s known from research that dads do more adventurous, active and physical kinds of play with girls than mothers do. They take children to wild outdoor settings and participate in riskier activities (and have more accidents, so do be sensible). Daughters with dads get knocked over by waves at the beach, graze their knees, wrestle, run and climb things far more. They go fishing. Dad is slightly less aware of mealtimes or having a balanced lunch! Within reason this can result in girls being more stress-resistant and hardy. But better still, they will be comfortable in male company, able to meet boys on their own terms. So dads – do stuff with your girls! (There’s a whole chapter about this later in the book.)

Keeping Out the Hyenas

It’s incredible how aware small children are of the world around them. So we have to be alert about the media that floods into our homes – television, the internet and magazines, as well as the advertising they see everywhere in the street, in shop windows and shopping malls. Advertising can accidentally impact our girls or be very deliberately targeted at them. In either case, its message is almost always harmful to their emotional wellbeing and self-image. We can choose what we let into our homes, and as they get older we can equip our girls to see what is being directed at them. We can fence out the hyenas until they learn how to fight them themselves.

“When she was barely three, our daughter was playing on the carpet in front of the TV. We were in that half-daze of early evening, sitting chatting about something, when her voice rang out loud and clear. She had raised her head and was looking at the TV.

‘Isn’t that nice! That lady’s husband will love her now she is thin.’ My wife and I almost levitated in our rush to turn off the TV, while also looking casual and relaxed. The ‘errkkk’ feeling was so strong. Australian TV has ads – I am sure the UK does as well – for diet products that show vivid before and after footage of chubby people suddenly grown thin and happy. Our toddler had taken in every word.

Love = thin.

Woman = decoration.

Marriage = goal in life. Aaaargghhh!”

June, 33, and Daniel, 33

“Selecting an outfit for the day ahead. Little Miss Two was at my side as usual, watching my every move. I chose my super-slimming high-rise black jeans, the ones that take a fair bit of jiggling to get on. It’s about then that I notice my little blonde-haired girl waving her rear-end at the mirror. She’s peering over her shoulder, gawking at her nappy-cushioned bottom, just like I do. The good old ‘Does my bum look big in this?’ move. I was shocked. I could’ve cried.”

Claire, 39

About fifteen years ago the corporate world discovered girls. Marketers realized there was an untapped demographic that was the softest target in the world. Large corporations routinely hire child psychologists who advise them on better ways to exploit and, if need be, harm children. Yes, big tobacco, big alcohol, and today’s equally conscience-challenged corporates all had psychologists to help them. And it all ramped up with science behind it. In Third World countries, they dress mid-teen kids in smart clothes and expensive-looking trainers, and these kids give out cigarettes to other kids for free. And they don’t worry about low tar. Just last year, in Australia, a wine company released a fizzy red drink in plastic bottles with little hearts printed on the label. And 8 per cent alcohol. Luckily alcohol products aimed specifically at the young are now illegal, and this new product was quickly withdrawn. (But it took us almost twenty years to get those laws passed.)

By the early 2000s it really got serious. What these hired experts told the companies was that girls are different to boys in an important way. They are wired for social cueing. If two girls are friends in primary school and one of them frowns or scowls, the other one will worry about it all day. If two boys are friends, they will sometimes have a big fight – blood will flow – and in minutes it will be all over! Boys forget. Or more to the point, they barely notice in the first place. We have to teach our boys to be aware of other people’s feelings. Most girls think about them all the time.

With this information, and some other insights I am not going to tell you, the advertisers focused millions of marketing dollars onto a new target – the pre-teen girl. In fact it was advertisers who invented the ‘pre-teen girl’. As if being eleven is only about waiting to be a teenager, and not a worthwhile age on its own. (Children are not pre-anything. They are who they are, and should be allowed to be so.)

Those advertisers succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Forty per cent of ten-year-old girls now worry about their weight and actively modify their food intake in unsuccessful and harmful attempts to change their size and shape. It’s sad because all girls get chubbier in the six months before puberty begins, and this is necessary for sufficient oestrogen to be built up. All old societies knew this and welcomed it. (Looks-conscious mothers and thoughtless fathers today say ‘Whoa, you’re getting fat!’).