Mothers exert enormous influence over their daughters. A positive, encouraging message can nurture confidence and self-assurance; a negative word or harsh rebuke can be crushing and humiliating. Our words, attitudes and actions speak powerfully to our children.
Today’s youngsters face a confusing world filled with mixed messages. Women have the opportunity to pursue virtually any career path, but media images of women focus on scantily clad singers or rail thin models. Girls get the message early that it’s their bodies rather than their minds that count.
Mothers can counter the influence of negative role models by creating strong female role models in a daughter’s life. Grandmothers, aunts, family friends and other relatives can all play important mentoring roles.
Try to set aside some time every day to talk with and really listen to your child. If you’re able to listen without being judgmental, you’ll establish a foundation of trust that will help maintain stability in the rocky teenage years.
Many young women today struggle with establishing their own identity and finding a voice. They may think it doesn’t look cool to be smart or to speak up in class. Girls who are outgoing and participate in class at the elementary level may suddenly lose their voice in high school, letting boys take on leadership roles.
Mothers can both model and talk to their daughters about being assertive and expressing ideas in ways that are effective and will be heard. Whether it’s defending personal rights, a political opinion or ideas about art or music, teach your daughter the value of being informed, of listening to and respecting other opinions and of stating her own position in a calm, assertive manner. Young women who learn to be confident and assertive as teens are developing skills that will serve them well at work and in personal relationships.
As a parent you can’t control your daughter’s friendships and relationships as she becomes a young adult, but you can model healthy adult relationships and talk about the signs of unhealthy or abusive relationships. It’s much easier to address these issues when the discussion focuses on a novel or a movie you’ve enjoyed together rather than the current boyfriend. You want your daughter to be able to recognize warning signs of relationships that are controlling, that try to isolate a young woman from family and friends or that are physically or verbally abusive.
Encourage academic striving and success in your daughter. Being willing to sign up for challenging classes, completing assignments on time and balancing study and social activities are all essential to high school success.
Talk (and listen) to her about career options. Arrange a visit to a local college or university to find out more about program offerings, arrange for a day of job shadowing with a woman in her chosen profession or better still, find a mentor willing to form a long-term relationship. As a parent, see your role as being someone who opens doors, not someone who closes them.
Mothers can play a big role in modeling healthy attitudes toward body image, weight and overall lifestyle choices. Not smoking, or making an effort to quit if you do, and a long-term commitment to healthy family eating are key elements.
If you never say the word diet in front of your daughter, you’ll be doing her a great favor. Although many people are able to lose weight by dieting, countless studies show that only a very small percentage manage to keep it off long-term.
Even when children and teens are already overweight it makes more sense to create a diet they can live with long- term emphasizing fruits, vegetables, whole grains and low-fat dairy products over high-fat, high-calorie fast food. Fixing healthy meals together can help your daughter avoid the binge purge cycle and body image problems that afflict so many young women today.
When daughters are young, they require more attention but parents are rewarded with children happy to accept the mother’s leadership and ideas. As they become teens and young adults with their own agenda, many parents feel they are losing their hold. But mothers can take comfort in the fact that daughters tend to internalize the messages and values. The bonds formed in younger years may stretch like bungee cords as teens establish an independent sense of self; to their relief as well as ours the cord usually holds strong.
Tana N Kaefer, PharmD
The Teen Challenge:Girls versus Boys
It’s popular wisdom that parents often find daughters more difficult to raise during the teen years than sons. Adolescent health experts suggest that boys and girls each present challenges; they just tend to differ.
Professor George Patton of the Center for Adolescent Health at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia says that, in his practice, girls are more likely to need help with emotional problems such as anxiety and depression while boys are more likely to be involved in violent, risky behavior including alcohol and drug abuse.
Because preadolescent girls tend to form a tight bond with the mother, the move toward independence in the teen years can be especially difficult for parents.
[SOURCE: Bettna Arndt, “The Trouble with Girls,” TheAge, Melbourne, Australia, March 3, 2004]
Dieting Linked To Smoking in Teens
Adolescent girls who diet are twice as likely to take up smoking as girls who don’t diet, according to a study from Boston Children’s Hospital and the Harvard School of Public Health.
The study found that girls who dieted once per week doubled their risk of becoming smokers. Those who dieted more than once per week were four times more likely to take up smoking compared with girls who didn’t diet.
[SOURCE: “Dieting and Smoking Initiation in Early Adolescent Boys and Girls: A Prospective Study,” American Journal of Public Health, March, 2001]
The Diet Trap
Adolescents who diet regularly are more likely to become binge eaters and increase their risk of gaining significant weight again compared with youngsters who don’t diet.
A study that followed 16,882 adolescents aged 9 to 14 years over a four-year period found that girls who dieted frequently were 12 times more likely to be binge eaters than girls who didn’t diet. And, contrary to what many might expect, over a three-year period dieters gained significantly more weight.
Researchers believe that it’s the repeated cycles of food restriction followed by binge eating that lead to weight gain.
[SOURCE: Robert Finn, “Applies to Girls, Boys: Dieting Results in Bingeing, Weight Gain,” Clinical Psychiatry News, December 2003.]
Girls on the Run
Numerous studies show that girls who participate in sports improve self-esteem and enjoy higher levels of physical fitness.
Molly Barker, mother, social worker and Hawaiian Ironman athlete, saw running as a way to boost self-esteem in adolescent girls and decided she wanted to share her passion for running.
She did that by founding Girls on the Run International, an organization that offers a 12-week program to adolescent girls in the spring and fall, culminating in a five kilometer run. Girls are paired with women coaches who train, inspire and work with them on decision making skills, conflict resolution, and goal setting.
Girls on the Run is spreading rapidly to more and more communities. For information, log on to [SOURCE: Eileen Portz-Shovlin, “Our Hero: A Woman on a Mission,” Runners World, July 2002]
Magazines Mirror Distorted Image
Studies of magazines that target adolescent and teen girls have found that the content promotes the idea that happiness and success for young women are tied to physical appearance.
Girls get the very strong message from popular magazines that being ultra-thin (an unrealistic goal for most young women as they mature) is linked to both health and beauty and is a key target area for self-improvement.
When girls and young women internalize these unrealistic ideals, they often seek to attain them through unhealthy practices such as excessive dieting and use of diet pills and laxatives.
[SOURCE: Steven Thomsen et al, “The Relationship Between Reading Beauty and Fashion Magazines and the Use of Pathogenic Dieting Methods Among Adolescent Females,” Adolescence, Spring, 2002]
When Moms Diet, Daughters Take Note
GUTS (Growing Up Today Study), surveying 6,770 girls and 5,287 boys aged 9 to 14 about dieting and weight concerns, found that when children see that the mother is frequently trying to lose weight, boys were more likely to become highly concerned with weight and girls were more likely to become constant dieters.
Researchers suggested the results underlined the key role mothers play in the transmission of cultural values about the importance of maintaining a desirable body weight and shape.
[SOURCE: Alison E. Field et al, “Peer, Parent and Media Influences on the Development of Weight Concerns and Frequent Dieting Among Preadolescent and Adolescent Boys and Girls,” Pediatrics, January 2001]
