How to Help Girls Moved Beyond Impossible Standards of Success to Live Healthy, Happy, and Fulfilling Lives.
By Mia Franz, English Teacher, Tampa Preparatory School
Rachel Simmons argues that girls continue to face challenges that we, as parents and as educators, haven’t yet confidently or helpfully addressed. This comes two decades after Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia, and about fifteen years beyond Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabees, both still considered groundbreaking social research into the fraught lives of adolescent girls. In Enough As She Is, Simmons explores the effects of social media on body image and friendships and the effects of the high-pressure world of grade competition and college applications on young women’s confidence and self-esteem., Simmons’ conclusion is that “[Girls] and their parents need special knowledge, support, and awareness to usher them through the challenges of twenty-first-century adolescence and into adulthood”. Through interviews with ninety-six girls between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, from a variety of ethnic backgrounds but similar class and school experiences, Simmons crafts this new guide for how to help girls navigate the world and develop a strong sense of themselves in the face of unrelenting busyness, expectation, and pressure.
The culprits that chip away at young women’s self-worth are not unexpected. Social media, the pressure surrounding college applications, a culture of negative self-talk, and the “permission” that we give girls to be whoever they want to be–which many interpret as needing to be EVERYTHING, perfectly, all the time–have made it almost impossible for girls to truly thrive. On top of this, Simmons avers, girls are still supposed to be “nice” and humble, which prevents them from claiming and celebrating their strength and their accomplishments. There is, inevitably and always relevantly, a chapter about body image and the pressure girls face to be thin and beautiful, particularly as this relates to the images they project and measure themselves against on Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook.
Simmons also directly examines some of the more general trends in education in terms of their effects on young women. She explores ways to better encourage girls to develop a growth mindset, following Carol Dweck, and reminds adults of the power of productive praise (and, for girls, the destructive power of anything that could be viewed as critical). She rejects the idea that high school students should be required to find and pursue a passion single-mindedly, and she questions whether Angela Duckworth’s popular trait of “grit” is really one that benefits all students, finding that some girls become fixated on unattainable goals and even more stressed when they can’t succeed. Instead, she offers specific advice about how to craft effective short-term goals. She also dedicates an entire chapter to the importance of failure and of changing one’s mind–to finding a new path when the one you’ve mindlessly followed doesn’t make you happy, even if that means taking a break from college or choosing not to pursue traditional opportunities for success.
As I read Simmons’ book, I didn’t feel like I was learning many ideas that were new, but they are packaged and organized in a very usable way, with each chapter providing an overview of the issue at hand, direct anecdotes from her interview subjects and, occasionally, from her own life. She concludes with some direct ways to open up conversations with girls and to help them reshape their view of a particular issue or problem. The book is directly addressed to parents, but clearly any educator who works with young women can use these strategies and benefit from these ideas. Additionally, Simmons calls out us, as adults, for modeling negative behavior around other women or refusing to practice self-compassion for ourselves. Obviously, if we don’t have the appropriate ways to deal with stress and with negativity in our own lives, how can we expect young girls to learn these lessons? By modeling better choices around our students and children, we help them see healthy living in action.
Simmons uses occasional statistics and studies to show how these problems affect girls more negatively or in a different way than they affect boys. As a parent of boys, as well as a teacher who works at a co-ed school, though, I found that much of her advice could, and should, still be applicable for young men. Boys might approach social media differently from the way girls do, but all young people are susceptible to the jealousy invoked by others’ posts and the “FOMO.” Boys are, like girls, caught in the trap of extreme pressure when it comes to college applications and achievement. Simmons could have acknowledged some of these similarities in addition to emphasizing gender differences; I certainly plan to use some of her strategies in conversations with my sons or my male students, in addition to conversations with the young women in my life.
Mia Franz is the gcLibrary Editor for gcLi’s Leadership Blog, and teaches Upper School English at Tampa Preparatory School in Florida. She is an experienced educator and accomplished writer who will be contributing to each edition of our new quarterly newsletter. Mia is the wife of gcLi Faculty member Robert Franz, and has a Master’s in Fine Arts from Indiana University.