GIRLS
UNINTERRUPTED
About the Author
Tanith Carey writes books which aim to lucidly set out the more pressing challenges for today’s parents – and set out achievable strategies for how to tackle them. Her previous book, Taming the Tiger Parent: How to Put your Child’s Well-being First in a Competitive World has been called ‘a critique to re-orientate parenting’ by Steve Biddulph. As an award-winning journalist, Tanith writes for a range of publications including the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times, the Daily Mail and the Huffington Post. This is her seventh book.
GIRLS
UNINTERRUPTED
STEPS FOR BUILDING STRONGER GIRLS IN A CHALLENGING WORLD
Published in the UK in 2015 by
Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,
39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP
email: info@iconbooks.com
www.iconbooks.com
Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia
by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,
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London WC1B 3DA or their agents
Distributed in the UK, Europe and Asia
by TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester Road,
Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW
Distributed in Australia and New Zealand
by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd,
PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street,
Crows Nest, NSW 2065
Distributed in South Africa by
Jonathan Ball, Office B4, The District,
41 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock 7925
Distributed to the trade in the USA
by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution,
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Minneapolis, MN 55413-1007
Distributed in India by Penguin Books India,
7th Floor, Infinity Tower – C, DLF Cyber City,
Gurgaon 122002, Haryana
ISBN: 978-184831-820-5
An earlier edition of this book was published under the title
Where Has My Little Girl Gone? by Lion Hudson in 2011.
Text copyright © 2015 Tanith Carey
The author has asserted her moral rights.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Typeset in Joanna by Marie Doherty
Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
For my daughters, and yours.
CONTENTS
Introduction
PART ONE
Building a Strong Foundation
Us as parents
The tween years
The role of mothers
The role of fathers
The role of schools
PART TWO
How Building Self-Worth and Communication is Your Daughter’s Best Defence
Self-worth
Connection and creating a sanctuary
Values and boundaries
Emotional intelligence
How to help your daughter find out who she is
How to build communication
What to do if things go wrong
PART THREE
The Influences Around Us
Pornography: Growing up in a pornified society
Pop videos: The pornification of pop
Pretty babies: Make-up and drawing the line between make-up and make believe
Body image: ‘When I grow up I want to be thin’
Branded: Resisting fashion and beauty advertising
Self-harm: How to stop girls becoming their own worst enemies
Connected: Growing up with the internet
Engaged: How to help your daughter use mobile phones safely
Friendships: Best friends or worst enemies
Wired children: Childhood and social networks
Television: Switching off bullying
Fashion: How clothes don’t make the girl
Material girls: How to fight back against the pressure to buy
Toys: Want to play sexy ladies?
Harassment, misogyny and abuse: Keeping girls physically safe
Feminism: Teaching your daughter the F-word
Sources and Research Notes
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Index
INTRODUCTION
When I chat to my two daughters, thirteen-year-old Lily and ten-year-old Clio, we cover all the usual topics: how their school day went, what’s for dinner, why can’t we get Honey, our dog, to behave.
But throughout the course of our conversations, lots of other, slightly trickier subjects also crop up, like: why is Miley Cyrus naked in her latest video, but for a pair of Dr Martens? ‘I mean, I get why she’s sitting on a wrecking ball,’ Clio has said, ‘because that’s what she’s singing about. But why she doesn’t she have any clothes on?’ From time to time, Lily has also wondered why every year at her primary school fair there is a ‘beauty’ tent for girls to get their nails manicured, when boys never have to bother about how they look.
So was I pleased when, the other day, Clio asked me why Rapunzel just didn’t cut off her own hair and make it into a rope to get down from the tower, instead of waiting for a prince? Am I delighted that Lily’s favourite game as we wait in tube stations is ‘spot the model whose been airbrushed’? Frankly, yes.
Does it make me a humourless, ball-breaking man-hater? Am I brainwashing my poor little girls with politically correct feminist theory? Some people might think that. But I believe I am simply encouraging my girls to open their eyes to a world which might otherwise give them deeply unhelpful messages about who they are, and how they should feel about themselves.
My daughters are not weak and defenceless – and neither are yours. But in a world where many pubescent girls say they are more worried about getting fat than their parents dying or the outbreak of nuclear war, my view is that our daughters need help to work out why so many of their gender think this way – so they don’t end up thinking like that too. They need to know that, in the words of the late Anita Roddick, there are over 3 billion women who don’t look supermodels and eight who do. Because if our daughters are allowed to believe what they see all around them, they will be fooled into believing they have failed before they’ve even begun.
It is the best of times and the worst of times for our daughters. On one hand they have never been healthier, better educated or enjoyed more opportunities in the workplace. When I was born in 1967, women were already making huge strides towards equality. The arrival of the pill meant women finally had a choice about when or whether they wanted to have babies. The stereotypes of females as ditzy airheads, sex objects or housewives whose main job was to serve husbands was starting, finally, to crumble. In their place stood ‘woman’ as she had never been allowed to be: every bit as strong, capable and intelligent as a male. So by rights, my daughter Lily, born 34 years after me in 2001, should be growing up in a world where women are enjoying the benefits of that radical shift.
When I held my baby girl in my arms for first time, I really believed she had been born into a world of endless possibilities, where being a female would never hold her back.
But, already, there were hints that that promise had failed to turn into reality. With the benefit of hindsight, I now see that by the time I became a mother, there were already the first signs that the progress we had taken for granted was starting to go off the rails.
By the early 2000s, the fact that a woman could choose to wear anything she liked was becoming twisted into the idea that in order to appear truly confident it was best to wear virtually nothing at all. Women stripped thinking it made them powerful, only to find that, far from getting respect, their willingness to liberate themselves from their clothing was turned back against them in lads’ mags and music videos. Sex tapes which once ruined careers now created them, perpetuating the idea that sex was a quick way to buy legitimate celebrity and make money. Brazilian waxes to strip adult women as naked as little girls, and which also mimicked the hairlessness of females in porn, had started to be seen as ‘empowering’. Yet, as questionable as I personally felt these decisions were, at least these were adult women, making adult choices.
But when little girls started to get sucked in by this undercurrent, and began judging themselves by adults’ sexual standards fashioned by porn, a whole new set of previously unseen and extremely toxic effects started to emerge.
To be honest, before I wrote the first version of this book on the creeping effects of this culture on our daughters, Lily was seven and I was in shock. Like many parents, I initially believed that if I pressed enough towels to the door I could keep those toxic fumes of early sexualisation out of my home. But then one day Lily came back from primary school and told me some of her playmates had been calling each other fat in the playground and that, as a result, she and her friends had been swapping diet tips. Then a few weeks later Clio, then four, came home from a school dance club, singing that she had ‘gloss on my lips and a man on my hips’. It seemed her dance teacher had not thought to question if it was a good idea to devise a ‘bootylicious’ routine set to the Beyoncé song ‘Single Ladies’ for a group of nursery age children. It was then I knew I couldn’t stop the fumes, because they were already in the air my girls were breathing.
So I realised that if they were to stand a chance of growing up strong, I couldn’t hide them from these things. Instead, I’d have to raise them in such a way that they could manage and filter these messages themselves.
When I talked about how to do this in the last edition of this book, there were some voices asking what all the fuss was about. One sociologist on ‘Woman’s Hour’ demanded to know why I was denying my girls the right to their sexuality. In fact I was helping them push back against a culture which was defining their sexuality before they had a chance to define it for themselves.
‘Moral panic’ is a phrase I often hear wheeled out to silence concerns about how girls are affected by these messages. But is it really prudish or panicky to ask that our children enjoy uninterrupted childhoods where they are not beset by self-consciousness about how they look as soon as they are old enough to recognise themselves in the mirror?
Modern life – and the way we adults express ourselves in it – may be evolving at a breakneck speed, but our daughters still need to go through the same developmental milestones in the same order as they always have to become emotionally healthy adults. Just because a child has the opportunity to dress up like a grown-up on the outside, doesn’t mean she is ready to be treated the same way on the inside.
My girls, and yours, probably see more images of physical beauty in one month than we saw in our entire childhoods. They are growing up in a world where their worth is measured by how closely they match those ideals. No matter what’s going on in their brains, beauty has become an obligation. Yet even if they achieve those ideals, it’s never enough. Girls today are caught in a double bind. If they fail in this beauty contest they are made to feel like they don’t count. If they succeed, ‘pretty’ becomes all that they are.
As a parenting writer with a wide-ranging remit to investigate the ongoing effects of these developments on our children, I have been in a privileged position to see how the situation is evolving. From this vantage point, I have not only seen how sustained this assault is, I have also seen how fast-moving it has become. When I originally wrote on the subject, sexting was almost unheard of. Now the latest research says teens accept it as a way of life. Self-harm, scarcely known in schools a few years ago, has soared – there has been a 41 per cent increase in calls from children to their helpline about self-harm over the last year alone, according to Childline.
But self-harm has not just ripped through our classrooms in the form of cutting. Virus-like, the internet has enabled it to morph into the new phenomenon of cyber self-harm, where children post hurtful comments about themselves in order to attract strangers to troll them and help put their self-loathing into words. When I last assessed the situation, size eight was the Holy Grail of thinness. Now it’s size zero. ‘Thinspiration’ and thigh gaps have also become aspirational, making our girls believe they should disappear, quite literally, into thin air before they’ve even grown into their bodies in the first place.
Then of course there has been the evolution of pornography. Naturally, it’s porn’s job to be graphic. That’s the whole point. What was surprising a few years ago was how easily accessible it was to anyone, of any age, who could type the word ‘sex’ into Google. What’s surprising now is how much more violent and degrading porn is becoming in order to maintain the novelty factor.
The pace of these changes, powered by a constantly evolving internet, is so fast, we can’t simply firefight one crisis after another. Instead, as parents, we need to be a firm centre in the middle of this storm. That’s why this book takes a three-pronged approach.
So that we start off from the best possible position to protect our girls, the first section deals with how to organise our own attitudes and ideas, so that the conscious, and unconscious, messages we send to our girls are healthy, clear and consistent.
The second part looks at how, by building self-worth in our children, we can go some way towards inoculating them. If we can create a strong core of self-belief in our girls’ formative years, they will be better able to stand firm against the pressure to reduce them to nothing more than their physical beauty. By really opening up channels of communication in the tween years, we have a chance of staying closer to them when the going really gets tough. The good news is that the latest research shows the best defence against bad influences is you, the parent. One upside of the sexualised culture is that fewer topics are off limits when we talk to our children – and there really are age-appropriate ways to tackle every subject, from sexting to STDs.
The third section looks at the world through the eyes of our children. It looks at how they see it – and how we need to teach them to discover for themselves how to discern what’s good and bad. From sexting to self-harm, from phone addiction to friendship problems, this part will look at the most common challenges parents face when trying to keep their girls strong. It will help you comprehend those challenges so you are in the best position to understand them. Then it gives you the practical tools to help you and your daughter push back. It will offer dozens of achievable ways you can help to tone down, if not turn off, the effects of ‘raunch culture’.
For the sake of our girls, we can’t forget about the well-being of boys. They are their future friends, boyfriends and husbands, after all. Just because girls were the first in the firing line doesn’t mean that our sons aren’t suffering too. Boys are also pressured to behave in the macho ways they see displayed in pop, porn and video games. They are fast creeping up on girls in terms of how much they worry about their appearance. They are expressing their need to conform to stereotypes with ‘bigorexia’ – the need to bulk up to look buff. They are also often miserable because they are struggling to connect with girls the way they’d like to. In the same way that we are talking about femininity, boys also need a chance to talk about masculinity. Ultimately our goal should be for both sexes to have dignity during their childhoods.
But until that happens, we need to help our children become strong and insightful enough to wage that campaign. As a mother of girls, my focus in this book is on my daughters, but there are still plenty more books to be written by fathers of sons, to make boys just as self-aware.
None of this can happen overnight. The sooner we begin, the better. The tween years – the ages between seven and twelve – offer a critical window when parents can help girls develop an unassailable sense of self. It’s during this period that our power to positively influence our children is also at its peak – before the inevitable separation of adolescence means our daughters’ peers begin to drown us out. If we really work at staying connected to our girls in those years, we have a better chance of being able to guide them when life becomes more challenging.
Our society won’t stop sending these destructive messages. But by becoming aware, we can filter the air around our children so they can breathe deeply and grow stronger.
Don’t see helping girls reject these negative messages as one more job to add to your already packed to-do list. By becoming a conscious parent, by talking more and providing daily subtitles to help your child to understand life, you will communicate better and the conversations you have will be livelier and more invigorating. Your bond will be stronger. Your girl’s knowledge of herself will be deeper and her respect for you will be more profound.
The younger you start, the stronger the roots she will have to grow sturdy enough to resist the temptation to degrade or sacrifice any part of herself when the pressure piles on in her teenage years. But all is not lost if we miss that window. Just by becoming a more aware parent today, you can help make your daughter more media-aware and emotionally literate. In the two minutes you take to show her how a magazine photograph of an ultra-skinny perfect model has been airbrushed, you have taught her not to hold herself up to an image of perfection that doesn’t exist. By talking about and explaining what’s happening around her today, you can shelter her against the drip, drip, drip erosion of her self-worth. That’s why this book offers many suggestions for parents of girls of all ages. With the best will in the world, it would be impossible to put them all into practice. As you know your daughter best, you need to pick the most appropriate ones for you and your family.
Parts of this book will be upsetting. Facing up to what’s out there – and making our girls more resilient and robust – isn’t going to be easy. You may even have to come back to the sections meant for older girls if they are too much for now. As you read, you may also have to question if the creeping sexualisation of society has affected your values too. You may have to ask yourself if you have unknowingly added to the pressure by joining in the push to make our daughters the brightest and the best. But if all this helps your girl to be a little more true to herself – rather than feel she has to fit into today’s stifling stereotypes of ‘sexiness’, beauty and perfection – then you will have won back her freedom to live without these restraints and develop at her own pace.
If we don’t face up to it, the price is high. When girls wander through life thinking there is something wrong with them it makes them feel anxious, lost and powerless. Unsure of how to make themselves feel whole, too many try to fill this emptiness with fixes like diets, meaningless sex, self-harm, oblivion drinking and drugs. The problem is that because these influences are inundating them at such critical times in their lives, these wounds don’t always heal, and without being shown how to fill this void, they will carry these insecurities into their adult lives.
Public Health England says that one in ten children now has a mental health issue, and a third of teenagers feel ‘low, sad or down’ at least once a week. According to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Body Image: ‘One in four seven-year-old girls have tried to lose weight at least once.’ More than a quarter of children say they ‘often feel depressed’ – and the thing that makes girls most unhappy is how they look. It’s heartbreaking that as early as nine and ten, our daughters are already judging themselves as losers in the beauty contest of life.
One of the most insidious and least recognised effects is that our girls are also losing their voices. By the time they are ten, 13 per cent of girls aged ten to seventeen would avoid giving an opinion. The reason? They don’t want to draw attention to themselves because of the way they look.
As a mother of two girls myself, I wrote this book because I do not want my children, with all their accomplishments and wonders, to be judged solely on appearance – and to feel silenced when they want to talk back and defend themselves. I do not want them to be exposed at every turn to a hyper-sexualised culture where sex is only a commodity and women are rated mainly on how ‘hot’ they are, or most of their headspace gets used up trying to work out what’s wrong with them, when they are more than good enough as it is. My daughters don’t deserve to feel like this – and neither do yours.
PART ONE
Building a Strong Foundation