10 Things Girls Need Most: To grow up strong and free

By Steve Biddulph

This epub is currently best viewed on a tablet or a colour e-reader.

In answer to the crisis in girls’ mental health, the UK’s bestselling parenting author Steve Biddulph brings an interactive learning guide rich in content and interactive elements to help parents be prepared and self-aware in providing for their daughters.

In his ground-breaking new book, Steve Biddulph, million copy bestselling author of Raising Girls, psychologist and parent educator, offers an interactive experience for parents to explore the relationship with their girls from the cradle to the teenager. It is a guided journey of exercises, conversations, reflections and self-rating questionnaires that builds the inner capacities in a parent, targeted at each stage of their daughters growing up.

Every aspect – love and security in babyhood, mindfulness, setting boundaries, emotional well-being and emotional literacy, education and learning in primary and secondary school, friendship, puberty and adolescence, sexuality and sexualization, choosing partners and negotiating equality and respect; in fact everything a father or mother needs to think about to be prepared and self-aware in providing for their growing girl.

Complemented by real-life case studies and full-colour photographs throughout.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Apr 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9780008146801

Steve Biddulph

Steve Biddulph, AM, is one of the world’s best known parent educators. A psychologist for 30 years, he is now retired but continues to write and teach. His books, including Raising Boys, Raising Girls, Ten Things Girls Need Most and The New Manhood, are in four million homes and 31 languages around the world. Steve’s work has influenced the way we look at childhood, the development of boys and men, the exploitation of girls and the misuse of young women globally.  

Book preview

Chapter One

A Secure and Loving Start

It all begins in your arms. Her knowing that she is cherished and safe. But to give her that security, we have to be in the right place ourselves.

This chapter is about how to get the most important thing about childhood right. That is, to help your daughter have a deep-down feeling of security and worth. Everyone alive needs to have this, because it helps us to feel at ease in the world, able to be close to others, and able to relax. Babyhood is the best time to get this feeling, but it’s never too late to start.

For a little child, mum and dad are her whole world. Their emotions are her emotions. A baby doesn’t know (or care) if she lives in a tin shed or a palace, as long as those caring for her are kind and peaceful. If we can manage that, at least some of the time, then long after we are gone she will carry this memory inside her. When times are hard, it will be there for her to draw on. Of course, this can be hard for us to hear, because our adult world is a rushed and stressful place. We might have spent our lives racing to get ahead. But with a baby or toddler, the priorities are changed. The most valuable thing we can do is – very little. We need to calm things down.

Imagine for a moment what it would feel like to be a small baby, with someone’s arms holding you gently and a loving face looking down at you. See if you can feel in your body what that would be like, and enjoy it for a moment. Imagine knowing that you are at the very centre of this person’s love and concern. Knowing that they will capably and caringly look after you. That you have no need to do anything, prove anything or fear anything. That they delight in you, and enjoy you, and love you and will give you all that you need. That you are totally safe. Just imagine all these things, and notice how that feels in your body. Where do you feel it? What is it like?

THIS IS THE FEELING WE WANT OUR CHILDREN TO START OFF WITH

This kind of experience for your daughter can only come from having you, her parent/s – and hopefully a handful of other people as well – who love her and actively show that. This is best and most easily done when she is a baby, but it carries all the way through. And if you’re reading this because you have a ten-year-old or a seventeen-year-old then it’s still fine – you can still fix this. You’ll find out how, as this book goes on.

HOW TO MAKE SURE SHE’S SECURE

‘Am I loved and secure?’ That question is at the heart of every whimper she makes, every gaze she sends out in search of your smile, every excursion she makes crawling or toddling across the grass or the floor before scurrying back to your arms.

It’s a huge question. It depends on a mother (or father or other carer) being safe themselves. Supported. Not stressed by outside factors. It depends on those around the mother – a partner, grandparents, neighbours and friends – being caring and warm to her, so she can do the same for her baby. It depends on her having memories of warmth and security in her own life, if not in babyhood then at some later time.

Babies need to be loved for a very practical reason, because that means they will be attended to, fed, soothed, kept clean and safe, talked to and sung to and played with. That takes time – huge amounts of it. And it takes an adult sufficiently mature in themselves to put this little creature’s needs ahead of their own. Love isn’t just a gooey feeling, it’s a blazing fire, a massive power source to carry you through all these things. That’s why it has to be kindled well.

Here is a rating for your situation during your daughter’s early years – give each point a rating out of five stars (5 is VERY, 1 is HARDLY AT ALL). Go slowly with this, and really think it over. When your daughter was under two:

very nervous and afraid12345so calm I almost fell asleep

These questions add up to the whole picture, and so total your scores. My total ___________________

If you have less than 10, that’s quite a stressful time. Around 15 would be about average – not too bad.

Over 20 would be a miracle!

For many reading this, the scoring on the last questionnaire will come as a bit of a blow, because parenthood in the modern world has been made terribly stressful, and unsupported. We may be materially very secure, but emotionally far from that. Or the reverse. Or neither.

And there is another option. It’s possible the questionnaire is completely wrong in your case. Sometimes that can happen. You can have had a terrible time in the first year, little support, poor circumstances materially, isolated from others, and awful childhood memories of your own, and yet by sheer fierceness of your love and commitment, you just made sure her situation was nurturing, responsive and calm. Draw a circle around this sentence, just to celebrate …

‘I think I have overcome tough circumstances, or a terrible background of my own, and still made sure my daughter felt loved.’

Massive admiration and love to you.

And if not, if either way you look at it, it wasn’t an ideal start – don’t blame yourself. Don’t blame others. Allow that there may have been a stress burden, in your family and in your daughter’s early experience, which may explain some of the challenges she has. There are things you can do about these, but it begins with an honest appraisal. If the sense of being loved and secure is wobbly, then that has to be the primary focus. Even if she is ten or sixteen, repairing those babyhood feelings might still be the priority. She might really need lots of cuddles and quiet times with you each day just to settle down her autonomic nervous system which has always been set on ‘red alert’ since she was little. She can be capable, helpful, and deal with the big world, but still need to stop and fill her tank regularly until her mind learns that she really is secure.

Our daughter was adopted: she came to live with us when she was one. We don’t even know what her babyhood was like – we suspect it was pretty terrible. She had quite a lot of issues growing up. But we loved her relentlessly and patiently, and knew she needed lots of reassurance, routine, lots of cuddles, lots of building up. We had read in Steve’s books that at the age of thirteen children ‘recycle’ their babyhood, or have a second babyhood, that makes them more open to love and affection. So we babied her a lot at that age. By fourteen she was completely out of that stage, and she has been going great ever since. She’ll always be a rather intense girl, I think, but her life is going fine.

Mark, 48 and Amy, 42

When my baby was one, I had to leave China for a year to study in the US. Our baby stayed with her grandma. When I came home, it was to have a second new baby. So our relationship is quite wobbly. She was fine with her grandma, but can’t live with her now. I am not sure that my career path has been good for her, and hope I can make it up to her.

Guan-yin, 38

Loving small children is natural – we have hormones like oxytocin which help us to feel melty and soft when we are around them. But that doesn’t mean that the caring role comes naturally to everyone, because though the feeling may be there, the doing of it has to be learned. If we haven’t seen or experienced how loving is done, we might actually be quite tense and awkward in expressing our love for our baby. (Sometimes a mother or father feels almost nothing at all towards their new baby, and has to start gradually by getting to know them, and being helped with outside support to do this.) Almost everyone today has gaps in their ability to love, but don’t worry about this because, rather like a fire, you can create and kindle the beginnings and it starts to take off by itself.

There are two things that increase the capacity for love in your family. These love sources are:

1. Slowing down your world.

2. Getting into the river of love.

Let’s explain what these mean …

Slowing Down

THE SECRET OF WHERE LOVE GROWS

When I talk to audiences of parents, I watch and listen closely. Some ideas make people go quiet. Some make them laugh out loud. Some make the room light up with acknowledgement – of ‘Yes, that’s right!’. A good example of that last one is that HURRY IS THE ENEMY OF LOVE. When we are rushing through our lives, our interactions get more and more jarring and unsatisfying, even insensitive. The warmth and harmony between us disappears. Husbands and wives stop getting along. Parents and children annoy and irritate each other. Love is there, but it’s eaten away by not quite being attuned to each other, and so things go badly. Reaffirming closeness, understanding ‘where each other is at’, takes time. If you have children, especially small ones, then slowness is essential to love being able to grow.

For love to exist between a parent and child (or adult and adult) they have to first feel settled and present. You have to be tuned in – to yourself, and to them.

The sequence for making human connection is timeless. It can only go in this order. You settle down. You breathe and your shoulders relax and you sink into the chair. You begin to feel at home inside yourself. (Sometimes you realize – ‘I am really hungry’, or ‘I need a wee!’ It might be good to fix this!) Now, there is this baby, or toddler, or older child in front of you. From your feeling of OK-ness in yourself, you reach out to them. Perhaps they are fretting and anxious, or needy, or wanting to talk to you or get your help. Because you are OK on the inside, and have the time, their distress doesn’t distress you. You care about them, and are happy to