Click for full show notes, exercises, and parenting scripts from this episodeIt can be hard to recognize all the negative messages our daughters receive from media, celebrities, athletes, and characters that say how girls should dress or behave. It’s even harder to raise our voice and combat massive social forces, especially when they’ve been around for so long that it feels easier to go with the flow. However, letting sexism slide can be very harmful, so what can parents do to shift our culture for the better?Thankfully, parents can be a major part of the solution. The key is changing culture from the inside by calling out disparities in clothing, sports, politics, and the workplace and asking for something better. The small differences that we can make in our individual social circles add up quickly, and together social change is more than possible.In this week’s episode, we spoke with Mike Adamick, author of Raising Empowered Daughters, who uses observations, history, and scientific research to break down cultural bias. Mike provides us with awesome insights for how to identify and call out sexism among friends in a way that starts a productive conversation without letting conflict drive others away. He also shares amazing methods for bringing up what’s not normal or not okay in the media without teens tuning out a lecturing dad.Mike’s passion is to inspire other parents to be vocal about sexism when it comes up.  Far too often, people pass around harmful ideas and language towards girls because they’ve heard it before and might not think about it too much. He brings up a great example that dads have no trouble standing up for someone talking trash about their favorite sports team, or if someone’s being racist, but a lot of dads choose to avoid confrontation when it comes to sexism. It seems to be that staying silent in the face of gender issues is a driving cause of ongoing cultural problems.Rocking the boat might sound crazy, but the disparity between men and women is crazy. In this episode, we dive into a ton of solutions to the common issues related to gaps between boys and girls.
Mike teaches us what to do and say when we encounter girls’ clothes that are more about appearance than utility.
We discuss the problematic logic of using biological differences between boys and girls to discriminate, instead of to be productive.
We’ll demonstrate how to avoid pigeon-holing moms and dads into certain roles, and consider how strangely out of the ordinary it seems when we see a dad spending time with kids instead of being at work.
Mike explains how to encourage boys to do better by not excusing bad behavior and falling into the dreaded “boys will be boys” mentality.
He also shares stories about his own daughter, and ways he supports her to let out the negative emotions like anger and frustration that our culture suggests girls should try to repress to appear ‘well-mannered’. 
This episode is jam-packed with even more eye-opening conversations that will help you shift the culture around gender bias, raise empowered children, and make a positive difference in the world.Exclusive offers from our sponsors... Wild Foods is a nutrition company on a mission to fix the broken food system. They put quality, sustainability, and health first in all of their products. Click here for 12% off your order. Teencounseling.com connects your teen with a licensed professional counselor right where they spend the most time: on their smartphone. Click here for 10% off your first month.