Chapter Seven – 

Taking Risks  

            “Of all the virtues, courage is the greatest, because without it, no other virtues are possible.”

                                                                                George Bernard Shaw  

            My brothers and I used to spend summers with some cousins along a dark-watered river that looped without much notice through the foothills of middle California and into pools that grew warm and mysterious in the sunlight. One of the pools lay at the foot of a rock that rose from the streambed forty feet or so above the water and seemed to glare at us. The pool was deep and the rock pitted, so that you could climb to the top if you wanted to, and (if you wanted to) jump.  

            We aimed for the still patches in the current. Locking our arms to our sides, we could sink straight through to the sand at the bottom and root ourselves there, stump-like, just above the bedrock. We’d stay down as long as we could, peer into the flowing river above us, watch air bubbles ride to the surface.  

            This was it, we told ourselves, grinning at each other through the spangled water. We’d stay right there as long as we could, hidden at the clear core of the river.  

The Daring Young Men  

    It would be a mistake to think that all our climbing and jumping was done simply for the thrill of it, though that was certainly part of the payoff. As young boys, we were testing ourselves. We climbed to reach heights, ours as well as the rock’s; we jumped to test the depths – within ourselves, as much as those of the river. We were answering a call to find out what we were made of, to see just how wide and far we could reach.

             The image glows in my mind against a bright summer sky, an endless satisfaction over the years. But missing from it, I now realize, are my girl cousins. Odd,  now that I think of it, because they were with us throughout that summer. We were a close bunch, half boys and half girls, and we were friends as well as cousins, hanging out together, shooting the rapids in old truck-tire inner tubes an uncle salvaged for us, getting into trouble down at the abandoned mine shaft. The girls went everywhere we went, and at the river they swam, horsed around, laid in the sun. But they didn’t go up on the rock. It wasn’t out of fear – they could be just as reckless as any of us boys. But in the fifties, even country girls didn’t venture beyond a certain, well-fixed feminine propriety. It was boys who tested the limits, not girls, and we had all internalized this core message: males take the risks, females stand aside and offer support. Now, though, their absence from that vivid image seems a fundamentally flawed omission, like a landscape without the trees.

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            By nature, boys are no more (nor less) daring than girls. But they are informed by their culture that proving themselves in acts of physical daring is an essential condition of their manliness. Whether they welcome it or not, boys take risks, push their limits, and in the process learn some important lessons about themselves. It’s what boys do.  

            It’s what girls would do, too, given the appropriate cultural mandate, and they too would learn essential lessons. But until just recently we’ve denied women the risk-taking arena. It has always been the males that we allowed to roam the borders, make the leaps, plumb the depths. Girls, from early on, are schooled to play it safe and to keep out of harm’s way.  

            If what Shaw said above is true, that everything of value depends upon courage, then in long denying girls the cultural inducements to explore their boundaries and test their limits, we may have denied them qualities essential to a strong sense of self. This denial may help explain the historical underachievement of gifted women and throws some light on why it is, for instance, that despite their pronounced verbal skills, women still publish fewer books than men and have produced fewer literary and artistic classics. Along with talent, art requires solitary time to think and work, and it demands great amounts of risk-taking, whether it’s the courage to expose one’s innermost feelings, or simply the daring to place one’s financial security at stake. Historically, we’ve denied them all three: time, solitude, and the opportunities to be daring.

             This is changing. Women pilot the space shuttle now, run corporations, win Nobel Prizes – but not nearly in proportion to their numbers. The bold, commanding, high-achieving woman is still the exception in corporate boardrooms and congressional delegations. Professional women still have a long way to go before they approach equity with men (see “Professional Women at the Millenium” on pages 136 and 137). The cultural injunctions that virtually prohibited women from being physically daring are even more unyielding. Girls and young women are allowed to be far more physically active now, but the cultural mandates that define daring and physical courage as essentially male enterprises are still locked away in the minds of most of us. If parents want to raise their daughters on a truly equal footing with their male counterparts, then they have to set aside some age-old injunctions and look upon their daughters as being as fully entitled to physical daring and courage as any male.

 Kinds of Courage  

            There is more than one kind of courage, and each is essential to the development of  fully self-reliant, creative young adults:

 ° Physical courage is generally synonymous with “courage” itself, the word having become identified with acts of daring and physical risk.

 ° Mental courage consists of intellectual and creative risk-taking, placing one’s integrity or reputation on the line, and creative problem-solving which may require leaps of faith in one’s capacities.  

° Emotional courage includes what might be called the courage of the heart, and includes qualities more associated with the feminine, like patience, endurance, fortitude. It also includes a form of courage especially central to girls’ healthy emotional development, what Dr. Annie Rogers of the Harvard Project calls the “ordinary courage” to speak what is in one’s heart.  

Teaching Girls To Be Daring  

            Risk-taking needn’t place a youngster in physical jeopardy. It’s mostly a mental quality, though it’s expressed through physical challenges. In order to establish it in our girls, we do not have to place them at risk. Risk-taking, physical or otherwise, means stretching oneself beyond one’s apparent capacities. For a toddler, it may mean taking a step while risking a fall, while a ten-year-old might extend her threshold climbing higher into a tree, learning how to swim in the deep end of the pool, performing a first piano recital. An adolescent’s courage may be tested in a team sport or in a physical activity like diving or skiing, or in taking a lead role in a school drama.

 Young Girls  

            Daring begins in the imagination as a possibility, with images of daring girls and women. And the best way to embed it in your daughter’s mind is through story. You can use the storytelling skills I described in Chapter Four to embed the images and voices of daring girls and women, traditional and modern:  

° Tell (or read) stories of daring women, stories showing that women have every bit as much claim to physical daring as do males. Your young daughter should become as filled with the images of heroic women past and present – from Egypt’s Queen Hatshepsut and the Greek philosopher Aspasia in antiquity to women’s rights crusader and abolitionist Sojourner Truth, adventurer and aviator Amelia Earhart, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, or astronaut Sally Ride –  as boys are of Daniel Boone and Charles Lindbergh. See the end of the Chapter Four for a list of books that describe courageous female heroines.

° Imagine your young daughter as moving within a bubble of security which defines her sense of limits. Ask yourself regularly: How can I help her expand it? How can I broaden her boundaries?

 ° Spend time outdoors with her. The physical world offers the most visible forms of physical risk-taking. Explore the outdoors with her. Encourage her to climb a tree (providing it’s safe), or clamber over a boulder, or jump down from a height. Applaud even her smallest successes. Help her overcome her natural fears of the physical world, while letting her experience the satisfaction of pushing her physical limits.

 Preadolescent Girls  

            As your daughter grows, try to keep nudging her beyond her thresholds of experience. Use the materials and activities that are easily available to you, and stay within her own tastes and natural abilities. But keep extending her capacity to explore new and challenging experiences. And keep mindful of the following:  

° Look at your own attitudes. Studies show that parents reward boys for exploring and risk-taking while they reward girls for being obedient and conforming. [1] You need to examine your attitudes towards girls and females in general. Do you think they are more fragile than boys? If so, ask yourself: Is a six-year-old girl any more likely to suffer injury on a bicycle than a six-year-old boy? (The girl is probably more coordinated.) The same can be said for teaching her to swim, to hike, or to jump. Girls are no more fragile than boys, and no less prone to injury. We simply think of them that way.  

° Use the same criteria for physical safety with your daughter that you would use for your son. Remember that you want to help her build daring within the context of her physical safety, and the criteria are no different for her than for a boy the same age.  

° Help her assess risks and gain confidence in her judgment to stretch herself, but not place herself in harm’s way. Much of the confidence in taking appropriate risks comes from experience in making good decisions. Only experience can teach this.  

Physical Challenges  

            I’ve listed below a few ways to encourage your growing daughter to embrace physical challenges. Have her experiment with some of these, but allow for her own preferences and natural abilities to guide her in trying out new experiences.  

° Machines – Get her a bike, or a set of roller blades, or even a scooter, as soon as she has the physical coordination to use them. These require a physical competency that is ideal for developing confidence and daring in a youngster. I recently watched a ten-year-old roller-blading off of a ramp she had built. When she landed, she skated my way with enough swagger and confidence for ten kids. Teach your daughter how to care for her equipment, too. She needs to know that when something breaks or malfunctions, she can learn how to fix it in many instances.

° Water skills – Swimming, diving, and most forms of water play provide ample opportunities for learning to be daring. I got my six-year-old son an inflatable raft that he used to navigate increasingly difficult stretches of water, including a couple of safe but heart-thumping white-water experiences that moved him beyond what he thought was possible at the time.

 ° The outdoors – Nature offers innumerable opportunities for stretching your daughter’s sense of her physical capacities, including her sense of daring, endurance, and competence as she learns that she can hike a mile (or ten), carry a pack, build a fire, climb a rock, cook a meal, pitch a tent, sleep outdoors.

 ° Gymnastics or ballet – Many of my students participate in one or the other of these activities, and I think I can spot them by their sense of physical presence. Both provide ample opportunities for a girl’s self-confidence and daring to flower.  

° Team sports – Soccer, softball, basketball (the sports available to girls in my area) all require her to take risks within an environment of physical skill-building, physical and emotional risk-taking, and connection (teamwork).

 ° Musical Instruments –  Learning to play a musical instrument is an obvious confidence builder, and performing in public is a terrific way to extend her sense of daring.  

° Animals – Working closely with live animals, especially large ones, requires a certain amount of daring.  Horseback riding includes a wide range of skills and offers many ways to help her extend her willingness to take risks.

 ° Stories and More Stories – And keep feeding her imagination and sense of possibility. Read books with her about courageous women, and not just those who were physically daring. See “Girls’ Books About Daring Women” in Sources and Resources for an annotated list of books for girls about women who demonstrated different types of courage.  

Adolescent Girls  

            When your daughter reaches adolescence, you can continue in much the same vein as above, since physical skills and athletics should continue to form an important part of adolescent girls’ lives. It’s never too late, if you feel that your daughter has imbibed the notion that girls don’t take risks. Now, you might extend her reach to include more adventurous activities like whitewater rafting, rock climbing, skiing, or scuba diving. Have your adolescent daughter meet women who are competent in high-performance, physical activities. Expand her ideas of feminine possibility at an age when the culture’s feminine stereotypes threaten to narrow them.

 Some Cautions

            Do not confuse daring with recklessness. The mountain climbers and whitewater rafters I’ve met are some of the most cautious people I know. They do not overextend themselves, and do not place themselves in jeopardy. They know that their physical safety depends upon their foresight, preparation and judgment. In fact, appropriate risk-taking teaches one above all the art of assessing risk, and weighing it against one’s abilities, equipment, the nature of the challenge.  

            And it builds judgment, which becomes increasingly important as girls mature. There is a delicate balance all parents have to strike between protecting their daughters from the real dangers that surround them, and in overprotecting them so that they lack self-reliance. As their daughters near adolescence and become more independent, parents have to rely increasingly on their daughters’ judgment – better to build that judgment right from the beginning.  

Practicing Mental Courage  

            For years I have told parents of my GATE students that I often see my role as a teacher of the gifted as teaching their children how to fail. These high-achieving students tend to play it safe in their learning experiences. This wins them good grades, and may even ensure their academic success. But such safe specialization has limits. Real-world achievement in the arts and sciences, the corporate world, in the professions and workplace is based on creativity and innovation which require taking intellectual and creative risks.

             Risk-taking is essential to creative achievement in any field. But often because of their academic success, high-achieving students may resist taking mental or creative risks for fear of getting something wrong. So it becomes my job (I reassure my doubting parents) to move these students beyond their insecurities, press them to take some risks in their schoolwork, and hopefully learn the value of trial and error.  

             “I can’t do that!” they’ll complain, staring at the complex cosmological model on the blackboard I’ve asked them to replicate.  

            “You don’t know what you can do,” I reply, “until you’ve tried.” Sometimes, after a few hours of trying, a student will walk up with a finished project in hand and a smile on her face, and say, “I didn’t know I could do it.”

 Learning Helplessness

             Girls are generally less willing to take intellectual risks than boys. It’s not that they are naturally more fearful, but because they have been taught that they need our protection and help. Girls are taught by adults to feel more fragile and less capable of daring than boys.  Parents assume that their infant daughters are more fragile than infant males (even though infant girls have a lower infant mortality rate). So to prevent her from experiencing frustration or even a little failure, parents rush in and tie the shoelace or assemble the puzzle even before she asks for help. Studies show that new parents are much more likely to rescue their newborn daughters from a challenge than their sons. [2] Fathers are especially prone to this.  

            Unfortunately, all this premature coddling sends girls a message that can be disabling: I am helping you because you can’t do this yourself. As a result, girls learn a kind of behavioral passivity called “learned helplessness,” that arises out of our unconscious belief that females are the weaker sex.

 Rescuing  

            I used to train parent volunteers to work in classrooms, and the most difficult concept I had to teach them was how not to help a child. Their instincts told them to do whatever they could to  help a student out of trouble, including finishing the child’s work themselves. It is an art to know when to intervene with a child, and when to withhold your active help.  It takes some skill to learn where a child’s threshold really is, and to gently help her across it, insisting that she do the work herself. Parents face a similar challenge, having to overcome their instinct to protect a daughter from frustration or failure in order to let her find her own strengths.  

            It is always difficult to stand back while your child experiences frustration, intervening only when you’ve decided that she is truly out of her depth.  It’s especially hard when you’re emotionally attached. But it is absolutely essential if you are to raise an independent, self-reliant daughter willing to press herself to her limits.

 Problem-solving  

            Whether intellectual or artistic, problem-solving consists of much trial and error, exploring unknowns and taking leaps. Denying young girls the opportunity to take appropriate risks, physical or otherwise, places them at a disadvantage. Here are some simple strategies you can use to help your daughter learn the skills of problem-solving:

 ° Identify your own problem-solving strategies to pass along to her. You probably have more strategies than you think.

 ° Wait until she asks you for help, or seems to be getting too frustrated before you intervene.  

° Offer her a strategy rather than a solution when she asks for your help: Why not look for some corner pieces first? What about putting all the reddish pieces over here? They might go together.” These will teach her useful mental strategies that will help her the next time she becomes challenged.  

° There are times when you will have to step in with solutions, but keep them minimal. Try to give her only part of a solution so that she may build on it to discover the rest.  

° When your daughter has completed a problem, walk her through her thought process: “Notice how you first got the pieces with straight sides, then you found all the yellowish pieces, then . . .”  In the flush of her success, she may be happy to hear you dissect her success, while learning some useful strategies.

 ° Lavish compliments, even for minor achievements. Young people are quick to let you know when they don’t want a compliment – until then, your words will give her a strong support that she can learn to solve problems for herself.  

° “Here, let me do that for you.” Make sure before you say this that you have given her every chance to solve the problem herself. Then instead, say, “Here, let me help you do that yourself.”  

° Make sure your daughter knows that you are there to support her. The message you want her to receive from you is, “I will give you whatever assistance you need to do this, but you get to do it. And I know that you can.”   

° Wait until she asks for your help. If she asks how to do something, model it for her, but let her do it herself. If she asks for the answer to a problem, show her where she can find the answer.

° When she attempts a problem that pushes her near her limits, don’t rush in and finish it for her. Stand aside and let your body language convey the message that you know she can manage things on her own.

 ° Help her learn from her failures. “Next time, if you cut along the lines, it should work.” Show her how “failing” can give her useful information.

Testing, Testing . . .  

            You need to find ways to applaud her efforts to test the boundaries of convention. It may result in her getting into trouble or trying your patience. Find a way to balance the need to establish clear limits for her behavior, while making sure you applaud her efforts to probe her boundaries. When you see defiant behavior in your daughter, ask yourself: is there risk-taking here? Is she testing herself as she tests your resolve? And find ways to honor that, even though you may well need to reprimand her.

 Emotional Courage  

            There is a form of courage that is especially crucial to girls’ healthy psychological development, especially as they enter adolescence. Dr. Annie Rogers of the Harvard Project writes about what she calls “ordinary courage,” the courage of girls to hold onto their real voices in their relationships, even though this may risk relationship itself. [3] Dr. Rogers notes that the earliest meanings of the word “courage” were in fact associated with “heart.” (Chaucer, for instance, uses “in hir courages” to mean “in their hearts.”) More specifically, Rogers found that the middle English usage of “courage” included the capacity “to speak one's mind by telling all one's heart." But, by the fifteenth century  “courage” had become dissociated from its more feminine qualities and came to mean facing danger without fear, a definition much closer to masculine ideas of physical heroism. Rogers suggests that the historical losses of the word reflect a larger cultural devaluation of feminine forms of courage, like patience or endurance. She argues that there is a correspondence between the historical alteration of the word courage and the losses that girls experience as they come of age in contemporary times.       

             Watching preadolescent girls struggle to hold onto their voice in the face of cultural silencing, Rogers feels that restoring the word to its broader meanings helps girls’ experience become more coherent. It takes courage to speak the truth, especially for young adolescent girls, whose fear of losing relationship is often at the heart of their willingness to trade away their authentic voices. In order to express herself honestly and openly in relationship, a girl must develop this “ordinary” courage to speak honestly, even at the risk of breaking connection with loved ones or friends.

In the “practice of ordinary courage,” a girl must learn to:

 ° Risk relationship when it asks that she be less than her true self.

 ° Face up to the fear of displeasing others, a difficult challenge for many girls.  

° Be willing to have disagreements with friends.

° Tolerate and accept criticism without letting it diminish her sense of self.  

° Learn to say no, and to expect her no to be honored.

 ° Accept the idea that not everyone she meets will like her.

             Instructing an adolescent daughter in what Dr. Rogers calls the “practice of ordinary courage” is a formidable task. But if you have been engaging her all along in the parent-daughter relationships I described in Chapter Four, encouraging her honesty and modeling your own, respecting her points of view even when you disagreed with them, than you will have helped her immensely towards gaining this “ordinary,” but immensely rewarding, courage on her own.  

Crossing Anxiety Thresholds  

            Your daughter also needs to learn that risk-taking will be accompanied by feelings of insecurity and anxiety. Overcoming these anxieties is a large part of becoming bold and daring. One of your jobs as a parent (and mine as a teacher) is to locate her anxiety thresholds and find creative ways to help her over them, increasing her sense of mastery as she grows.  

            Whenever you observe your daughter facing a challenge, ask yourself: “What is her threshold here. Can I raise it a little?” Usually it means taking her hand and walking her across the threshold, while artfully stepping back and letting go.  Make this process a staple of how you support her so that she trusts that you will provide a safety net for her should she overreach. The aim is to nudge her beyond her emotional comfort zone, to where she can experience herself at the full extension of her powers.  

There is no reason why learning to be brave, adventurous, and self-reliant should compete with a girl’s being connected, nurturing, expressive, and caring. More than anything else, your daughter needs to know from you that she has a rightful place along the conventional boundaries, at the edge of her comfort zone, testing waters, plumbing depths – that she has as much claim as any boy to the high ledge above the pool.

The Daring Young Women  

             The pool was deeper this time, the rock higher and 100 miles south of the one I jumped off of so many years ago with my cousins. My son and I were on our way back from a camping trip, fighting the summer heat when we found a swimming hole with a waterfall and a series of diving ledges rising up as high as sixty feet. The place was jammed with local kids who must have grown up around there, for nine-and-ten year olds were leaping from the thirty and forty foot ledges. Jumping from the very top were the teenagers, some diving fifty feet and more into the water.  

`           My son took his time getting up to the thirt- foot ledge (I figured I didn’t need to do that sort of thing anymore) and finally worked his way off, feeling pretty good as he clambered up out of the pool. We started to leave, then stopped underneath one of the valley oaks when he pointed to the very top of the diving rock. “Look.”

             Two teenaged girls had stepped out onto the topmost ledge and were smiling down at the water. Then they stepped off and dropped into the pool, holding hands all the way down!  

            “Awesome,” my son said, his head shaking.  

            “Amazing,” I muttered to myself, watching the two puckish faces bob up from where they had splashed down. I found myself both buoyed and delighted at the image of these gutsy kids swinging down together through the summer air – girls testing themselves their way, with courage and connection.

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