Chapter Three  

Hardy Girls

             The losses that many girls experience as they enter adolescence are neither necessary nor inevitable. They come largely from the dislocation of self that most girls experience as they try to find their way through the “force fields” of biases and stereotypes that still pervade our culture. There’s probably no way to completely buffer young girls from these forces. But parents can support and empower their daughters in ways that help them get through their adolescence with their self-confidence intact. I’ve kept in touch with a number of my former girl students as they went through high-school and on to college,  and their resilience and confidence have caused me to take a closer look at the self-esteem data of the past decade to see how it accounts for their success. What I found has been especially encouraging as it confirms these girls’ more hopeful experience and forms a basis of hope for others.  

            Though all girls have to pass through the adolescent gauntlet of pressures, stereotypes, and biases that I outlined in Chapter Two, self-esteem studies show a fair number of them making it through with their confidence intact. When you look more closely at the self-esteem data of the past decade –  what the media missed and what you probably haven’t read or heard about –  you find that some girls get through adolescence with high levels of self-esteem. In fact, a fair proportion of them manage it: twenty-nine percent of the high-school girls in the AAUW study, for instance, reported high levels of self-esteem, and twenty percent of the young women in the UC Berkeley study that I cited in Chapter Two.  

            As you break down self-esteem data, you can find a core set of qualities that these more resilient girls seem to share. In fact, they form a pattern of qualities and experiences that parents can use as guidelines for their own daughters. Looking more closely at the literature on self-esteem, we can find three traits that appear to be common to these more resilient survivors: these are connection, competence, and complimentarity or gender balance.  

1. Connection – Connectedness to a caring, competent adult is a strong predictor of high self-esteem.

            A close correlation has been found between a girl's level of self-confidence and the amount of support she receives from the adults in her life. Girls who indicate that their parents care about their opinion and that teachers listened to what they say, report that they feel much more comfortable in expressing themselves.  

            Psychologist Dr. Susan Harter of the University of Denver reviewed the literature on adolescent self-esteem and found two primary components that seem consistently predictive. The first is what she calls the “looking-glass” concept, based on how a person feels she is being perceived by other people. Here a young person incorporates the attitudes of significant other people towards herself, and unconsciously imitates them: If Ms. X likes me, then I must be OK. The AAUW survey found that it was girls’ parents and teachers, and not their peers, who had the greatest impact on their self-esteem. [1] The poll found that teachers act as especially important role models for young women. (Nearly three out of four elementary-school girls and over half of the high-school girls indicated they wanted to become teachers.)  

            Dr. Michael Resnick is Director of Research at the University of Minnesota’s Adolescent Health Program and his studies have found that the single most important predictor of an adolescent positively weathering attacks on self-esteem is “connectedness to at least one competent adult.” [2] Resnick identified the second most important predictor of resiliency among teens as "academic connectedness" –  when teens identify school as an arena where they felt competent, naming one or two special teachers. A third component of connection Resnick calls "spiritual connectedness." This does not necessarily imply church-going, but “spirituality in terms of some kind of belief in a higher being or higher order.” So, despite predictable generational conflicts, parents continue to play a central role in helping their daughters hold on to their self-esteem. Carol Gilligan’s five-year Laurel School study reinforced this conclusion: “This came to be the message of the study,”  Gilligan’s coinvestigator Lyn Mikel Brown reported,  

“ . . . that one woman can make a huge difference in a young girl’s life. Girls around eleven start to look to women almost as touchstones to reality, so it’s very meaningful when women really align with girls and start to listen carefully and say, 'Yes, this does seem unfair. I understand what you're seeing. I don't know what to do about it, but let's think about it together.' " [3]  

            The next chapter will explore the notion of connection in detail.  

2. Competence – A sense of personal competence correlates highly with high levels of self-esteem.

             In her survey of the literature on self-esteem, Harter identified a cluster of attributes that are grounded in competence: how well a girl performs in areas of life that are important to her. For girls this is especially true of their school performance, which the AAUW study found was the most important contributor to their self-esteem.  

            A sense of competence in math and science is especially important, as it correlates strongly with high self-esteem. In fact, the AAUW survey found its highest correlations here. “Students who like math and science possess significantly greater self-esteem; students with higher self-esteem like math and science more.” [4]  

             Competency in athletics also correlates with high self-esteem. Girls who play sports have higher self-esteem, and are more likely to stay in school, assume leadership roles, do well academically and perform better in science. (This appears to be especially true for Latina girls.) [5]   80 percent of the women among the top echelons of Fortune 1000 companies have been involved in team sports at the high-school or college level. [6] Adolescent girls who play high-school sports are three times more likely to graduate from high-school, eighty percent less likely to have an unwanted pregnancy and ninety-two percent less likely to use drugs. [7]  

            It turns out that the self-esteem research supports what we all know anyway about ourselves, that, when we are good at something, we feel good about ourselves. This is not rocket science, and it opens a number of avenues for parents and teachers working with young girls. From my experience with hundreds of young people over the past twenty-five years, at both ends of the academic spectrum, I’ve developed three maxims that parents and educators can use as touchstones to children’s competence and, therefore, their self-confidence.

3. Gender Balance – Girls who exhibit both feminine and masculine attributes have higher levels of self-esteem.  

            Men and women have traditionally occupied such different spaces, women confined to the home, men going out to their work,  that personality traits have become gendered. Because certain traits are considered “masculine” or “feminine” qualities –  the strong, independent male, the convivial, loving woman – we overlook the fact that these are, first of all, human qualities which have nothing to do with one’s sex.  

            Not surprisingly, given the pronounced tilt towards success and achievement in our culture, positive masculine qualities cluster around our notions of achievement, success and power: assertive, physical, independent, confident, ambitious, competitive, independent, self-reliant, risk-taking. Positive feminine qualities cluster around service, emotional sensitivity, and appearance: nurturing, emotional, cheerful, loyal, sensitive, soft-spoken, understanding, sweet, cute, enticing. (Whatever may be said about these, they are not the qualities you’d be looking for on the resume of a corporate CEO.) That feminine qualities are so strongly linked in our minds to service and appearance, while decidedly disassociated from achievement, speaks volumes for our culture’s disregard (despite lip service to the contrary) for traditional “women’s work, ” homemaking, child rearing, and caretaking.  

            Like it or not, we’ve all been conditioned to view ourselves as mature and emotionally developed only when we have fully achieved those qualities associated with our gender. We have our modern mythic heroes and heroines to remind us at every turn: John Wayne still stands for many as the epitome of the properly acculturated male –independent, self-reliant, take-charge, the tough guy with a big heart. Jackie Kennedy was a powerful icon for the smiling, compliant, savvy woman, ready to stand by her man, raise their children, and look good while doing it. When she married the Godfather-like Aristotle Onassis, Jackie Kennedy sent alarms through the culture for stepping so precipitously out of her perceived gender mold.

            The need for such gender specialization is largely a myth. In fact, psychological studies find that it is not uncommon for a woman or a man to combine personality traits that were considered mutually exclusive to one or the other sex. More significant, they found that people who combined masculine and feminine traits were psychologically better adjusted than their more stereotypical counterparts. [8] Other studies found that women who expressed a combination  of feminine and masculine qualities tended to have higher self-esteem than  women who exhibited a more traditional version of femininity. Women who were stereotypically feminine tended to suffer greater anxiety, and lower self-esteem than their more gender-balanced counterparts. [9]  

            Something of the same is being found with the more resilient and confident teen-aged girl. Harter found in her review of the self-esteem literature that the girl who describes herself as both caring and competitive, for instance, both nurturing and assertive, seemed most likely to remain self-confident throughout adolescence. [10] On the other hand, girls who most strongly endorsed  an exclusive feminine gender orientation reported  greater loss of voice.  

            The idea of linking a balance of gender qualities with emotional health and self-confidence mirrors my own experience in working with high achieving girls these past twenty  years. The girls I have found to be the most promising have generally combined their feminine sensibilities with a sturdy self-reliance, a robust sense of their selves and their capacities, and a ready access to risk-taking and problem-solving. (It’s also my observation that many of my most promising boys possessed ample measures of sensitivity and connectedness: of the three male stars most prominent in my memory, one teaches handicapped kids to swim, another spent much of his sixth-grade year studying and drawing birds, and the third was deeply connected to and seemed more or less the caretaker of a younger sister who later came into the program.)  

Beyond Gender  

            In raising and schooling girls, we need to break personality traits free of their traditional gender moorings, and view them as qualities and skills appropriate to us all. Freeing the most common personality traits from their sex-stereotypes, we can classify them loosely into two broad categories. First, the qualities of achievement, which include independence, self-reliance, risk-taking, problem-solving, and many of those we’ve traditionally associated with socially successful males. Second are the qualities of connection, the traditional feminine qualities I mentioned above.  

            At the same time, it is crucial that as parents and teachers we break free from the cultural mandate that one set of traits is more significant or more valuable than the other. Both connection and achievement are central to the human experience, both can serve women and men at home, in the workplace, alone and with others.  

            Parents, then, should try to help their daughters develop a range  of skills and qualities that embrace both connection and achievement. Girls with such a range will have at their disposal a broad set of qualities and skills that can help them master any given set of circumstances, wherever they choose to employ them. This maximizes their potential for surviving the perils of adolescence and for leading satisfactory adult lives.  

Finding Balance

             While we empower girls to develop the skills of achievement, we have to make certain that we do not devalue the traditional  feminine skills of connection. Our work is double-edged. In our eagerness to equip girls for an increasingly competitive workplace, we so not want to strip them of their capacity for connection and nurturance, traits which the workplace will require if it is to serve all human needs. Girls should understand early that they can lay claim to traditional masculine qualities with as much entitlement as boys. They can be fully feminine and as capable of self-reliance and decision-making as they are of nurturing and caring. All girls should carry within them an image of rich possibilities for themselves – that they can be as loving or as assertive as they need to be, wherever they find themselves.  

            To help your daughter arrive at this balance, you need to present her with many opportunities and experiences that require problem-solving and risk-taking, while answering her need for connection and relationship. The next four chapters focus upon helping your daughter towards a balancing of the qualities of connection and achievement. They include a number of practical strategies.  

             Complimentarity is a useful lens through which you can view and assess your daughter’s development. Periodically ask yourself, Is she developing an adequate sense of risk-taking? Is she embracing self-reliance? Is she refining her relational skills? Gender complimentarity is a powerful tool to empower your daughter against the culture’s attempts to constrain her with narrow stereotypes.  

Buffering Your Daughters  

            Though you cannot shelter your daughter from the culture in which she is growing up, you can play a major role in equipping her to withstand its worst effects. From what we’ve seen so far, there are several basic keys to her self-esteem that you should understand. The chapters in Parts Two and Three provide numerous activities and strategies that can help you along, but for now, I will summarize these key factors, and include chapter references where you can learn more about each one.

 1. Consciousness - Girls need to be aware of essential information about themselves as females, and about their experience growing up female in a culture that has traditionally disadvantaged them. I will keep this to just a few essentials. Your daughter needs to know:  

° The power of the feminine. For too long, Western culture has devalued the feminine, especially women’s ways and women’s work. Girls need to know that women have played a vital historical role in developing culture, and in what scholar Peggy MacIntosh calls the “mending and minding of the social fabric.” (See Chapter Eleven.)  

° That institutional bias still persists.  Despite thirty years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and twenty-five since Title IX, deep and pervasive forms of gender bias still infect our institutions, schools and the workplace. (See “Professional Women at the Millenium” on pages 150 and 151.)  

° That they will need to balance the competing claims of home and work. Ninety percent of the girls in this year’s high-school graduating class will work full time outside the home for at least twenty-five years. The increasing presence of women in the workplace has not diminished the demands and expectations made upon them at home.  

° That they can find the autonomy they need without separating from their mothers. Adolescent girls need to be aware of their competing need  for autonomy and for connection, and that they can achieve autonomy without emotionally separating from their mothers.  (See Chapter Five.)  

2. Competence – Fundamental to girls’ self-confidence is their feeling of competence:  

°  In the skills of connection (see Chapter Five).  

°  In the skills of achievement (see Chapter Six).  

3. Connection – Girls need to be aware that their need for connection is both a deep strength and an enduring need.  

° Girls and women are psychologically grounded in a sense of connection and relationship. Girls should know that this is OK, and that women’s deep sense of connection is the foundation for home, community, and culture itself.  

°  Girls should be aware that they may learn better in a connected setting, with other girls, and from adult mentors.  

4. Complimentarity – Girls need to find balance:  

°  Between traditionally  feminine and  masculine attributes.  

° Between the skills and attributes of achievement and the skills and attributes of connection.