Ep 74: Growing Strong Girls

Lindsay Sealey, author of Growing Strong Girls and “girl
advocate” speaks with me this week about how to help your
daughter find, understand, and value her own voice. With girls
receiving so many conflicting external messages, it is vital we
help them strengthen their internal self!


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Full show notes


Mixed Messages


“Be yourself,” “know that you are strong because you are a girl,”
“stand up for yourself,” “don’t let the man get you down.” These
platitudes are constantly thrown at girls to assure them that
they’ve got everything it takes to rule the world and make all
their dreams come true. Though well meaning, these sentiments are
made redundant by unrealistic expectations to look pretty at all
times, know how to attract and please men, and be accommodating
and polite to everybody. In order to encompass all of these
values, you would literally have to be perfect. And that’s, like,
really hard to do.


Girls are constantly presented with conflicting messages on
social media, at school, on TV—even at home. It’s confusing
enough for full-grown women to know how to act in the face of all
these contradictory pressures, so for girls who are just entering
into teendom it feels almost impossible. In order to give
tips on helping your teenage daughter build
confidence, parents have to effectively combat the
pressures placed on her by society. They must also help her
confront the drama and growing pains of adolescence in a logical
manner. Needless to say, being a teenage girl, or a parent to
one, is no walk in the park.


Teenage and preteen girls are in an incredibly vulnerable stage
of their lives. They’re extremely susceptible to the influence of
their peers and the outside world. So how do you give
tips on helping your teenage daughter build
confidence if you feel that the influence of others is
greater than that of their own parents? Author, CEO, and
Professional “Girl Advocate” Lindsay Sealey can tell you how.
Sealey wrote the book Growing Strong Girls: Practical Tools to
Cultivate Connection in the Preteen Years and has been running
workshops with young girls to help develop their own sense
confidence and self-worth for fifteen years. In this interview
she offers tons of practical tips on helping your teenage
daughter build confidence by showing parents how they
can successfully connect with, support, and influence their teen
girls to believe in themselves despite societal pressures.


What a Girl Wants


It’s not always about what a girl wants but what a girl needs.
Let’s face it, some teenage girls want a lot—popularity, money,
lots of followers on Instagram, an expensive new car (the last of
which they’re definitely not getting). This vapid list of
necessities comes from the constant stream of messages society
and pop culture throw at them. As parents, some tips on
helping your teenage daughter build confidence might be
“these things don’t matter” and “one day you might be happy that
you didn’t get everything you wanted.” Lindsay Sealey says when
parents respond this way, they aren’t actually recognizing their
daughter’s feelings.


Among other tips on helping your teenage daughter build
confidence, Sealey states that active listening is a
pivotal part of connecting with your teenage daughter. If she’s
talking to you about a fight with a friend, or about a boy she
likes who doesn’t like her back, don’t cut her story short. You
need to let her tell you the whole story and run the gamut of all
the emotions she’s feeling. Sealy says that parents must be
willing to validate their daughter’s feelings and help them
process emotions in a healthy way. This means urging your
daughter to fully experience, not deflect, their emotions and be
open with how, and why, she is feeling them. Letting emotions
sink in, even when it’s uncomfortable, will help your daughter
fully process the situation and eventually come to terms with it.


Another of the major tips on helping your teenage
daughter build confidence is to avoid giving advice when
your daughter comes to you with her problems. When parents jump
in with their own stories and advice, girls often feel belittled,
like their opinions and experiences don’t really matter. Sealy
says that parents need to respond with empathetic phrases like,
“You must feel really saddened that your friend doesn’t want to
eat lunch with you,” or “I would be hurt too if a boy didn’t like
me back.” This lets your daughter know that she is valid to feel
the way she does, that having feelings doesn’t make her weak.
Sealey says it’s okay to ask to share how you’ve overcome a
similar situation, however, you should avoid overpowering her
story with yours. Tune into the episode to hear more tips
on helping your teenage daughter build confidence by
identifying opportunities you have to foster revelations through
quality time with your daughter.


Miss Independent


According to Sealey, a major part of empowering young girls is to
provide them with a safe space to focus on their own interests.
In an age defined by comparison, it’s crucial for girls to
understand—first and foremost—they need to make themselves happy.
One of Sealey's tips on helping your teenage daughter
build confidence is to encourage her to pursue
individualistic interests, like horseback riding, hiking,
painting, or volunteering at animal shelters, rather than
focusing entirely on her social life.


Teenage girls have a tendency to overextend themselves with
social events in order to avoid missing out or disappointing
others. According to Sealey’s tips on helping your
teenage daughter build confidence, parents need to steer
their daughters away from relying too much on friendships for
fulfillment. Developing individualistic interests not only
expands your daughters mind, it also gives her a greater sense of
self-reliance and independence that’ll come in handy when she’s
confronted with friendship drama. If she knows that she has other
things to do with her time than spend it with a problematic
friend, she won’t be so torn up about parting ways with them.


Further, Sealey provides tips on helping your teenage
daughter build confidence and self-respect when
confronted with friendship drama. Drama is an unavoidable part of
girlhood and can be an opportunity to learn valuable lessons.
Often, our daughters will fall out of friendships because someone
moved, or someone became popular and the other didn’t, or someone
joined the soccer team while the other played tennis. It’s
important, Sealey states, to teach your daughter that drifting
apart is part of life and it’s important to have a large pool of
friends to lean on when one friendship ends. Sealey urges parents
to encourage their daughters to become friends with many
different types of people. That could mean someone a few years
older than them, someone who goes to another school, or someone
who comes from a different ethnic background then them. Rather
than having one BFF, it’s more beneficial for teenage girls to
seek out multiple friendships with people who bring out and
strengthen different parts of their personality.


Finding Her Voice


Without proper guidance, it’s easy for daughters to feel
overwhelmed in ...