Here are a few crucial weapons for your arsenal in the War on our Daughters' Self Esteem. It's only a quick partial list. There is much, much more. I'll keep posting, and would love to get your recommendations.
Daughters.com
http://www.daughters.com/
Ophelia's Voice Resource list: A fantastic one-stop-shopping site for all kinds of terrific resources to help you and your daughter. http://opheliasvoice.org/ophelia/resources.xml
Ophelia's Voice is a nonprofit organization based out of Sherwood Park, Alberta, with a focus on empowering girls and young women to use their leadership potential to affect social change in their community through self-initiated social justice projects. The organization is led by youth, for youth, and was started by the 17-year-old founder, Joanne Cave, with assistance from her graduate student mentors at the University of Alberta. Ophelia's Voice is in its third year of operation.
Girls on the Run - a spectacular national program that uses running, mentoring, healthy messages and activities to support girls nationwide. http://www.girlsontherun.org/
New Moon Girls - an excellent magazine and online resource and community providing resources, friendship, great reading materials and a smart, exciting, safe community on and off line for your daughters and you to learn, grow and have fun together.
http://www.newmoon.com/
Must-have books:
"Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap,"
Peggy Orenstein
http://www.peggyorenstein.com/books/schoolgirls.html
"Reviving Ophelia," Mary Pipher http://www.amazon.com/Reviving-Ophelia-Saving-Selves-Adolescent/d...
"In a Different Voice," Carol Gilligan http://www.amazon.com/Different-Voice-Psychological-Theory-Develo...
"Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls. " Rachel Simmons http://www.amazon.com/Odd-Girl-Out-Culture-Aggression/dp/01560273...
"When Girls Feel Fat: Helping Girls Through Adolescence," Sandra Susan Friedman
http://www.amazon.com/When-Girls-Feel-Fat-Adolescence/dp/1552094596
"The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women," Naomi Wolf
http://www.amazon.com/Beauty-Myth-Images-Against-Women/dp/0060512...
http://www.daughters.com/
Fellow Psychology Today blogger Dara Chadwick's excellent new book: "You'd Be So Pretty If...Teaching Our Daughters to Love Their Bodies--Even When We Don't Love Our Own."
Her site: DaraChadwick.com
Information to spark discussions:
Suicide, stats say girls at risk
September is Suicide Prevention Month. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, girls ages 10 to 14 have the fastest growing suicide rate of any population group, with the rate increasing 75.9% between 2003 and 2004 (the most recent data available). This week at Daughters.com, we're featuring articles and resources about suicide, depression, and self-harm in girls. Read, "When You're Afraid You're Losing Her" by Helen Cordes, "Why do Girls Cut Themselves," by Jean Lynch and Amy Lynch,"
Announcing Rachel Simmons, "The Curse of the Good Girl" Tour
Our friend, Rachel Simmons, just released her newest book, "The Curse of the Good Girl," about how girls can lose out if they're too "nice." Rachel will be talking about New Moon Girls when she does her book tour. Thank you, Rachel! Get more info on Rachel's Tour, and see Rachel's appearance on the Today Show
Meeting at the Crossroads
Women's Psychology and Girls' Development
Lyn Mikel Brown
Carol Gilligan
"On the way to womanhood, what does a girl give up? For five years, Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan, asking this question, listened to one hundred girls who were negotiating the rough terrain of adolescence. This book invites us to listen, too, and to hear in these girls' voices what is rarely spoken, often ignored, and generally misunderstood: how the passage out of girlhood is a journey into silence, disconnection, and dissembling, a troubled crossing that our culture has plotted with dead ends and detours.
In the course of their research, Brown and Gilligan developed a Listener's Guide - a method of following the pathways of girls' thoughts and feelings, of distinguishing what girls are saying by the way they say it. We witness the struggle girls undergo as they enter adolescence only to find that what they feel and think and know can no longer be said directly. We see them at a cultural impasse, and listen as they make the painful, necessary adjustments, outspokenness giving way to circumspection, self-knowledge to uncertainty, authority to compliance. These changes mark the edge of adolescence as a watershed in women's psychological development, a time of wrenching disjunctions between body and psyche, voice and desire, self and relationship. Brown and Gilligan open their method to us and share their discoveries as they encourage girls at different ages to speak about themselves in conversation with women. They follow some of these girls over time, listening to changes in their distinct voices from one year to the next, addressing their successes and failures as they confront one barrier after another."
-from the Harvard University Press website description of this groundbreaking book
Great national afterschool program that supports girls' bodies and souls:
From the West Seattle Herald:
Program encourages students to think outside 'girl box'
By Rebekah Schilperoort
August 14, 2009
"Since 2002, Girls on the Run of Puget Sound has operated an after-school prevention program for third through fifth grade girls throughout the region and this year it finally comes to West Seattle with two new programs; one at Pathfinder Alternative School and another at Hiawatha Community Center starting Sept. 28.
Kerin Brasch, executive director of the local chapter of the non-profit group, said Girls on the Run is an after school program that combines physical activity with self-esteem building, "life lessons," aimed at preparing young girls for the challenges they will likely face in middle school.
"It's more than running," she said.
The mission, said Brasch is to "use the power of running to educate and prepare girls for a lifetime of self-respect and healthy living."
http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:eaRWYg8sHlwJ:www.westseattle...
