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Imagine girlhood as a swimming pool, shimmering and vast. Tweens frolic on the shallow side, parents hovering. The deep end beckons.
Here is the agony of adolescence in these peculiar times: Parents want their daughters to swim confidently to the far side and emerge into womanhood, but things lurk in the water, strong currents and dangers they don’t completely understand. And so they are happy when their girls hesitate, when they stay within arm’s reach.
Adolescence itself hasn’t changed, says Laura Haskins, head of school at Orchard House School, a private girls’ middle school in the Fan. “What has changed is the world that we’re living in.” Parents, confounded by the complexities of online lives, don’t know how to set boundaries or help girls navigate social media. Girls are achievers, but they’re also self-doubters; social but lonely. Then there’s a flowering of ways to talk about sexual orientation and gender identity. “I want to support this,” parents tell Haskins, “but this is new territory for me.”
This is why Haskins is organizing the Brave New Girl conference on March 21, to help educators and parents learn how to guide adolescent girls through these challenges. One of the keynote speakers is Sara Pipher Gilliam, co-author of the new edition of “Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls.”
Gilliam’s mother and co-author, Mary Pipher, wrote 1994’s “Reviving Ophelia.” Gilliam was a teenager herself when that book shocked parents by revealing the problems that simmered in the lives of 1990s girls: eating disorders, self-harm, media pressures and more.
Since then, Gilliam says, she’s seen many positive shifts. Families are closer, and there’s less conflict between mothers and high school-aged daughters. Youth activism has surged. In the new edition, Gilliam and Pipher decided to delete the entire section of “Reviving Ophelia” that addressed academic inequality for girls, because it was no longer relevant. Gilliam credits her mother’s book with sparking that change.
Photo courtesy Sara Pipher Gilliam
Girls now outperform boys in school. And yet, held back by a pervasive perfectionism, they often have less confidence than boys do. Perhaps most telling, “the original ‘Reviving Ophelia’ didn’t have a chapter on anxiety,” Gilliam says. “The new one does.”
Why are girls so anxious? The social stresses of their digital lives are part of the answer, but Gilliam looks deeper. Compared to their parents’ generation, fewer teens have jobs, and the workplace is where you “learn to navigate that range of human experience,” she points out. They’re driving later. They’re home, scrolling and group-texting instead of interacting face to face with peers. And when something goes wrong, they call their parents to help them.
As a result of these layers of insulation, when girls leave the house, “they are just not prepared for reality.”
So what are the solutions?
Gilliam proposes two. One is calibrated stress. “We want to make life as smooth and wonderful as we can for our kids,” she says, but they won’t learn anything from a frictionless life. “We grow from times of trial, times of challenge.” And so parents should encourage their daughters (and sons, too) to take age-appropriate risks.
What does this look like? Gilliam gives the example of her sister-in-law, who told her oldest daughter to manage her own schedule in her senior year of high school. That included everything: scheduling medical appointments, playing sports, arranging carpool pickups. Sometimes, important things didn’t happen, but the consequences were natural and manageable.
Gilliam and Pipher’s other big idea is helping girls find their North Star, “that idea of a constant, forward-looking presence and centering force in a girl’s life,” Gilliam explains. Girls need a close circle of caring adults who can help them discover who they are and who they want to be.
The average teen spends more than seven hours on the phone each day. The best way to fight the inexorable pull of social media and videos isn’t to hand down a mandate, Gilliam says, but to have thoughtful conversations. Talk with a girl about what her goals are and the role tech does or doesn’t play. If her dream is to one day be a veterinarian, is TikTok going to get her there? Would she rather spend her time after school volunteering at the animal shelter?
Parents have the power to help girls recognize their unique gifts and build their identities around them. Then, they can watch their daughters swim to the pool’s distant edge, to emerge gasping and glorious, triumphant.
The Brave New Girl conference takes place from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on March 21 at Orchard House School. The other keynote speaker is playwright, actress and makeup artist Eva DeVirgilis, whose mission is to get women to stop apologizing for themselves. Workshops focus on diverse topics: anxiety, resilience, technology, fitness, leadership, sexual identity and more. Tickets are $175; scholarships are available.
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