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“Raising Authentic, Courageous, Confident Girls” is the title of a PTA-sponsored program to be held Thursday (Sept. 24) from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. at Gunn High School’s Spangenberg Theatre.
Rachel Simmons, founder of the Santa Cruz-based Girls Leadership Institute and author of several books on girls, will discuss how to help all girls reach their full potential.
Simmons, a Rhodes scholar, is the author of “Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls.”
She will host a PBS television special on girls in conjunction with publication of her latest book, “The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence.”
Simmons will address how to boost a girl’s ability to manage interpersonal conflicts in healthy ways; to handle criticism constructively and be true friends with peers; and to be confident, courageous, authentic and self-aware.
Parents and daughters fifth grade and up are invited to this event, sponsored jointly by the PTA councils of Palo Alto and Los Altos.
In the meantime, boys have a higher high school dropout rate than girls, boy have a lower rate of going to college, and boys have a lower college graduation rate than girls.
I don’t buy that the scools and society are so anti-girl, that is a load of manure. With such a high number of teachers and school administrators being women, why would one think our schools were anti-girl? Just look at the statistics, it is the boys that are being discriminated against, and it is a crime.
I am not against encouraging girls to be all they can be, but let’s not do it at the expense of the boys.
I feel like picketing this event.
I must respectfully disagree with JustMe. Many girls deal with their interpersonal relationships in aggressive, bullying ways. Have you ever read some of the mean comments middle school girls make about other girls on MySpace, their text messages, etc? They can be horrible to one another. And for what reason? Is it low self-esteem? Maybe. I’ve worked with 11-14 year-olds for twenty years and believe me, both boys and girls have their issues. Let’s bring in parent education programs that address both.
As a parent of both boys and girls, I can testify with both sides of the coin. Raising children is not a one fit suits all situation. Girls are different and have different problems from boys and their problems. Yes, we do need advice in raising girls. But, we also need advice in raising boys. The way I raise my girl has to be different from the way I raise my boy. I have known this from the cradle. It would be good if society acknowledged this.
Is this really an issue? I mean, those cougars at the convention didn’t really lack courage and confidence in going after cubs. I mean, really.
I am raising two girls too, and I have seen the problems being addressed here. I am very interested in raising my girls to be successful.
However, look at the blinking statistics. Recently it was found that the workforce is now more than 50% women. Where are the men? When was the last time you EVER heard of a program or seminar or ANYTHING aimed ar making boys more successful? I don’t mind the emphasis on girls as much as I mind the total lack of emphasis on boys.
As I recall, the gap between girls and boys isn’t among the higher economic strata, but the lower. In some sense, we’re not seeing the programs here because the issues are in places like Redwood City, EPA and East San Jose. Girls from lower-income households are likely to do better than boys from the same situation. And, yes, I think those problems are serious–the drop-out/incarceration rates are heartbreaking.
However, as I also recall, historically, girls do well in elementary and then drop off in adolescence. And that this is still an issue in math and science. And this continues to be true here. From what I’ve witnessed in the schools at a younger age, I see a lot of math/science ability among the kids here, but even now it’s socially easier to be an artsy/crafty reading girl than an artsy/craftsy boy and mathy/computer-gaming boy than mathy/computer-gaming girl. There’s a certain social reinforcement that goes on. You tend to get better at the things where you spend more time and you spend time doing stuff with same-sex peers.
One other thing with girls–they have the higher rates of depression, though it’s probably underreported with boys. So there is a statistical reason to have a seminar on girl and esteem.
Doesn’t mean there shouldn’t or can’t be one on boys.
JustMe,
I agree that there should be education for both boys and girls. The other posters are correct. One look at MySpace/Facebook/etc show the problems for girls. This event is needed and to picket it would be wrong.
When someone feels as passionately about an issue as you do, you should do something about it. This is obviously something you have been following for some time. It’s all well and good to come to this forum to write about this, but rather than picketing, why don’t you spend the time more productively organizing a speaker event for raising boys. The PTA is largely a volunteer organization. I’m sure they would welcome you to organize some speakers to present to the community just as the people who organized this event did.
If you want something to happen, do something positive to make it happen. Don’t take down an event that is also needed. I hope to see your event featured in the PA Weekly in the coming months because it is needed too.
JustMe,
Here’s an event for you…
More info at http://www.challengesuccess.org
In the meantime…go easy. It’s all good.
Challenge Success Fall Conference at Stanford University
The Long View: Preparing our Children for 21st Century Success
Friday, September 25, 2009
7:30-9:30 p.m. in Memorial Auditorium
Please join us to for an evening of discussion with:
Michael Thompson, Ph.D. is a consultant, author and psychologist specializing in children and families. He is the clinical consultant to The Belmont Hill School and has worked in more than 500 schools across the United States, as well as in international schools in Central America, Europe and Asia. He and his co-author, Dan Kindlon, wrote the New York Times best-selling book, Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys (1999). In addition, Dr. Thompson is the author of several other acclaimed books, including Best Friends/Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Worlds of Children (2001) and The Pressured Child: Helping Your Child Achieve Success in School and in Life (with Teresa Barker, 2004).
Chris Kelly is the Chief Privacy Officer and Head of Global Public Policy at Facebook, guiding Facebook’s efforts to make the internet a safer and more trusted place. He has previously served as Chief Privacy Officer at three other internet companies, Spoke Software, Excite@Home, and Kendara, and was an attorney in private practice at Baker & McKenzie and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. Chris also served as a policy advisor in the Clinton Administration. He was Editor in Chief of the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology and part of the founding team for the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
All you have to do is look at the statistics involving the violence against women to understand the difference between raising a boy and a girl.
From: “Violence by Intimates: Analysis of Data on Crimes by Current or Former Spouses, Boyfriends, and Girlfriends, U.S. Department of Justice, March, 1998″
Estimates range from 960,000 incidents of violence against a current or former spouse, boyfriend, or girlfriend each year to 4 million women who are physically abused by their husbands or live-in partners each year.
While women are less likely than men to be victims of violent crimes overall, women are 5 to 8 times more likely than men to be victimized by an intimate partner.
Violence by an intimate partner accounts for about 21% of violent crime experienced by women and about 2 % of the violence experienced by men.
31,260 women were murdered by an intimate from 1976-1996.
Females accounted for 39% of the hospital emergency department visits for violence-related injuries in 1994 but 84% of the persons treated for injuries inflicted by intimates.
I am sorry to report that I do not have the time or the ability to organise seminars on how abused boys are by the system. I am a working father supporting my family as the sole wage-earner. I am not a intelligent college degreed stay-at-home woman with tons of time to expound on how abused I was when I was young. I have to keep my nose to THIS grindstone so that I can help support the women.
When I was young I saw a sign on a timeclock I had to punch that said “A mule that is pulling can’t bray”. There seems to be a lot of braying going on, I suspect some are not pulling.
On the topic of domestic violence, I will go on record as being totally anti-domestic violence. but I will also contend that the definition of violence changes based on who hits and who gets hit.
I recall studies that indicate that while women end up hospitalized due to domestic violence more often, they are also more likely to INITIATE violence. Go watch the Disney channel any time, supposedly good, safe entertainment for kids. count the instances of physically expressing oneself, and the genders that give and receive those expressions. It is MUCH more common for a female to hit, punch, kick, push, knock over, dump food on, or throw something at a male than vice versa. Female on male violence is not only accepted, it is seen as a staple of comedy. This is how girls are TAUGHT to express themselves.
The boys, for their part, can either take the abuse and be good, or they can respond in kind and become the bad guy. On TV, they tend to take their lumps “like a man”, but in real life I contend they are a little more likely to defend themselves, and then they become criminals. Mind you, I am not saying this is always the case, but I believe that with the acceptance and even expectation of female-on-male violence as a means of self expression, the statistics on domestic violence may be a little skewed.
encouraging confidence and courage is wonderful, I look forward to this talk. But I am curious – how can you be an inauthentic girl?
JustMe
I agree with you on this one. I have raised both a girl and a boy in Palo Alto. My personal observation in Palo Alto schools is that there are many successful girls in this school system and that they are encouraged, looked up to and not discriminated against. However, for boys, it is not so “cool” to be a good student.
Midtowner
I do agree. My boys call boys who are good students the nerds and don’t want to be nerds themselves. The girls who are good students are cool, admired by both girls and boys. The male athletes are cool but not expected to be good students. The female athletes are are cool and if they are good students too they are “wicked”, which I believe also means cool only more so.
Palo Alto Mom, you ask “But I am curious – how can you be an inauthentic girl?”
You live this close to San Francisco and you have to ask that?
Just kidding,….
What do people here think about “all girls” school for the middle school years – grades 6,7,8?
I’ve read studies that girls from single sex schools are more likely to maintain an interest in math/science in college, and are 3x more likely to get graduate degrees in math/science that girls that went through the co-ed education system.
I should post this from mom of an authentic girl (still not sure what that means aside from having the right body parts).
The single sex schools (which locally are limited to only girls middle schools, there are no boys only elementary or middle schools) have so many factors which are unrelated to being single sex that I’m not sure the sex part is a major difference. 60 kids per grade instead of 300, $30K per year instead of free, a pretty homogenous group of students (I suspect even the kids with scholarships have homes, clothes, more than one involved adult, enough food, a drug free environment to live in and a ride to school besides public transportation.) They also probably have an adult who helps with homework, educational summer trips, tutors, tutors, tutors, tutors.
All things being equal, sex makes a much smaller difference then attention and resources.
I don’t understand the objections. If you want a speech about raising boys then invite an expert to come and give that talk.
I think we should be able to have a seminar about raising girls to become strong, authentic women, acknowledging the difference in women’s issues and the fact that there is a difference between “girl issues” as opposed to “teen issues” without protest. Likewise we should be able to have a seminar about raising boys to become strong, authentic men, acknowledging the difference in “male issues” as opposed to “teen issues”, but I suspect we would have women’s lib types protesting discrimination and advocating that we should raise our kids the same, that plumbing and reproduction is different but that otherwise there is no difference.
I would like to think that we could have both seminars. However, sadly, in effect I don’t think it would be pc.
I was listening to KQED public radio this morning at 9-10am as I was driving up to San Francisco for a meeting.
The topic is related to this thread–it looked at a series of studies that have been conducted regularly since 1972 about how happy women are with their lives. They looked at different age brackets, different demographic and working/non-working backgrounds, and also tracked how things have changed over time for the cohorts that we part of the original studies.
The general findings were the same across all the dimensions–women overall are less happy now than they were when these studies first were conducted. Interestingly, men were more happy than they had been earlier, and the percentage of men who are happy now is greater than it is for women, an about face from the findinngs in the earlier data capture.
The more things we as parents can learn and do to not only boost self esteem amongst both our sons and daughters, the better, as far as I am concerned. I would add to self esteem being considerate, interacting cooperatively with others, and doing one’s best with the circumstances they have presented to them. It begins and ends at home, and many of us can benefit from learning what professionals observe.
I don’t entirely understand all the specifics of this study I heard about in an hour long call-in radio program, but I did find it troubling that women over a 30+ years period of time as a whole are less happy. I think about the options my ex-wife and daughter have and have had compared to my daughter’s grandmothers, and there is no comparison. The choices they have and how they feel about themselves in making these choices seems to be night and day from the women of my parents’ generation. Any yet they are less happy.
Cycling back to this program for girls that will take place, what the future holds for the happiness these girls will experience as they become and live as women may be a helped by programs such as these. They sure couldn’t hurt.
Christina Hoff Sommers wrote “Who Stole Femanism” and “The War on Boys”, and I forget in which of those books she discussed the “study” that the AACW used to launch the “Take Your Daughter to Work Day” thing. I do remember that what she found was that this “scientific study” was incredibly hard to get a copy of, even though standard practice would be to distribute it for peer review. She has to answer questions about who she was, why she wanted it, what she wanted to see in it, and so on, very unprofessional for the group that released the study. Basically, they released only the conclusion, but no information on how that conclusion was arrived at.
But she percevered and finally got a copy of the study itself, and she discovered that while the entire study was based on girls “self esteem”, there was no place in the study where “self esteem” was defined, nor was there an acceptable description of how it was measured. The study was crap, but based on it, you were supposed to take your daughters to work while your sons would go to school for a day of lectures anout how bad men have historically been to women.
I like the concept of “take your Child to Work Day”, but as originally envisioned, “Take Your Daughter to Work Day” and the justification for it make me retch.
There is nothing wrong with engouraging and enabling children of either gender, (or uncertain gender,) and I would encourage it. But when it comes to gender favoritism, I draw a line and refuse to agree. I refuse to believe that discriminating against any child, for race, ethnicity, religion, GENDER, or any similar reason, based on wrongs from the distant past that they had NOTHING with in the first place.
To Just Me: for someone who works so hard, nose to the grindstone, you seem to have a lot of time to post things on this forum. How can it have been a bad thing to hold the discussion. It did not suit you so you chose not to go– it should be over for you.
I think that girls’ problems and some problems of boys originated in that heady time known as “Women’t Liberation.” I was a young woman then and heard a lot of crazy talk about daughters among women. Some of that crazy talk came out of pent up resentment toward men’s privilege. I had a divorced friend who announced she would not teach her daughter to cook because the girl would just end up as some man’s slave.
For instance, no aggressive impulse in a girl should be criticized just because she is a girl. Fair enough, but I often saw aggression completely ignored. Just as boys had been excused (“He has to learn to stand up for himself in the world.”) there was not a very nuanced response to aggression in girls, either. The female of the species has always been mean socially, rather than physically, but they learned to beat people up too. Furthermore, men were taken by surprise and had to invent a response to the newly aggressive women, because no one taught the boys how to rspond to the “new girl.” A lot of the exchanges between men and women became a lot rougher; no need to “hide behind” etiquette any more. Now many young people learn their first etiquette in the corporate world.
We started heaping privileges and encouragement on young women to help them catch up, and we seem to have lost a lot of young men in the process. Maybe we thought their privilege just “stuck” naturally and they didn’t need to be taught and nurtured in any changes in the culture.
jb
I wholeheartedly understand and agree with what you are saying.
Looking at tv commercials is a great example of how not to do it. Most of the commercials showing families show a strong wife/mother and a weaker, almost one of the kids, husband/father. It is the woman who makes the right decisions, tells the man what to do and comes over as the leader, while the man is the foolish, shallow, single focused individual who prefers to watch sports on tv, play with the kids, and ultimately make the mistakes that the woman sorts out.
How can boys look at these commercials and see themselves as strong individuals against all these smart women?
And this is just one example of how society has changed as the ultimate result of the 60s womens’ lib. movement.
Did anyone go and can they summarize?