Monsters or regular blokes??

 

Today I’m sharing with you a blog post and what an incredible blog post it is, by the courageous Tom Meagher. It’s not light hearted and it is substantial food for thought. I will preface this post by saying that is about violence against women, both physical and sexual, nothing graphic but for anybody who may be distressed by that sort of content you may want to steer clear of this post.

Tom is the husband of the late Jill Meagher who was was raped and murdered in 2012. In his post, he explores the ‘monster myth’ that is perpetuated by the media and the ‘silent non-violent men’ of our society. While acknowledging his wife WAS killed by ‘monster’, it was through the tragic loss of his wife that he now sees more clearly than ever, that violent and sexual assault happens every day, all over the world; it is perpetrated by people known to the victim and it is rare that someone like Adrian Bayley, stalks a random victim in the way he did Jill. While it clearly calls for all the ‘silent non-violent men’ to find their voices and sights this is the way forward, what it highlighted for me, was that we parents and carers of girls need to foster girls’ sense of self right from the get go. Show them how to be courageous, show them how to speak up for themselves, show them respect so they can respect themselves, give them great male and female role models to look up to and be guided by. I’m not suggesting that for an instant that this guarantees immunity from these awful crimes but by teaching girls they are the captain of their own ship, I’d like to think we can help them make good, wise decisions for themselves as they get older and have to navigate the world as young adults and beyond.

It goes without saying that those of us with sons and brothers have an obligation to teach them about respect of themselves and females; teaching them to speak up and take action when they see or hear something that isn’t respectful of women or girls.

I described Tom Meagher as courageous and I did so because as you will read in this article, for him to really explore this myth fully, it requires a level of self awareness that most want to turn their heads from. By having a good look at this issue, means that we, both as individuals and as a community have to face the fact that it’s easier to believe in monsters than see that the violence being committed by men, against women is happening in our own backyard.

Have a read, I’m really interested to hear your thoughts.

Here’s the link to the article:

http://whiteribbonblog.com/2014/04/17/the-danger-of-the-monster-myth/

Image: ilovetoquote.com

Excuse me…I need some help!

Do I ask for it? No, well sometimes but not enough. 

Why not?

For me I was raised that way.

I saw my parents help others…lots. But why do I find it so hard to ask for help?

Do we have to give ourselves permission to ask for help?

Is all of this learnt behaviour?

 

Where am I going with this? Well, I wonder about the fuzzy line between independence and the ability to ask for help. As a parent when my children were really little, I remember reading that when a child is old enough to do something for themselves, let them do it, and rightly so. So they learn they can do things for themselves and in measure clearly, this is a good thing.

 

But what I’ve realised is that I’ve never really actively encouraged my children to ask for help. I’ve encouraged them to give things a go, actively tried to foster resilience in them but I’m not sure that I’ve told them often enough it’s ok to ask for help when things get tough. I maybe have in roundabout ways; always open to questions, if they want to talk about things, tried to be available to meet differing needs, being that soft place to fall but I can only only remember once consciously saying ‘it’s ok to ask for help’.

 

I know as a mum and as an individual I find it really difficult to ask for help and I know I’m not the only one! Have I learnt this? I must have. I know how to openheartedly help others but what stops me from asking that of others? fear of reject maybe? Hmmm…there’s some food for thought. That aside, I’m wondering is this inability to ask for help contributing to the rising levels of anxiety and depression in our children? With statistics like these, I’m wondering what we are missing?

 

“Depressive disorders tend to first appear in adolescence or early adulthood. One in every five adolescents are likely to experience a diagnosable depressive episode by the age of 18. In Australia, it’s estimated that 6 to 7 percent of young people aged 16 to 24 will experience depression in any year. The rates tend to be higher among young females (8.4%) compared to young males (4.3%).” 

 

It goes on to say: “Protective factors that can reduce the risk that a young person will develop depression include the presence of a supportive adult, good interpersonal relationships, a strong sense of self, family cohesion and social support”.   (http://www.headspace.org.au/what-works/research-information/depression)

 

Does the inability to ask for help keep us disconnected and therefore in the privacy of our own minds we think we can handle everything ourselves? Clearly not everyone suffers from depression or anxiety because they don’t ask for help, but for those that it does affect and potentially will, how much is this a factor? I wonder if I had have asked for help when I was a child or known that it was ok to, if I would’ve have avoided a whole lot of pain. I wonder if children do need to be told very explicitly that it’s ok to ask for help. If good interpersonal relationships and a strong of self is required as two of the protective factors to depression then surely this fuzzy line between independence and the ability to seek help comes into play?

 

I think about what a childrens counsellor told my children’s dad and me, when our marriage was ending, about the importance of telling the children that it wasn’t their fault that their mum and dad weren’t together anymore, and regularly. They think in concrete terms and can’t rationalise events in their lives. When things go badly, they don’t think of the external factors at play, they think it’s happened because of something they have done. So following that line of thought, and I really don’t know, I wonder in the same way, if they don’t know it’s ok to ask for help and I’ve been encouraging them all the way along to independant, that it will be a tricky thing for them to do and become as equally as difficult for them as they get older, as it is for me??

 

What do you think? What’s your experience of this? Is it a female thing or does it equally effect men too, I imagine the answer to that would be yes but I’d be interested to know your thoughts.

 

Resilience. Not what I expected.

In light of the death of the great man, Nelson Mandela, I couldn’t go past using this quote. May it continue to inspire all for many many years to come.

Sorry I’ve been absent for so long. Long story but after a few months getting my daughter well and doing my best to deal with adrenal fatigue, everything seemed bit too much! But I’m back and although at the end of 2013, 2014 promises to be a cracker I reckon!

Here’s the long awaited return to my blog….enjoy.

My daughter is about 10 and a half and all those years ago when I started learning about emotional intelligence, I didn’t really know what I was building or working towards. In my limited knowledge and experience, I thought at best, it would teach her to navigate her emotional world in a way that would, as she got older, allow her to have a better understanding of herself and what emotion was what.

What I didn’t know is that this is the stuff that has laid a foundation for her to build her own resilience. It’s like building a house. The foundation is made up of two things, love, that allows trust and respect to grow and an inquiry into the emotional world of the child.

So the scaffolding that I put in place on that foundation was teaching her about her emotions (Dr Vicky Flory’s book was an excellent resource!), teaching her about empathy. I’ve been fortunate enough to have a couple of glimpses of the fruits of the those efforts and it’s amazing.

Here’s the bit that I didn’t know would happen. It seems quite obvious now but it’s one of those times when it’s the difference between knowing something intellectually and realising it in practice. By putting some scaffolding around her, she’s been growing the structure within, that is uniquely hers. She’s building it bit by bit, in a way that I couldn’t have imagined because we are quite different in the way we handle our emotions, apart from the fact that she is a child!

As I talked about in my earlier post “What’s the use of the fear, if not to face it?”, that was about her challenge to get herself on the stage for a sanskrit recitation. She gave herself the time to prepare for something that she didn’t think she could do. That took one sort of courage. That was her fear and it had little to do with anyone else. Then just recently she needed to find a different sort of courage. She was confronted by her first and hopefully her last experiennce of ‘bullying’. I’m not 100% that I would call it that but it would’ve certainly turned into that if it hadn’t have been addressd. Bullying is a whole other blog post but with regards as to how it relates to resilience in my daughter, it is was pretty cool how it played out.

My extroverted nature mixed with a bit of Aries plus being born in the year of the Ox thought this is how it would play out:  Tell the teacher; teacher will speak to the boy; tell the boy who is belittling her and making fun of her, in no uncertain terms to pull his head in, then he’ll back off and all will be well. Yeah right. That’d also be a bit of my idealist nature kicking in too! I was soooo wrong. You’d think I’d know better having been bullied myself both at school and at home as a child! Speaking up about bullying or being continually teased is hard for any child regardless of their nature, so I asked her if she wanted my help. I went to the teacher at her request. Her teacher asked that my daughter come and tell her EVERY time an incident occurred. That’s what she did. I encouraged her to say something to the boy when he made fun of her in the playground. She tried and he used it against her. It didn’t work. Or so she thought. Each time she told me about it, I reminded her that just because it didn’t work out the way she had wanted, didn’t mean that it didn’t take courage to speak up in the first place!

Over the couple of weeks that we were (I say we because who knows how long she was dealing with it by herself) dealing with it, she continued to tell the teacher and continued to say things back in the playground. With no success, his behaviour didn’t change. To cut a long story short, her teacher intervened and spoke to the whole class, turns out someone else found the courage to speak and spoke of being subjected to similar behaviour. The class were involved in a group discussion about bullying and that there was zero tolerance at all times. The following day, the ‘culprits’ were to apologise to those whom they had hurt with their words. My daughter didn’t want to go to school. I said to her that she had to go! She had to be there to receive the apology! As uncomfortable as it would be for her AND him, she needed to be there. She went. At the end of the day when I asked her about it, she was all self conscious. She didn’t think it was a big deal.

I said to her ‘do you realise you are the one who championed change in your class?”

“What do you mean mum?”

“Well, if you had not stood up and said something and CONTINUED to say something, nothing would have changed. Because of your actions, the situation has changed for you and your whole class!”

She just had a little smile on her face.

That was a very proud mum moment!

A week or two later, another incident, once again out in the playground. The difference was this time it was a girl and one that liked to be the boss. My daughter wanted to join in on an activity and was being excluded. Dealing with a fiery character was really challenging for her. I asked her if it was important to her to be included in the activity? If not, don’t worry but if it is, then let’s work out another strategy. It was important to her so we talked about how she was going to handle it. She was fearful and we talked about what she needed. “Courage” she said and I said, “exactly the same stuff you needed when it came to dealing with the boy hassling you at school. You just need some more of that”. We came up with a couple of different options and then she tried them out. The first two (seemingly) didn’t work but then for some reason the situation changed where she was included after all. I suppose we can never really know what the effect of our efforts are.

It was after all of these things happened that I REALISED that this is how I can help build substance within my child! Resilience. Growing a back bone. Whatever the term, this is how I can help her (and my son too). I saw that how I would deal with all of those situations was very different to how SHE needed to handle them. She needed my support and guidance but she was the one who worked out which strategy was best for her and found the courage she needed to step over the fear and do what was needed. So I go back to my house analogy. The scaffolding is only there when the internal structure is under construction. However, it’s integral to the structure progressing in a safe and healthy way and needs to be taken away when the job is complete. I really hope that when my work here is done that she continues to grow into a fine young lady, with an internal resource of strength, courage and fortitude that will take her forward on her own journey to wherever that maybe!

I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a safe and joyful New Year. For those of you who don’t celebrate Christmas, I wish you much peace and happiness!

“Your child’s emotional needs” Dr Vicky Flory

Image by http://m.deseretnews.com

Barbie doll – looks pretty normal to me!

In my last post, I referred to the ‘crossing’ that happens from about 7-9 years of age and the shift in they way they think around the age of 10. I remember being told some time ago that when they do get start to think differently about things, any response from me that amounted to ‘because I said so’ wouldn’t cut it. In the last week or so I’ve had my first real taste of that, where my daughter started to ask questions of me and why I wouldn’t let her do a particular activity rather than taking my word for it and doing what she was asked. It opened up a really interesting discussion on body image.

My 10 year and I have been home together for the best part of 2 weeks. She’s unwell with a viral infection and what a long two weeks it has been! However, it’s been a bit of luxury at the same time to have her all to myself!

What has prompted this post is the discussion that ensued after she went looking for some games online. Since she was little she has always like playing dress ups. As she has gotten older that has developed into a like of either paper or electronic forms of dressing up mannequins. I have to preface this with I’m not into fashion, those of you who know me can vouch for that! I don’t buy fashion or women’s magazines, never really have. Clothes shopping is more a chore than a joy. Used to buy the odd copy of Who Weekly back in my pre-children days but these days I’m more likely to buy the Big Issue. I love to talk philosophy and spirituality, trying to gain a better understanding of myself and my life. Fashion and clothes just aren’t my thing. I’m more likely to buy a ticket to the moon than buy a copy of Vogue.

So while my daughter have a lot in common, fashion and clothes is where we diverge. What’s cool about it though is that I stand in awe of her ability to wander into an opp shop and throw together an outfit of the most unlikely garments and carries it off! (By the way she loves opp shops – yay! but has her mum’s uncanny ability of discovering the most expensive items – in regular clothes stores!)

The online games we came across was the same stuff as we had come up against previously and the reason why I didn’t like her playing them remained the same. I’ve wrestled with this in the past, it’s a creative outlet for her and I’m all for her finding those outlets, but the imagery she is subjected to, I believe is sending her all the wrong messages about body image. The mannequins are ridiculously skinny and their proportions have been distorted, longer legs, longer torsos, they have tiny little waists, no bums and have cleavage showing in many of the outfits. So that’s one thing, but what I saw at the bottom of the page that disturbed me the most; why does my 10 year old have to see this on a site designed for her age group?? It was one of these mannequins lying down across the bottom of the screen, in hot pants and crop top. Her back was slightly arched, looking very ‘appealing’. It was all too sexy for this age group. So again, after seeing the mannequins in the games and then this bit of advertising down the bottom (tried to find it to show you but couldn’t locate it), I asked her to get off that site. Here’s an example of what is on the site though…

Not my cup of tea!

Clearly she wasn’t impressed that she had to stop playing and asked why? Initially, my response was because I didn’t think those games were appropriate for her. That wasn’t a good enough answer as she just didn’t understand why. It was really hard to explain, I stumbled over my words and I finally said “by watching stuff like this, it sends you the wrong message about how the female body should look”. I said “it’s just not normal”. Her response “looks pretty normal to me.” Crikey, what was going on there?! She didn’t understand where I was coming from at all. She’s not going to understand how that stuff just creeps into her psyche and feeds her perception of herself and the girls around her. I was really struggling to find the words to express how it was sending all the wrong messages about body image. Then I remembered a post that I put on the SHG Facebook page. I showed her this and because she could actually see the difference between the ridiculous proportions of barbie and that of something that is closer to a real woman’s proportions, she was quite taken back when she saw them side by side. Have a look……
http://www.visualnews.com/2013/07/11/barbie-got-back-doll-with-real-woman-measurements/

What this illustrated to me was just how insidious marketing is, we all know that it is but I saw it up close and first hand! As a little person, she was just as happy playing with a remote control car as she was her soft toys. Then when she got to about 4 she went through the really pretty in pink thing. Princesses, tiaras, everything that sparkled. Having grown up with 3 older brothers, this was all a bit foreign to me! Then she was given a Barbie, a princess one. She thought it was great and she only ever had a couple that were all princess ones. Long gowns and more tiaras! How much of an impact that had, I’ll never know, but what amazes me is that up until very recently she only watched ABC for kids and little bits of ABC3. I’ve always been pretty conservative with what she watches and reads. She goes to a school where there’s lots of like minded parents so isn’t exposed to lots of it there or with her friends. As you all know though, just driving around, travelling on trains or trams, you are constantly assaulted by images of what is considered ‘beautiful’……and it’s all photoshopped! It’s just not real. So my point is even for a child who has very little ‘conscious’ exposure to the world of models, and mass media…..it still gets in!

Initially I felt a bit of despair as to how, as one parent, in a world full of marketing masterminds, could I make a difference to how she perceives the world and the ‘real’ beauty in it? I had to come back to what Steve Biddulph said about finding her spark, spending time doing those things she really loves doing. Having the courage as a parent to not let her grow up too quick. So I will continue to feed her soul with what is good and also showing her bits and pieces of those of the celebrity world that just aren’t real. I can’t shield her from all that stuff but I can choose to educate and expose her to things that are good for her soul.

We went hunting for something better and came across My Pop Studio. The description from the website says: “My Pop Studio is a creative play experience that strengthens critical thinking skills about television, music, magazines and online media directed at girls”. The girls get to create their in their own magazine, tv, music or digital studio. Pretty cool if your daughter is into online activities and miles better than the example above! Probably aimed at 10 and up.
http://www.mypopstudio.com/index2.php

This was another great link that I showed her parts of. How ‘real’ the real images were I don’t know and it doesn’t really matter only to say, it shows very clearly how images are manipulated.
http://imgur.com/a/zRmEM#IL6jtDY

It is wrestling with this is the sort of thing that inspired me to write this blog. I believe that there is as much good stuff out there as there is the mass marketed rubbish, if not more. I’ve just got to go looking for it. Fortunately, I’m not the only one and many of you have supplied me with some great links. One of which is this TED talk by Cameron Russell, who gives the view from the inside of a model’s life. Clearly an intelligent young woman and fabulous that she has done it in this way. While my daughter is still a bit young for it, it’d be great for teenagers to see it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KM4Xe6Dlp0Y

And one last link, again brought to my attention by one another of you beautiful people is the music of a young singer/songwriter from New Zealand. Her name is Holly Christina. She writes for a young audience about the issues facing teenagers. Here’s the link to a song that is called ‘Image’. My daughter likes this one among others. Sweet voice and looks like a regular chick.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7-kqO4IxDY&feature=c4-overview&list=LLZuW8lM2UD7zdFQmGFR4t1Q
http://www.hollychristina.co.nz/

Oh, sorry one more thing……another fabulous link, this certainly made me think of the words I use around my daughter and also gave me pause to listen to the internal dialogue how I view and feel about my own body. Have a read……
http://hopeave.wordpress.com/2013/07/29/how-to-talk-to-your-daughter-about-her-body/

Top image by life.paperblog.com

“What’s the use of the fear, if not to face it?”

I heard a man called Giles Duley say the title of this post that last night on the tv show 4corners. Amazing man. He is a war photographer who was embedded with the US army who had both legs and 1 arm blown off when he stepped on an IED (improvised explosive device a.k.a a bomb!), while working in Afghanistan. The most extraordinary thing about it is that he is going back to Afghanistan. He’s learnt how to use his camera with his one arm and hand. He’s going back to photograph the lives of those who don’t have the luxury of top level medical care, who remain in a war torn country. That takes courage……here’s what another courageous man had to say about fear:
“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” Nelson Mandela
I reckon he knew what he was talking about and both of these people have had extreme circumstances to be forced to look at their fears…..how as parents do we step over our own fears? To do our best to live fearlessly so our daughters can discover that in themselves?

When my daughter was only 2 or 3, a friend gave me a copy of Steve Biddulph’s book “The Secret of Happy Children”. The thing that stayed with me, from that book, was how we can make our children fearful without even knowing it, in the language that we use. How often when you go to a park, do you hear a parent call to their child ‘be careful’? Reading it here, it sounds pretty innocuous but in my own experience I used to hear myself say it a lot. My little one was the adventuresome type. She was a climber from the get-go and seemingly had no fear of heights, only becoming afraid when she’d clambered up something and was unsure of how to get down! After reading what Steve Biddulph had to say, it gave me an insight into myself and I was able to observe that she was actually fine, she wasn’t scared at all and I was the one who was! The challenge became finding the balance between what WAS actually a safe exploration for toddler to be embarking on and my own fears about that.

So what did I do? I started taking deep breathes and being aware of my own fears and did my best not put them on my little girl. I changed the language that I used. Instead of using ‘be careful’ all the time which when you think about it has little meaning to little people, especially when they’ve heard it 600 times, I began to say ‘remember where you are; feel your foot on the step; feel your hand on the rope’. With positive reinforcement when she was able to do that, she was going up and down stairs with ease and confidence in no time! By doing this, it encouraged her to be present, training her to give her attention to where she was and what she was climbing on. Thankfully to this day, we’ve only had one fall! Unbelievable! She does have a pretty good sense of balance so I’m sure that has something to do with it too! As a result though, my worries started to decrease because I wasn’t speaking to her from a place of fear but from one of encouragement. It also allowed me to gauge more accurately what she was within her capacity. Then when there were times that she got scared, it became a powerful way for her become aware of the fear she was feeling but be present to where her body is and give her attention to that (not that she would have thought of it like that). This is clearly a work in progress, in different ways as she moves through different stages.

I consciously tried to be present to my own fears when they raised their heads. I looked at the things in my life that increased fear within me. It was things like the news and violent movies, particularly brief news reports on TV and radio, full of awful things with no real context and no follow up, just awful news with a fluffy kitten story at the end. Yuck. I just stopped listening and watching. Not only did I not want my daughter to see that stuff but I didn’t like the effect it had on me. So I stopped and I still rarely listen to it, and I don’t regret for a minute. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to be an ostrich, I just don’t like sound bites that don’t give a full picture!

That’s one sort of fear…….now picture this….a young girl sitting in front of you completely and utterly overcome with fear and anxiety, shaky, speaking really quickly and putting her hands over her face when try to ask her what was happening. It’s tricky to find out what is really going on because she just keeps saying I can’t, I can’t. This was what I was confronted with 2 weeks ago. This was my 10 year old. The same confident little climber was now sitting in front of me completely brought undone because she needed to make a decision. Not a small decision. She was asked to do a solo recitation at her school, where she was required in a weeks time, to stand in front of the whole school and recite two verses of sanskrit and its translation in english. Interestingly, at that point in time it wasn’t about the task she needed to perform, it was the decision she had to make; to commit or not to commit. To put this in context, at her little school, she has learnt sanskrit since prep and finds it relatively easy to learn, so as her mum I knew learning it, which she already had the first verse under her belt, wasn’t going to be a problem. I also knew, from past experience that being the emotional introvert that she is, that she needed time to prepare herself and she was worried that a week wasn’t long enough. She was blowing it all out of proportion – we all do that from time to time right? Something didn’t quite gel for me though, there was a part to this that didn’t make sense for her response to be so strong.

So I’ve talked with her, trying to get her to take some deep breaths to slow things down a bit. I’ve said all the rational, cognitive things that you say to try and make it better….or make ME feel better, that I was at least doing SOMETHING! I reassured her that it was ok to feel what she was feeling, it was understandable and that the world over, people are scared of public speaking! We went and spoke to her teacher and then I got all the pieces to the puzzle. She adores her teacher and her teacher leant over and said to her, “you won’t be letting me down if you don’t want to do it”. Ahha! Her teacher explained that she wanted to offer the opportunity to her, to give her a chance to step over the fear of not getting it right, but if she wasn’t ready, that that was ok too. So there was no pressure from anyone, other than herself. So it was twofold, not wanting to let her teacher down and not being able to learn it in time.

Her teacher said the only reason why she needed an answer was if she wasn’t going to do it, she needed to let the other child who would step in know, so they could learn the lines. What I also knew from past experience, both in front of her class and whole school, that if she was prepared then standing up speaking publicly was a piece of cake. That’s how her introvert nature works in her. Needs time and space to process and then in all likelihood, deliver the goods.

Her teacher offered her the choice of deciding then and there or taking the weekend to think about it,  then coming to school on Monday with a decision. She chose to think about it over the weekend. The end of the school day came and when I went to collect her from the playground and the first thing she said to me was “I’ve made a decision about the sanskrit competition.” “Really?” I said, thinking that she couldn’t cope with it swirling around in her head for the weekend, thinking she’s not going to do it, going by the state she was in when I last saw her. She says “I’m going to do it”. Wahoo!!! When we got to the car, I said how stoked I was she had decided to do the solo recitation. I knew it was no small thing. She looked over at me and said “I think that little voice won”.

What did she mean by that I hear you ask? She and I have had lots of conversations around the importance of turning 10. At Erasmus, where she goes to school, it is founded on the principle of unity. It comes from the indian philosophy of Advaita, meaning ‘not two’ – as with loads of sanskrit terms I’m sure it holds lots of other meanings but it’s is fundamentally about unity. Within that philosophy, when it comes the development of a child’s heart and mind, at the age of 10, it is said that that is the time when their capacity for reason begins to take shape. It’s like a bud of a flower beginning to open. Through watching my own daughter, it’s interesting to watch how things for her have evolved.

In the Ruldoph Steiner philosophy, he talks about ‘the crossing’. It starts at about 7 and is in full flight through 8 and 9 years of age. It is a tumultuous time for a lot of children. I’ve heard ‘the crossing’ described that it’s when the child starts to see the world from the outside in, rather than from the inside out. Hence grade 3 and 4 can be a really tricky time at school, when worrying what your school friends think really begins to matter. I know my daughter felt it in Grade 4. Things seem to have really settled for her a lot in the last few months. So what happens after ‘the crossing’? I don’t know what Steiner would say, what the philosophy of Advaita says is that this faculty of intellect or voice of reason begins to show itself in such way that the child can now start to understand the world in a way they had not been able to previously. Prior to this time, often Mum and/or Dad have been the authority in their lives and now a part of the child will begin to question that……I noticed attitude starting to creep into interactions with my daughter, that previously hadn’t shown itself. Teenager-dom here we come!

In the conversations I had had with my daughter about turning 10 and why I was making a big deal about it, I explained it like this. I told her all those times that her dad and I had told her what to do, given instructions, directions, guidance, advice and wanted her to do what she was asked, it was because (apart from that was what was needed) she needed to be able to follow a direction that was in her best interest, so that when she is older, when she has to make decisions without her dad or I to guide her, she can listen to that little voice in her head that knows what the right thing is. I’ve been a big cartoon fan since I was a kid and I said to her that it is like Sylvester the Cat or Goofy when they are depicted with an angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. The devil will always be telling you WANT to do but the angel will always tell you what you OUGHT to do. Listen to the angel and if you can, it’s like a muscle, the more you listen to it, the stronger it gets and the easier it is to do what’s best and right for you.

So when she told me the little voice won, I was so stoked. Not because she had listened to what we had said but because in the face of an enormous amount of fear, she listened to the angel. By the end of the weekend, she had learnt both verses in sanskrit and english and by the middle of the following week was happy to recite it to whoever wanted to listen! Then that young girl that was a complete wreck the week before stood in front of her whole school and recited the verses so well that she won the solo recitation competition in her age group. Her class won the group recitation. Awesome. Yes I was rapt that she won but to me that was cream on the top. In her stepping over the fear and listening to the little voice, that to me is worth more accolades than the kudos that comes from winning a competition. In saying that though, for her, it was a great confidence boost because having that introverted side to her nature, she doesn’t rush forward for those sorts of things.

As with every other aspect of parenting, dealing with fear is a step by step proposition. For me, in order to allow my daughter to discover fearlessness, and I do believe it’s a quality we all possess, it’s just covered over a lot of the time, I had to have a very good look at my internal world. I certainly don’t have it nailed down. I’m doing my best to find what I value the most and in discovering that, aiming to live in accordance with it. It certainly brings up fear and I’ve learnt now that when fear does come up, it’s something for me to have a look at, rather than running or dodging or pushing in down. I think I’ve taken little steps to helping my girl do that too.

I found this quote online after hearing it in the Princess Diaries movie, which comes from the book by Meg Cabot. I watched it with my daughter. While there are aspects of movie are questionable with regards to princesses and all that stuff, it has some pretty good bits in it too. This is from the princess’ dad in a letter to the princess on her 16th birthday:

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. The brave may not live forever, but the cautious do not live at all. From now on you’ll be traveling the road between who you think you are and who you can be. The key is to allow yourself to make the journey”.

I love it! Looking for to hearing what you think. How do you deal with fear that you see in yourself or in your child?

How do we help depressed young people?

When I found the picture above, I thought oh Jan that’s a bit corny! But when I thought about it a little more, it’s actually a very truthful statement. I have been the significant other of a person with full blown clinical depression and to this day he would tell you that I saved his life. I always shied away from that but in seeing the talk that I’m going to write about here, I now have an clearer understanding of the role I played and why it was so important to his well being. It comes down to me being present and willing enough to try and understand his world. Had I not, on reflection, I’m not sure he would still be here.

As you will see and read here, understanding is the very thing that is missing when comes to depression and none more so than with adolescents. They have so much going on that it’s easy to put it down ‘a phase’ they are going through, when in actual fact it can be so much more, and without understanding it, it may well have dire consequences. It’s another huge frontier for parents!

Sorry, a bit of a heavy start but mental health isn’t exactly a light subject!

Back in mid June this year, a friend and I went to this talk in the heart of Melbourne. It’s called a Lunchbox/Soapbox and it’s conducted by the Wheeler Centre. It’s such a great forum for all sorts of things! (see the link below). But on this day we went to see Dr. Michael Carr-Gregg. He is an amazing man who has dedicated his career to understanding and helping adolescents who suffer with mental health issues. He clearly has a deep love and passion for this work and spoke in a way that was completely accessible and empowering. He said his aim “in all his writings is to increase the emotional literacy of mums and dads and adult carers and to explain what they can do when their teenagers do in fact, lose their psychological moorings.”

Here is a overview of what he spoke about and I’ve included the link so you can watch if for yourself. Please do, having seen it more than once now, it is very potent. The case study is pretty disturbing but certainly made me sit up and take notice…

Just a note of warning, this blog and talk does include the issue of teen suicide so please exercise personal discretion.

Here’s a big statistic and this is how the talk began…..75% of all psychological problems in human beings begin before the age of 24.

Each year in Australia, 300 young people take their own lives.

He told us the story of Hannah. The 3rd of 5 children. She had a happy childhood and adolescence, not without challenges but managed well. She enjoyed music, both listening to and playing it. She engaged in sport and writing, including journals. Hannah had simple tastes, not big on fashion and good relationships with her parents and siblings. She had a spiritual faith, was involved in a youth group, and did some teaching at sunday school. She worked part time, and enjoyed going to parties and the beach with friends.

She “appears to have a solid base of warmth, friendship and love. All of which should have been a potent and positive amulet, a countervailing force against future unhappiness. But all of this unravelled and eventually she slipped her psychological moorings and succumbed to a savage, lacerating depression.” It would have been a ‘herculian’ effort to keep up the facade. It was only after she died that her family found journals that described what was really happening for her, “where she no longer found anything in life remotely interesting or enjoyable or worthwhile”. She tried to handle it by herself and tried to ‘wish’ the dis-ease away. There were few outward signs to anyone. Not friends, family, or siblings.

I don’t know about you but that knocked me for six! What a full on and tragic account of a girl’s life. Sadly though, she isn’t alone.

Dr Carr-Gregg says people who commit suicide see it as a problem solving device – If I’m not here, my problems aren’t here. Most people who kill themselves in this age group, have depression and are often undiagnosed. He says “it’s a chemical imbalance in the brain, and no amount of love and caring or trying to build their self esteem will change their perception that their situation is hopeless.” He said “the unpalatable truth of the recognition of mental issues in young people is still unacceptably low”, not just by parents and schools but also by peers.

It’s estimated that 30% of young people who have psychological problems will seek help and that 50% of the most serious cases NEVER seek help.

This is in part due to what he says is the ‘ostrich mentality’ – we notice something strange going on with teenagers but out of ignorance or fear, hope it’ll go away or we put it down to a typical teenage phase and ignore it. However the longer it’s ignored, the harder it is to treat, and it’s still not taken seriously in 2013 because you can’t ‘see’ the signs of it and through ignorance, stigma and prejudice it’s still not seen as a genuine illness.

THE GOOD NEWS!

The vast majority, 60-70% of young people get through adolescence with no major problems.

However, as parents, knowing the fine line between normal behaviour and warning signs for mental health issues is not always easy. But here’s a list of what to look for…..

8 KEY SIGNS

1. Long standing feelings of unhappiness, moodiness and in particular irritability, accompanied with a sense emptiness and numbness in conjunction with the other symptoms (listed) for a period of 2 – 3 weeks continuously. This is more than just adolescence, it deserves diagnosis and assessment.
2. A young person who formerly enjoyed life suddenly loses interest and pleasure in activities that once gave them a wonderful feeling.
3. Loss of appetite, or weight, or particularly in girls, over eating, trying to manage their mood with food.
4. Can’t sleep. Teenagers are the most sleep deprived segment  of the population. Depressed teenagers struggle to get to sleep and wake frequently during the night. They can get stuck in a pattern of waking early at 4 or 5am and can’t get back to sleep because ironically, they are too tired to fall asleep again. There’s hypersomnia too, where they can’t get out of bed and sleep all day.
5. Feeling bad, worthlessness or guilt.
6. Self critical, self blaming type of behaviour.
7. Difficulty concentrating or making decisions (par for the course for young people at this age but not if they have all these other symptoms as well).
8. Preoccupation or obsession with dark and gloomy thoughts that include suicide.

Another scary statistic…..and why is it so that
1 in 4 secondary school children are diagnosed with depression
1 in 7 primary school children?

Advertising, celebrity, internet and pornography is pressuring them to grow up too soon. “Our 18 is their 14, our 14 is their 10”.

Dr Carr Gregg says “never has growing up been under such a sustained assault”. The pressures of marketing are ‘all sewing the seeds of body hatred. Little girls and little boys did not grow up hating their bodies….hating the world”. Marketing companies around the world have sold the message that ‘your looks are the most important thing about you’.

When you ask the question why is all this happening and what can we do, he says….
GO BACK TO THE PARENTS …. “equip them with the skills, the knowledge and strategies so they can become the world experts of their sons and daughters to intervene early.”

Not filmed but afterwards, there was question time. Dr Carr-Gregg was asked about medication and the push to see psychologists given the power to prescribe it. He flatly said he didn’t want that power and wouldn’t like to see it introduced. He said in the vast majority of cases with young people, mental health issues could be managed and dealt with without the use of medication. Instead, he would prescribe CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy) and mindfulness techniques.  He said there were some cases, like the one he described with Hannah, that no amount of talking (or skill or charm on the part of the psychologist!) or techniques would have helped in that acute stage. Medication would be used to help normalise the situation for the young person so they would  have the capacity to see things more clearly and not through the dark lens of depression.

So where does that leave us? I don’t even have a teenager yet! What I did get from this talk however, and it links back to my last post on introversion, is the need to connect and understand my children. For me, my efforts go in that direction now so when we do hit the teen years, the ride might not be quite so rough. Right? Well that’s all I can hope for! I think this is the case in point for me because while there are lots aspects of my daughter’s nature that are like me and I completely get, there are others, like the introversion, that I don’t. So what if you are a go goer, amazing sales person and your child is super sensitive and doesn’t appear to have any get up and go? I think this behoves us to look at positive, constructive ways to build bridges between my world and my understanding of the child and what is ACTUALLY going on inside their world. Hopefully the lines are open so when the tough gets going and like I said in my first post – we all know it will! – they are not feeling so isolated in their own world that they can’t find a way to communicate it. I could be way off base, as I’ve no experience of it yet as a parent. I can also appreciate the adolescence that I went through will be VERY different to that which my children face.

Am I way off base? I’d love to hear from those of you who have teenagers or have navigated that path already and are on the other side it. Maybe you are a young person, beyond adolescence. I would love to get a perspective on what’s helped, what didn’t, what was missing, what would you have done differently?

Dr Carr-Gregg suggested, in the question time, to use a online personality test so as get a better understanding of the type of personality your child is. In writing that it feels a bit weird, (really a Myers Briggs for kids?) but in the absence of a manual, any tool that can be added to my back pocket, I’d be grateful for the use of! I haven’t found a good one yet so I’ll post it when I do, but if you have any experience of that kind of thing, please let me know so we can share it with everyone!

The last thing I wanted to add is that I know psychology isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. There are loads of things that fill out the picture as to why someone ends up with a mental health issue and equally as many ways of approaching its treatment but as a starting point to this conversation, I think this is a really intelligent one.

Here’s the link to the talk, along with Dr Carr-Gregg’s website and the Wheeler Centre.

Looking forward to your feedback!

Cheers,
Janet

http://wheelercentre.com/videos/video/lunchbox-soapbox-michael-carr-gregg-on-parenting-adolescents/

http://www.michaelcarr-gregg.com.au/index.shtml

http://wheelercentre.com/

As with everything, it’s step by step…

Hello! Another week has passed already! Hope you’ve had a good one.

This week I want to open up a conversation on introversion. Why? Because in my experience, introversion is a pretty misunderstood aspect of many people’s nature and how they relate to the world. Through learning about it, my understanding of my daughter has deepened. It has significantly affected my relationship with her, for the better.

Did you know that a third to a half of the world’s population are introverts?

I certainly didn’t and I didn’t realize that my daughter had or has an introverted side to her until pretty recently AND she just turned 10! How did I not know that??

I don’t know about you but growing up I barely heard the term introvert. If someone was quiet and reserved, they were labeled as shy, timid or lacking in self-confidence. That’s what I thought too. Then, in my ignorance, along with many others, I thought that there was something wrong them. I pitied them or when their way annoyed me, they needed to ‘get over themselves’. Get up, get out there and get on with it. Not that hard surely? Sadly, it’s taken me far too long to come to a clearer, healthier understanding of what introversion is and how we as a community are poorer for not understanding it more fully.

So what is introversion? According to Susan Cain, she says in her TED talk (see link below) “It’s different from being shy. Shyness is about the fear of social judgment. Introversion is more about how do you respond to stimulation, including social stimulation. So extroverts really crave large amounts of stimulation, whereas introverts feel at their most alive, their most switched on and their most capable when they are in quieter, low key environment, not all the time, these things aren’t absolute but a lot of the time”.

http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts.html

The talk is great and I really recommend having a look, it opened my eyes considerably. It has paved the way for me to have broader and deeper understanding of my daughter and this part of her nature. But here’s the thing, like all polarities, there’s a continuum between the two. So no one is completely introverted or extroverted and there’s a whole lot of grey in between.

On reflection, watching my daughter grow up, I can now see the sensitive aspects of her nature showing themselves right from the get-go. I didn’t think much of it at the time, only to notice it really. She’s always been quite sensitive to energy of other people and I noticed it from the time she was just a wee bubby. The thing is, when I talk about it with others, they often comment that they wouldn’t pick her as an introvert at all, and therein lies the answer as to why I only really discovered it in the last 18 months or so because she isn’t a particularly reserved person. She can be the life of the party…love that giggle, participates well and is well liked in class and has a great circle of friends. She has always been a sociably little person. From the time that she could move she was off, with little concern for where I was. Nothing shy or timid about that right? That’s right, she doesn’t have a problem with being social, but as Susan Cain said it’s about how she responses to stimulation. She gets overwhelmed by it. If she gets overloaded, she goes inward. If her emotions get too much for her, she goes inward. If she feels unwell, she goes inward. When anything is too much she retreats into the safety of her own world, thankfully into books, music and writing.

So how come I woke up to this? In a word…..Frustration. Why? Because I would get annoyed with her when she just wouldn’t speak. I knew something was bothering her and trying to get to the bottom of it was nearly impossible! What I realized was that this feeling was familiar to me. I felt the same thing toward her dad. Sadly, it was after the dissolution of my marriage that I came to fully appreciate his introverted nature. For so long I wanted to change him, be more outgoing, more social, more……..like me. Wow how wrong can a girl be? But the gold in that wound is the learning from that. That will now help me help my daughter be able to navigate her internal world in a healthier way. The emotional intelligence she is learning is that she can regulate how much stimulus she can handle. She is learning about her own measure, when she needs to retreat, when she needs to push through. She is finding healthy ways to express what she is feeling, particularly useful when her parents are longer together.

Through my learning I have been able to say to her many times there’s absolutely nothing wrong with needing to retreat. For me, I struggle with it because that’s not how I operate. I had a conversation with her one day last year and I said to her that when I am sad, my energy goes out. I talk with friends, I cry with friends, I get it out of my system and then have some quiet but when you get sad your energy goes in. I said to her while that is perfectly ok, I don’t understand because that’s not the way I work but I WANT to understand so I understand where you’re at. I gave her the analogy that it would be like if she were left handed and me right handed. I don’t understand how she could write differently across the page, how she could use scissors differently. There’s nothing wrong with it, just different. So I knew that MY way wasn’t going to work, talking was a waste of time at that point. So I suggested ways that she might feel comfortable with, that could allow her to express what was going on for her. She has discovered a love of writing so I was able to use that to stand at the door of her world. We started with written conversations, on paper, via emails, on notepads, with drawings and gently, gently, she’s opening the door and allowing me into her world. How beautiful and rich it is.

I could go on, this is a huge topic and while my daughter is definitely on the introvert end of the spectrum, it’s not at the extreme end. I hope I’m helping her grow in emotional intelligence so she can feel comfortable in her own skin. I feel more connected to her and I hope she feels the same way toward me. More and more I see that that connection is a big part of raising Strong Healthy Girls.

It is as the title of this blog says, step by step….one hurdle at a time, one moment at a time.

Til next week.

Janet

Susan Cain is the author of  “QUIET – the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking”. Great book. Highly recommend it…

http://www.thepowerofintroverts.com/about-the-author/

Looking in my own backyard!

Hello! Thanks for coming back! Please let me start this second instalment with the most humble thank you. I have been close to tears more than once in the last week, just reading your comments and words of congratulations and encouragement in emails and the like. Wow! Who would have thought?! Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you for joining me, wherever this journey may lead us!

A comment posted by Nicole inspired this week’s post (thanks Nicole!). There wouldn’t be a parent among us that doesn’t or hasn’t blamed themselves, criticised or berated themselves for their words, thoughts or deeds on the journey through parenthood. My question in response to that is: How does that serve us? How does that help us in our role as parent? What effect or impact does that have on our daughters?

This is by no means isolated to parents, self criticism happens to all of us in all facets of our lives. The second guessing, the self doubt, the shouldn’t’s and the should have’s become a self perpetuating cycle and with not one positive outcome…..and yet we continue to do it.

In pondering what to write about this and how we can best care for the souls of our daughters, Clare (thanks heaps for your comment) reminded me about a book, Mother Daughter Wisdom by Christiane Northrup. It is a great book, so I revisited it this week and in the first few pages she considers not only the long line of genetic connections, but also the soul connections through the generations AND the ambivalence of motherhood.

Where am I going with this? Bare with me……there’s two aspects to this. One is taking a huge view of all the connections between mothers and daughters, all those who have gone before us. The other is talking about the life we are faced with after the sentimental view of motherhood wears off. The following quote sums it up: “Who wouldn’t be ambivalent about the one decision in a woman’s life that totally changes her future? Though the biological act of becoming pregnant requires little thought or planning for most, raising a healthy, secure child is, hands down the hardest job on earth.” Ain’t that the truth??

So one view is the big picture, that so much has gone before us and that we are all connected to the mothers in our lineage and the other is the individual or personal picture faced by all mothers, to varying degrees. This personal lens is the one which we look through on a daily basis. It’s the one that creates much of the turmoil we find ourselves in when we criticise ourselves for the way we parent our children. How often do we stop, look and appreciate the REALLY BIG PICTURE. I’d venture to say not often enough. SO much has happened to lead us to this point in time, and when you begin to consider the connection between the generations of mothers, genetically, emotionally and spiritually, the view becomes vast! This moment, crazy or blissful or somewhere in between has been created by all the amazingly wonderful things we have done, and equally by the not so amazing things, yet we are so quick to hang ourselves out to dry. We forget about all the beautiful qualities that we share EVERYDAY in our jobs as mums.

A friend and mentor of mine, a very long time ago when my daughter was only 3 or 4, said to me very plainly how important is it for mums to have timeout. Time to recharge, to feed her soul, time to rest, time to exercise or simply time to just ‘be’. In her words, “be nothing to no-one”. By that she meant having time where you aren’t responsible for anyone else’s needs except your own. In my friend’s mind, it was imperative. My response was sort of ‘yeah, I hear ya’ but the guilt and the thought of it left me standing in a bit of no man’s land. Who was I if not mother? That’s a big question for another time, but the kicker of the conversation, was when she saw my reaction to her advice. The thing she said next made me really take stock and it was something like this, twas many moons ago…. “Consider what it is you are modelling to your daughter if you don’t take that time, what will this teach her about what it is to be a mum?”. Whoah…. Ok, if I don’t do this for me then she won’t do that for her, if she is a mother one day. And the same goes for my son now, if he doesn’t see Self care from me then he will learn that that is what mothers do and may expect a wife to be that way with his children, if he’s a dad. She was right, it is imperative. Time to nurture yourself must be part of your day or week. I can’t say I became a champion at it over night. It took effort but I found ways to nourish myself. I’m still not a champion at it but I know what feeds my heart and soul.

So back to Nicole’s post about blaming ourselves and more focus on what we are doing right. In my experience, the criticism and self blame comes about when the smaller, personal view is the dominate lens that I look through. When I haven’t had time out, if only to meditate for 5 mins, the space gets gobbled up by thinking. My mind becomes one of those old fashioned spinning tops. You know the metal ones with the handles at the top that you pull up and then push down that creates the momentum? Slowly the speed builds the more you push and pull, faster and faster but if you stop, it’ll slow and eventually stop. I’m still learning to let the top slow down and make sure it does actually stop and rest. When I have taken some time to be still, for me it’s meditation, the knock on effect is that I don’t give myself such a hard time. There’s more space to see things with a clear and reasonable mind! Simple but easy to forget in the throws of looking after children!

The last thing I’ll add to this, to add into the big picture, is to say that I remind myself regularly that my children have their own journey. Kahlil Gibran’s quote on children is my touchstone. I’ve read it since my daughter was born, to remind me that there’s far more at play than anything I can conjure up in my little mind. To me, it’s confronting but true.

Til next week,

Janet

ON CHILDREN

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.

Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Kahlil Gibran was a Lebanese American artist, poet and a writer.

A different way of looking at things……

The last two years of my life have been exceptionally challenging. But everyone has challenges right? So what makes one person better off than another as to how they deal with those challenges? There are loads of factors but a big point of difference is the lens in which we choose to look through. Through all sorts of circumstances in the last couple of years, it’s becoming blindly obvious that I am one of the most if not the MOST important role models in my daughter’s life. I know it’s screamingly obvious but when the chips were really down, I had to stop and ask myself, what do I want my daughter to learn from me in this situation? My marriage ended. I was heartbroken, angry and grieving. Not just because I was no longer married but because I had to and continue to watch my children go through pain that I have no control over and I can’t take that pain away. I’ve had to dig really deep because I decided that I want to teach my daughter (and my son) is that while things can be REALLY hard and she might wish with every part of her being that things were different, that she can choose to deal with the situation with integrity, honouring every part of her heart and soul. I want to teach her that if she has to walk through a fire, that she can do that and come out the other side better for it. I don’t want to sound like I had tickets on myself but this is what I chose for MYSELF first and foremost, no one else. My hope is that she can know those qualities within herself.

Then…..something else happened that woke me up in a different way. A couple of months ago I was listening to the radio and I heard an interview with Steve Biddulph. I was aware that he had written a book called ‘Raising Girls’. The chaplain at school had given a talk to us mums of girls after having been to a seminar where he and Dr. Michael Carr Greg (and others, their names escape me now) had spoken about the wellbeing of girls and that 5 years ago it had begun to really slide. So when I heard him on the radio what he said shocked me all over again. Eight year olds regarded as the best fodder for marketing companies, the softest targets, 14 yr olds having sex and treating it like homework ‘something that you just have to do’ (!!!) and young girls wanting/having labial surgery to change the look of their genitalia because they want to look like what they had seen in porn movies, what the??  From that point on it’s like the universe has just been throwing things my way  to continually fill this picture out for me, to find the answer to the questions that came from hearing that interview – What’s missing? What are girls missing that allows them to be swept away by the media and marketing, by social media, by what their friends think? What are we as parents missing?

Never in a million years did I think I would find myself doing this but there seems to be a real need for it and I need to follow my nose….. so here I am and here is the beginning of Strong Healthy Girls and here’s the journey so far…

After hearing Steve Biddulph speak on the radio, I was inspired! It dawned on me that surely they must have lost or never found themselves! If they had a strong sense of Self and who they are and valued that then surely there’s no need to behave in these ways?

I jumped online at my next available opportunity and I searched ‘strong healthy girls’. Nothing. Healthy girls. Still nothing much except a couple of sites on healthy eating. I really had to go hunting. I found some American sites that were pretty good but nothing that really hit the nail on the head. I found the Raising Children’s Network, the Australian govt funded site – fabulous resource – but still very mainstream and soulless.

So I bought Steve’s book, devoured it in a few days and was blown away. Heartened because it was so rich in its depth and provides a heap of resources to help us parents and therefore our daughters.

He writes in his letter to the reader at the beginning of the book with the hope that the book “fills you fire to make the world a better place for her (your daughter) and for all girls”. That’s exactly what happened for me. It ignited a fire in me that I’m hoping I can spread to and with other parents, so we can make a really positive difference in the lives of not only our own daughters but for all girls in our community.

Because my daughter is just about 10, when I read Steve’s chapter on this age, it was entitled “Finding her Soul”, a little bit of my heart melted. I felt a sigh of relief because I really felt like he was speaking my language. Helping your daughter find her ‘spark’ is an integral part of how she will journey through teenage-hood and young adult life. Phew!

So here is the guts of it. I want to have a conversation with you. Through that conversation, I want to learn from your experience. I want to provide a hub of information and resources for parents so we can nurture the souls of our girls.

After my fruitless search, I decided to create it. There is so much mass marketed rubbish out there that is deliberately targeted at our girls, that I want to create a space that contains what is good. Everything from good books, inspiring movies, clothing and music to alternative health practices for when the mainstream model doesn’t work or fit. I’ll find relevant articles from the experts because I’m NOT an expert. I’m a mum who has a bee in her bonnet about the plight of girls. I’m pretty fired up about it and there is so much good being done in the world in so many different ways, by women and men, mums and dads for the benefit of all girls and women.

So let’s have that conversation, I’m aiming to post an article each week. Follow my blog and please post comments on your experience, your thoughts and how you think we can help girls, right from the get go, so they can find their souls or should I say, stay connected to them.

I sincerely thankyou for reading this and I look forward to hearing from you soon! Til next week.

Janet