Celebrating Girls: Nurturing and Empowering Our Daughters by Virginia Beane Rutter

I can't remember where I first heard about Celebrating Girls but it's been sitting on my to be read shelf for quite a while now.  Published in 1996, it speaks to any woman who has a relationship with a growing girl.  The author is a Jungian, so if that school of thought makes you uncomfortable, some aspects of this book may do so as well.

A few chapter titles:

Three: Bathing: Nourishing Emotional Integrity
Six:  Dressing: Developing Social Awareness
Eight:   Storytelling: Teaching and Learning
Ten:  Walking into Beauty:  Coming of Age and Sexuality

From the first chapter:
"Our task is to invest our daughters' everyday care with purpose, intention, and awareness of their feminine value, and then to create celebrations to mark the passages in their lives.  Broadly speaking, I use the word celebration to mean a conscious attention to making the girls in your life feel that they matter -- to you, to the family, to the community, to the world."(3)

From the third chapter:
"Vacillating, ambivalent feelings are part of growing up and developing emotional maturity.  As a mother, it is easy to get caught up in the tide of your daughter's feelings and try to solve her problems for her.  But it is best to ride the waves with her, maintaining some inner detachment so you do not get invested in either extreme." (30)

Rutter speaks of a mother who gave her 13 year old Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth "to educate her about the cosmetic industry's manipulation of women and girls". (73)  I'm not very familiar with this book, but I like the idea.

From the sixth chapter:
"Social development is important for a girl's self-empowerment, but if you do not want a daughter who just goes along with the crowd, she needs to feel that she has the ability to make changes and choices of her own, not based on peer pressure or your pressure.  This is a delicate balancing act we are asking our daughters to perform -- to be comfortable being exactly who they are (self-expression) and at the same time taking other people and social convention into account (social development)

The object is to be a woman who is in touch with her own needs and creativity and also considers others.  Because, historically, girls have been taught to consider others first, we must be sure that we honor our daughters' individuality and self-expression.  Amazingly, this development often takes shape around the clothes they wear." (88)

This book has given me the opportunity to reflect on the way I care for my body and for my daughter's body.  I want that time to be a pleasant and gentle time.  I hope to talk to her about some of the author's ideas and anecdotes sometime soon.

If I were to say one downfall of the book for me, it would be the somewhat frequent suggestion to use rewards for good behavior, etc.  But I know this is just an idiosyncrasy of mine and it will most likely not bother most other readers.