Teaching Your Child To Be Assertive

Check out this great post about giving your child ways to stand up for themselves -- even if it's you they are standing up to!

http://www.authenticparenting.info/2011/03/most-effective-tool-youve-never-used-to.html

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.

Protecting the Gift: Keeping Children and Teenagers Safe (and Parents Sane) by Gavin de Becker

So I'm pretty sure that book bloggers are supposed to have nice concise little reviews -- not rambling streams of consciousness and/or bullet pointed excerpts from the book they are reviewing.  Luckily, I've never completely identified myself as a book blogger -- or at least not as solely a book blogger.

Whew, glad we cleared that up.

So this book.  It is truly not an alarmist book, though the title would give one that impression.  The author has an impressive resume -- the book flap bills him as "America's leading expert on predicting violent behavior" -- he has advised Supreme Court justices and the C.I.A. 

We live, in the U.S. and perhaps in the West as a whole, in a culture of fear.  De Becker's first book was The Gift of Fear.  I haven't read it but I have the impression that he feels that our intuition uses fear to warn us and that warning comes for a reason.  In this book, he encourages parents to trust their intuition.  He also educates the reader about what fears are unwarranted -- thus freeing up the emotional energy and time to focus on those dangers that are more likely to occur.  This book is filled with anecdotes (all taken from actual incidents) to illustrate his points.

The rest of this post will most likely be me blathering about specific parts of the book I especially liked.  Feel free to stop reading now, but do know that I recommend this book to all and sundry.

Chapter titles:
The Search for Certainty
Intuition - The Source of Safety
Worry
Survival Signals
Talk to Strangers
The Changing of the Guard
Baby-Sitters and Nannies
Children away from Home
Sexual Predators
Children at School
Protecting Ophelia
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and Smith & Wesson
Friends as Enemies
All in the Family
Protecting the Village
Protecting the Gift

Actually, I've decided that there's too much good stuff in here and it's too late at night.  I've put this on my re-read list and I'll leave it at that for now.

Goodnight and good luck.