Ep. 74: Growing Strong Girls

Lindsay Sealey, author of Growing Strong Girls and “girl advocate” speaks with me this week about how to help your daughter find, understand, and value her own voice. With girls receiving so many conflicting external messages, it is vital we help them strengthen their internal self!

Bonfire Digital Wellness has a diverse team of seasoned, compassionate school counselors, ready to coach your teen. Check it out today and take advantage of a 1-month FREE trial: BonfireDW.org/talkingtoteens

Full show notes

Mixed Messages

“Be yourself,” “know that you are strong because you are a girl,” “stand up for yourself,” “don’t let the man get you down.” These platitudes are constantly thrown at girls to assure them that they’ve got everything it takes to rule the world and make all their dreams come true. Though well meaning, these sentiments are made redundant by unrealistic expectations to look pretty at all times, know how to attract and please men, and be accommodating and polite to everybody. In order to encompass all of these values, you would literally have to be perfect. And that’s, like, really hard to do.

Girls are constantly presented with conflicting messages on social media, at school, on TV—even at home. It’s confusing enough for full-grown women to know how to act in the face of all these contradictory pressures, so for girls who are just entering into teendom it feels almost impossible. In order to give tips on helping your teenage daughter build confidence, parents have to effectively combat the pressures placed on her by society. They must also help her confront the drama and growing pains of adolescence in a logical manner. Needless to say, being a teenage girl, or a parent to one, is no walk in the park.

Teenage and preteen girls are in an incredibly vulnerable stage of their lives. They’re extremely susceptible to the influence of their peers and the outside world. So how do you give tips on helping your teenage daughter build confidence if you feel that the influence of others is greater than that of their own parents? Author, CEO, and Professional “Girl Advocate” Lindsay Sealey can tell you how. Sealey wrote the book Growing Strong Girls: Practical Tools to Cultivate Connection in the Preteen Years and has been running workshops with young girls to help develop their own sense confidence and self-worth for fifteen years. In this interview she offers tons of practical tips on helping your teenage daughter build confidence by showing parents how they can successfully connect with, support, and influence their teen girls to believe in themselves despite societal pressures.

What a Girl Wants

It’s not always about what a girl wants but what a girl needs. Let’s face it, some teenage girls want a lot—popularity, money, lots of followers on Instagram, an expensive new car (the last of which they’re definitely not getting). This vapid list of necessities comes from the constant stream of messages society and pop culture throw at them. As parents, some tips on helping your teenage daughter build confidence might be “these things don’t matter” and “one day you might be happy that you didn’t get everything you wanted.” Lindsay Sealey says when parents respond this way, they aren’t actually recognizing their daughter’s feelings.

Among other tips on helping your teenage daughter build confidence, Sealey states that active listening is a pivotal part of connecting with your teenage daughter. If she’s talking to you about a fight with a friend, or about a boy she likes who doesn’t like her back, don’t cut her story short. You need to let her tell you the whole story and run the gamut of all the emotions she’s feeling. Sealy says that parents must be willing to validate their daughter’s feelings and help them process emotions in a healthy way. This means urging your daughter to fully experience, not deflect, their emotions and be open with how, and why, she is feeling them. Letting emotions sink in, even when it’s uncomfortable, will help your daughter fully process the situation and eventually come to terms with it.

Another of the major tips on helping your teenage daughter build confidence is to avoid giving advice when your daughter comes to you with her problems. When parents jump in with their own stories and advice, girls often feel belittled, like their opinions and experiences don’t really matter. Sealy says that parents need to respond with empathetic phrases like, “You must feel really saddened that your friend doesn’t want to eat lunch with you,” or “I would be hurt too if a boy didn’t like me back.” This lets your daughter know that she is valid to feel the way she does, that having feelings doesn’t make her weak. Sealey says it’s okay to ask to share how you’ve overcome a similar situation, however, you should avoid overpowering her story with yours. Tune into the episode to hear more tips on helping your teenage daughter build confidence by identifying opportunities you have to foster revelations through quality time with your daughter.

Miss Independent

According to Sealey, a major part of empowering young girls is to provide them with a safe space to focus on their own interests. In an age defined by comparison, it’s crucial for girls to understand—first and foremost—they need to make themselves happy. One of Sealey's tips on helping your teenage daughter build confidence is to encourage her to pursue individualistic interests, like horseback riding, hiking, painting, or volunteering at animal shelters, rather than focusing entirely on her social life.

Teenage girls have a tendency to overextend themselves with social events in order to avoid missing out or disappointing others. According to Sealey’s tips on helping your teenage daughter build confidence, parents need to steer their daughters away from relying too much on friendships for fulfillment. Developing individualistic interests not only expands your daughters mind, it also gives her a greater sense of self-reliance and independence that’ll come in handy when she’s confronted with friendship drama. If she knows that she has other things to do with her time than spend it with a problematic friend, she won’t be so torn up about parting ways with them.

Further, Sealey provides tips on helping your teenage daughter build confidence and self-respect when confronted with friendship drama. Drama is an unavoidable part of girlhood and can be an opportunity to learn valuable lessons. Often, our daughters will fall out of friendships because someone moved, or someone became popular and the other didn’t, or someone joined the soccer team while the other played tennis. It’s important, Sealey states, to teach your daughter that drifting apart is part of life and it’s important to have a large pool of friends to lean on when one friendship ends. Sealey urges parents to encourage their daughters to become friends with many different types of people. That could mean someone a few years older than them, someone who goes to another school, or someone who comes from a different ethnic background then them. Rather than having one BFF, it’s more beneficial for teenage girls to seek out multiple friendships with people who bring out and strengthen different parts of their personality.

Finding Her Voice

Without proper guidance, it’s...