Jo Wimble-Groves - Rise of the Girl: Seven Empowering Conversations To Have With Your Daughter

Parenting consultant, coach and certified NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) practitioner

In this book, Jo Wimble-Groves is asking you to have seven conversations with your children. They will show you how you can encourage your daughters to celebrate who they are, and not be afraid to show that to the world.

Every day we are told, by ourselves and others, that we should be happy and positive. This goal translates to an agenda in our parenting that we must make our daughters happy in order for them to feel confident enough to build an independent and successful life. However, I believe that by making happiness our main parenting goal, we can miss opportunities to teach our children the skills that create sustainable success, in terms of how they feel about themselves, and what they choose to do in life in order to live independently. Sustainable success can only be created through a secure foundation of emotional regulation and resilience. Growing resilience is a more useful goal than pursuing happiness, because it will help our daughters find contentment in their internal and external worlds.

We know that the experience of assigning meaning to ourselves as individuals takes place around the age of two, when words start coming together to form sentences, at which point children are able to start naming things and experiences. By age four, children start to experience being seen as a unique person of significance. Young children interpret what is told to them as fact and they begin to create a story about themselves, which they refine as they grow. It is at age seven that the childs self-defining story known as an inner script has been developed and internalised.

I believe that some of our parenting decisions, despite our positive intentions, can lead to a less-than-positive and less-than-confident inner script. Therefore, its crucial for us as parents to consciously make our words, our communication, our conversations and our actions significant and intentional in order to build self-esteem through a positive parenting philosophy.

You may have heard of the psychologist Dr Carol Dweck, whose 1998 research paper suggests that over praising can undermine a childs motivation and performance. How we praise, how we discipline, how we ask for the behaviours we want to see, how we punish the behaviours we dont want to see, how we problem-solve whether we try to fix things from a place of control or collaboration all contribute to a childs development.

We want the focus to be on what our daughters can do, rather than what they think they cant do. In the early years, the emphasis should be on being, rather than doing.

Rise of the Girl is a current and relevant response to the global rise of girls and young women feeling anxious about finding their place in a world that is constantly changing: politically, economically, socially and environmentally. This anxiety can translate into the limiting belief that less than perfect can never be good enough. This way of thinking can cripple a girls motivation and curiosity. It can impede her ability to dream big.

In 2018, the Mental Health Foundation reported some data that was released by NHS Digital. Their aim was to shed some light on the mental health of our children and young people. The figures showed that for ages 1719, nearly one in four young women had a mental health disorder, with emotional disorders (particularly anxiety) the most commonly reported.

The rise in teenage anxiety and depression could be tackled by something as simple as having the seven key conversations described in this book. Why are these seven conversations so important? Because when we strive for excellence, rather than perfection; when we reward and praise for effort, rather than ability; when we encourage curiosity for curiositys sake; when we encourage experimentation; when we talk about the positive impacts of failure, we can reframe the developing mindsets of our daughters.

This book will help you reflect on, and have an honest conversation about, the role of fear in todays parenting approach how fear seeps into what our daughters see, hear and experience from an early age. One of the key messages of this book is to reassess our relationship with failure. Failure in itself doesnt interfere with happiness if we are able to bounce back and accept that life is difficult. Using the concept of the growth mindset that we must believe in our capacity for self-improvement which is at the core of the seven conversations, we can teach our children to dare to be different, dare to dream, dare to make mistakes and dare to be curious.

Anxiety is the thief of dreams, of contentment and of resilience. Read on to discover ways to increase your daughters chances of happiness.

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