Joann Deak - Girls Will Be Girls: Raising Confident and Courageous Daughters

Girls
Will Be
Girls

Raising Confident and
Courageous Daughters

JoAnn Deak, PH.D.
with Teresa Barker

Dedication

For my mother,

whose words are becoming part of me;

and for my father,

whose short life shaped me significantly

Epigraph

To Rachel and Rebecca with love

THB

Contents

Most of us get one childhood to remember. I got two.

There was the picture-perfect one of my family: a mother and father very much in love, very loving parents to my older brother and me. We lived in a little town in the Midwest. My mother never worked outside of the home, but instead spent her days driving a station wagon, taking us, and all the neighborhood kids that could fit, to the public pool, the playground, and town. We even had a collie! That was my first childhood. It lasted fourteen years.

On a beautiful spring evening the Sunday before Easter of my freshman year of high school, my father suffered a fatal heart attack. Thus began my second life as a girl growing up, a life that began with an adolescence transformed literally overnight from a girlhood dream to a nightmare of loss and a new, bittersweet appreciation of lifes nuances. Everything about my life changed, and with those changes came a heightened awareness of the gendered experience of everyday life for girls and women.

After my fathers death, I watched my mother go to work in a factory; she was one of the few women there in the early 1960s. Since my brother was at college, I needed to get my drivers license as soon as possible because my mother worked the afternoon shift and was no longer there to drive me anywhere. An adolescent girl who drove herself to school, appointments, high school football games? I was not the only one, butlike my motherI was one of just a few. What surprised and intrigued me the most was the way the rest of the world responded to the changes in our lives. My mothers best friend would become jealous when her husband came over to help my mother start the lawn mower. I proved quite able in my new life, yet without my fathers enthusiastic endorsement, I felt smart but uncertain, more sensitive to what others thought, what others suggested, and what others assumed about me.

This second childhood was to become a particularly defining one for me for reasons that I would fully understand only later through my work as a child psychologist with girls. My fathers death was for me a crucible event , a moment in which everything I knew and felt and was was put to a test. It was a trial by fire, and one through which I might emerge more fragile or more strong, or perhaps both. But whatever the outcome, I was changed. Without thinking consciously about it at the time, Ive always separated my life into two parts: before and after my father died.

Subsequently, in my work with children and adults my sense of crucible events as the catalyst for emotional growth and development became a useful tool in helping others see the effects of life events on their own emotional development and their relationships with others. Through this lens of crucible events it is possible to get a better view of the inner life of girls. This I know from my work, and from my own personal experiences of moving from my family home out into the world. I would forever feel a particular empathy toward girls emotional experience, and a strong desire to make sense of it for parents, educators, and girls themselves. But first I had to navigate those waters for myself, and it was a slow, deliberate journey.

My love of science and people drew me first to pursue an education in nursing, but I soon shifted my focus to teaching, earned my degree, and got the job. By my second year of teaching, when I couldnt figure out how to reach and teach some of my students, I took a day off to visit the nearest university, Kent State, to see which graduate courses were available to help me understand how the human brain worked. A serendipitous meeting and the discovery of an exciting doctoral program in preventive psychology prompted me to resign from teaching to resume my own education. With my Ph.D., I established a private practice and started a company with three other colleagues developing preventive psychological programs for schools. Soon one of our clients, the director of Laurel School, recruited me to serve as the staff school psychologist, a position I agreed to take for one year while we assessed their needs.

The next year Carol Gilligan, author of In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Womens Development, and her Harvard crew wanted to do a landmark study at the school. I had taken a course from her at Harvard; she now asked me to be an in-house interviewer for the next six years. How could I pass up the opportunity? I stayed on.

After the Laurel/Harvard study was completed, someone had to go to other schools and conferences to share what we had learned. Carol Gilligan was moving on to other studies and was too busy. Thus began my life as a gender expert. Laurel School graciously allowed me to take several days each year to do this. By now I was also experiencing the joys of being an administrator, having become director of the middle, primary, and early childhood divisions through another instance of serendipity. The previous director resigned in April one year, and the school was in chaos. What better person than the school psychologist to fill in the gap? It would only be temporary, the head of the school assured me. Well, it wasnt, exactly. Five years later, because of my speaking engagements around the country, and a growing list of requests for me to present gender equity workshops for parents, teachers, administrators, and students (girls and boys), I was asked by the National Association of Independent Schools to be on a national committee for women in independent schools. My already crowded calendar of speaking engagements and the growing demand for my gender equity workshops made my next career step clear: I became a full-time consultant, working year-round with schools, parent and teacher organizations, and students themselves in the United States and abroad.

Early in my career as a psychologist, after teaching for several years and then interning in a variety of settings, and with a variety of clients, from the very young to the very old, it was clear to me that for many clients, treatment was long, expensive, painful, and often ineffective. Being the idealist that I am, my core philosophy fit with the philosophy of prevention, and that is where I turned my attention as a specialist.

Preventive psychology is at the other end of the spectrum from the kind of private practice work most people envision when they think of a psychologist or therapist. I do counsel individual children and their families privately, but most of my time is devoted to what we call primary prevention. I evaluate factors in schools or families that cause mental health or learning issues and work to fix them, eliminate them, or modify an environment so those factors dont exist. As a public speaker and a consultant, I work with schools and communities around the country, conducting workshops for parents and teachers who want to create schools and families where children can thrive, and speaking with students about their concerns or issues of the day. My life and career have thrived in ways I would never have imagined in earlier years. I have made my way as many women do: on the winds of my intuition, a perfect model of affiliation motivation, influenced by people, connections, and gut feelings.

Wherever I go, I generally find thoughtful, caring, determined parents and school staff with a lot in common. They typically have high ideals, a desire for clarity, and a willingness to work at making their schools and homes places that support healthy development for girls. Parents always want to know in general how to be a good parent. Teachers want to be the one a student remembers fondly thirty years later.