Kasey Edwards - Raising Girls Who Like Themselves

Inner strength, authenticity and self-love are the greatest gifts a girl can possess. The tools and insights in this book will help parents to give these gifts to their daughters. Dr Lea Waters, author of The Strength Switch

When you raise a girl who likes herself, everything else follows. She will strive for excellence because she has faith in her ability to achieve it and the confidence to pick herself up. She will nurture her physical and mental health because its natural to care for something you love. She will insist on healthy relationships because she believes she deserves nothing less. She will be joyful and secure, knowing that her greatest friend and most capable ally is herself.

Raising Girls Who Like Themselves details the seven qualities that enable girls to thrive and arm themselves against a world that tells them they are flawed. Packed with practical, evidence-based advice, it is the indispensable guide to raising a girl who is happy and confident in herself.

Free of parental guilt and grounded in research, Raising Girls Who Like Themselves is imbued with the warmth and wit of a mum and dad who are in the same parenting trenches as you, fighting for their daughters futures.

Dear fellow parent,

Thank you for picking up our book. We have daughters, too. Violet is ten and Ivy is a unicorn (also known as five). At this stage our girls are very different from each other. If they one day decide to go backpacking around Europe together, it wouldnt surprise us if Violet critiques the art inside the Louvre while Ivy scales the pyramid outside.

Like every generation before us, we want our children to have lives that are better than ours more secure and filled with greater opportunities. We want them to be wealthier than us, and were not just talking about material wealth. While a certain level of financial stability is important for a secure and independent life, we want our girls to be wealthier in spirit.

We want our daughters to be curious and independent and ambitious. We want them to make good choices, to have the resilience to bounce back from their it seemed like a good idea at the time decisions, and to possess the strength to recover from plain bad luck. More than anything, we want them to have the courage to be real. We want them to understand themselves and to genuinely like who they are. If we were to boil down our goal as parents, it would be: we want to raise girls and the women they become who love themselves as much as we love them. Unconditionally.

If we can get this right then we figure everything else will follow. They will strive for excellence not because theyre the hectored cubs of tiger mothers and fathers, but because they have faith in their ability to achieve it. They will range far beyond their comfort zones because theyre adventurous and because failure is just a sign that theyre still learning. Theyll have the confidence to pick themselves up and try again. They will insist on healthy relationships because they will believe they deserve nothing less. They will nurture their physical and mental health because its natural to care for what you love. They will be empathetic and open-minded because they will not be threatened by difference or need to tear other people down to feel better about themselves. They will be joyful and strong, knowing they are their own greatest friend and most capable ally.

Yeah, good luck with that, we hear you say. Do you plan on raising your kids in the middle of nowhere with no access to the internet, or the beauty, fashion and weight-loss industries, or school bullies, or patronising or sleazy adults?

And you have a point.

The challenges facing this generation of girls as they attempt to develop and hold onto a healthy, happy and secure sense of self are daunting. We know as well as any parent that the odds are stacked against us. But we refuse to accept that the battle for our girls well-being has already been fought and lost. There is too much at stake not to fight for their right to grow up whole and safe.

Through our writing, we have spent a decade calling out inequality and chipping away at our culture that dehumanises and devalues girls and women. But progress is slow so, when it comes to raising our own girls, we are focused on what we can control what we can do right now. We cannot single-handedly kill off the cultural disease that is robbing so many of our girls of their potential, so instead we concentrate our attention on prevention and inoculation.

What we can do is think about our own childhoods, rethink parenting prejudices, pull apart our accepted cultural norms and stereotypes, talk to friends, make mistakes, re-evaluate (and then make yet more mistakes and re-evaluate again) and look at evidence to give our daughters the best chance possible in a world that too often encourages girls to make themselves small.

We are not claiming that ours is a foolproof parenting prescription. There is no single right way to raise a daughter. Families are different, children are different, and our capacity to parent the way we want to varies enormously from one day to the next. Some days it changes from hour to hour. As any parent knows, the gap between how we think we should raise kids and what we actually do takes on the proportions of the Grand Canyon when we are tired, stressed, busy, or just really need some time to ourselves.

And you know what? Thats okay. Children dont need perfect parents. They just need good-enough parents.

Rather than writing an expert parenting manual that dictates a series of lovely-in-theory-but-never-going-to-happen guilt-inducing parenting rules, we have set out to share our risk-mitigation strategy for parenting our daughters. Its the perspective of both a mother and a father who face the same parenting challenges that you do right now. Its what we endeavour to do most of the time, within the constraints of life and our imperfect selves, to raise daughters who like themselves.

This book is for parents with girls who range from toddlers to tweens. Its about connecting the many dots of modern parenting advice on raising girls, helping you to develop an approach that fits with your values, works with your family dynamics and, most of all, works for your daughters. We hope to give you some new insights and tools that will be helpful in raising your own girls as well as a few laughs along the way, and a sense of solidarity and courage as we fight for our daughters futures.

Kasey and Chris

This book is based on our own experiences of raising two girls, watching children interact, many hours of conversation with other parents, and a decade of trawling through research about children, parenting, education and culture. It reflects our own perspectives perspectives that are inevitably limited. Families come in all different forms: heterosexual parents, same-sex parents, separated and blended families, legal guardians and multi-generational families, all of which can be springs of love. Because we are the parents of girls, we have chosen to focus specifically on how to raise girls who like themselves. However, much of the research and our parenting strategies also apply to raising boys and non-binary children. For simplicity we have also referred to the carers of children as parents, mothers and fathers. We consider these to be roles that can be fulfilled by any number of people in a childs life, not limited by biology, gender or family structures.