While girls [age 9ââ¬â12] appear to have much more social know-how, they are characteristically cliquey, disloyal, cruel..., insecure, and a bit bitchy now. Today's best friend becomes tomorrow's discard. Parents watch in horror at what seem to be total personality changes in previously lovely, upright little girls. Sometimes girls are just as unsettled by their behavior as the disapproving elders who watch them. Sometimes they are unregenerate, relishing their freewheeling and dealing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A girl in the middle years also becomes more centered in her soul-life, the feelings of her heart, and she needs our guidance to l...earn to express her uniqueness, those small seeds that will someday sprout into gifts, talents, and resources.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A girl must allow others to share the responsibility for care, thus enabling others to care for her. She must learn how to care in... ways appropriate to her age, her desires, and her needs; she then acts with authenticity. She must be allowed the freedom not to care; she then has access to a wide range of feelings and is able to care more fully.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Because relationships are a primary source of self-esteem for girls and women, daughters need to know they will not lose our love ...if they speak up for what they want to tell us how they feel about things. . . . Teaching girls to make specific requests, rather than being indirect and agreeable, will help them avoid the pitfalls of having to be manipulative and calculating to get what they want.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
From infancy, a growing girl creates a tapestry of ever-deepening and ever- enlarging relationships, with her self at the center. .... . . The feminine personality comes to define itself within relationship and connection, where growth includes greater and greater complexities of interaction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
With a balanced combination of the two principal energies from mother and father, a girl can both be in touch with her womanly str...engths and be a powerful force in the world--strong and nurturing, decisive and caring, goal- oriented and aware of the needs of others. She has the courage to voice what she thinks and feels and the strength to follow her destiny.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Another reason for the increased self-centeredness of an adolescent is her susceptibility to humiliation. This brazen, defiant cre...ature is also something tender, raw, thin-skinned, poignantly vulnerable. Her entire sense of personal worth can be shattered by a frown. An innocuous clarification of facts can be heard as a monumental criticism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The adolescent frequently supposes that she is breaking out of the confines of her mundane, schoolgirl existence simply in order t...o break rules and defy authority. . . . She rids herself of the "oughts" and "musts" that convert every minor infraction into a sin of omission or commission. It certainly does not occur to her or to her family that by questioning the moral standards she erected as a child she is taking the first steps in her journey toward a firmer, more reasonable, less harsh, more ethical form of conscience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Teenage girls are extremists who see the world in black-and- white terms, missing shades of gray. Life is either marvelous or not ...worth living. School is either pure torment or is going fantastically. Other people are either great or horrible, and they themselves are wonderful or pathetic failures. One day a girl will refer to herself as "the goddess of social life" and the next day she'll regret that she's the "ultimate in nerdosity."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Some [adolescent] girls are depressed because they have lost their warm, open relationship with their parents. They have loved and... been loved by people whom they now must betray to fit into peer culture. Furthermore, they are discouraged by peers from expressing sadness at the loss of family relationships--even to say they are sad is to admit weakness and dependency.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »