Growing Strong Girls

Today's culture offers broadening opportunities for women; yet it still pressures them to fit long-standing stereotypes. McMinn challenges parents, teachers, churches, and civic communities to create a social environment that nurtures strong, confident girls. Combining careful research with personal experience, McMinn takes a thoughtful look at gender differences and patterns limiting women's full participation in society. She discusses what it means to raise strong daughters made in the image of God and covers the various aspects of strength--confidence, interdependence, voice, and self-image.

“To grow up strong and confident, girls need connection with kind, competent adults, yet all too often they push that support away. For every parent, teacher, or mentor who has ever wondered, ‘How do I get through to her?’ Lindsay Sealey has given us a wealth of answers in her book Growing Strong Girls.” -Haley Kilpatrick Founder, Girl TalkTM, and bestselling author of The Drama Years Girls today face an astounding degree of pressure to grow up fast. They yearn to connect, but sometimes this yearning turns into negative, even destructive behavioral patterns such as gossiping, being passive aggressive or mean, becoming screen-addicted, or disengaging from school. It's heartbreaking to watch even the most confident little girls disconnect and lose their sparkle as they hit the preteen years. In Growing Strong Girls, Lindsay Sealey reveals the tremendous power of connection to activate self-awareness, inner strength, and confidence in girls. It all starts with a nurturing and secure connection between you and her. In this book you'll discover: Why she should avoid frenemies and create a circle of friends How to set healthy boundaries and practise assertive self expression The truth about social media and screens Social emotional learning strategies and lifelong learning habits you can implement at home More than 250 conversation starters, stories, tips, and activities to cultivate connection

“Mackoff’s strategies for enhancing girls’ self-esteem and creating equal opportunity are clear, practical, and most important, achievable.”—Peggy Orenstein, author of School Girls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap “IS THAT YOUR DAUGHTER? ISN’T SHE PRETTY?” Like parents of girls everywhere, psychologist Barbara Mackoff often heard her young daughter Hannah dismissed with those words. So often that she started to reply: “And she’s smart too.” Hoping to counter the culture that she feared would stereotype her daughter and diminish her confidence, Dr. Mackoff spent three years searching for strategies to nurture Hannah’s growing sense of self. The result is Growing a Girl. Offering hundreds of specific suggestions and tools for fostering a daughter’s independence and individuality, Growing a Girl encourages parents to act now by exploring seven practical paths. Based on clinical research and Dr. Mackoff’s highly acclaimed Growing a Girl workshop, this extraordinary book offers parents the skills to shatter stereotypes that can stunt a daughter’s growth while giving her the tools to nourish her strength, spirit, and capacity to care. YOU WILL DISCOVER: • How gender stereotyping starts at birth—and how you can prevent it • Why she can wear a velvet dress to the ballet and still climb to the treetops • What to do about Barbie dolls and traditional fairy tales—without spoiling your daughter’s fun • How to discover and honor her feelings • How to counteract our culture’s emphasis on physical beauty • How to bring home heroines—in books, magazines, movies, and in her community • How to recognize and strengthen your daughter’s learning style—and build on her natural interesting science and math • And more.

Steve Biddulph’s Raising Boys was a global phenomenon. The first book in a generation to look at boys’ specific needs, parents loved its clarity and warm insights into their sons’ inner world. But today, things have changed. It’s girls that are in trouble.

"Hands down my favorite book for teen girls." Rosaria Butterfield, author, The Gospel Comes with a House Key Your teen years matter. Of all the ways you're learning and changing during the busy teenage years, your growth in Christ is the most important. God intends to use your teen years as a launching pad into a lifelong pursuit of looking more like Jesus. This book will help you prioritize your Christian growth—pointing you to the resources God has given you in his Word, in prayer, and in the church; offering help for managing your emotions, watching your words, and bearing spiritual fruit; and challenging you with ways to center your life around this important task. Even as a teenager, you have all it takes to grow in godliness.

An activist in the Girls Movement provides a unique resource that's chock-full of information to help girls develop their interests and skills and discover what they love.

Through the innovative methodology of asking them to record their experiences on videotape, this book offers an evocative and fascinating cross-cultural exploration into the everyday lives of a number of teenage girls from their own broad social, cultural and ethnic perspectives. The use of the video camera by the girls themselves reveals their exploration and experimentation with possible identities, highlighting their awareness that the self is not ready made but rather constituted in the process of continuous performance. The result is an active self-conscious exploration of the continuous "art" of self-making. Through their play, the teenagers are shown to strategically test out various possibilities, while keeping such explorations within the bounds of what is acceptable and permissible in their own micro-cultural worlds. The resulting material challenges previous findings in those feminist and youth anthropological studies based on too narrow a concept of class, ethnicity or populist approaches to culture.

A Joyful Life Starts on the Inside Hi, I’m Cambria! For years, I struggled with my self-image and how to make my dual pursuits of faith and fitness fit together. Maybe you can relate. Everything changed one day when I decided I was tired of looking in the mirror and started looking solely toward God. What He showed me is that true strength—physical, emotional, and spiritual—starts from the inside out. When you’re staying connected to God, you’ll find that eating well and exercising regularly will be so much easier. Your faith, food choices, and fitness will all just naturally flow together as part of your healthy and whole life. I want to share what I’ve learned with you, motivate you, and encourage you with delicious recipes to nourish your body, creative workouts to keep you moving, and wisdom from God’s Word to inspire and shape you into the woman He’s creating you to be. Let’s grow strong from the inside out!