As a mother of a nine-year-old daughter it was with great interest that I read Stacey Radin’s new book “Brave Girls: Raising Young Women with Passion and Purpose to Become Powerful Leaders“. As my little girl grows up, I want to be prepared to guide her as best as I possibility can through the trials and tribulations of adolescence. Looking back, my early teenage years were perhaps the worst years of my life. Years that were difficult, unhappy and rocky. Even to this day, I will never forget my mother’s words of shock when she lamented “What has happened to my happy little girl?” when I hit thirteen and was drowning in hormones and confusion about who on earth I had become.
Sadly, these are years that I often wish I could do over but of course that isn’t at all possible. I realize how much these years negatively impacted me and my self-esteem. Thirty years later I still remember the mean, devastating comments and when all my friends decided to drop me. I was so afraid to go to school because I had no one to sit by and I vividly remember hiding in the bathroom over lunch. Thankfully life got easier for me once the braces came off, I grew into my body and blossomed. But those terrible years still haunt me when I think about them today.
Radin’s book “Brave Girls” opens with the following sentence that instantly pulled me in:
“Our society as a whole is lacking in opportunities designed to help preadolescent girls feel confident, secure and emotionally safe”.
