When Big Issues Happen to Little Girls: How to Prepare, React, and Manage Your Emotions So You Can Best Support Your Daughter

by Erin Munroe, Michele Borba (Foreword)

The average fifth-grade girl knows a cutter, a classmate with Asperger's syndrome, or has a friend with two fathers. Issues like these are big, and they are just drops in the bucket. A generation ago, we worried more about kidnapping and divorce than cyberbullying and prescription-drug abuse. With little personal experience in the new, complex issues that plague our daughters on a daily basis, how can parents today help their girls cope better and raise a generation of girls who are resilient and self-confident instead of insecure and confused? This book answers that question with concrete action steps and easy-to-follow talking points that help parents keep the lines of communication open and better support their daughters. Author Erin A. Munroe, LMHC, who has been counseling adolescents for more than a decade, is in a unique position to help parents understand how girls cope and react to stressors and adult-size problems today, so they can be active and effective participants in their daughters' reality. When Big Issues Happen to Little Girls also helps parents learn about themselves and control their own emotional responses to the big issues their daughters face, · Sexuality, sexual orientation, STDs, and pregnancy · Mental health issues and learning disabilities · Bullying, peer pressure, and cyberbullying · School anxiety, social anxiety, and other phobias · Substance use and abuse and the newest addictions · High expectations for young girls that often cost them their childhood Raising girls is a big responsibility. Let When Big Issues Happen to Little Girls become your twenty-first-century parenting strategy and give your daughter the gift of resiliency and confidence that she is deserving and capable of experiencing.

268 pages, Paperback

First published October 26, 2010

Reviews

[Veronica]

My daughter is 7 1/2 and in the second grade. This book couldn't have hit me harder in so many ways. Big Issues Happen to Little Girls: How to Prepare, React, and Manage Your Emotions So You Can Best Support Your Daughter by Erin Munroe is a must read for every mother and father of a girl.

Munroe gives the world a great handbook on how to handle challenges and issues of raising a girl in today's world. From puberty to using drugs, Monroe walks us through case studies that exhibit how and how NOT to react to things that happen to our girls.

One criticism I had with the book was that it presents itself as something for parents, yet I felt that it was written for moms. There are subtle things about how she presents suggestions for parents that feels like she's talking to moms.

This book will challenge you. It will challenge you to revisit how you see issues (recreational drug use, teenage sex, the drive for success) not just by what you hope your daughter will do, but also how you did it and your fears for how she might go through it. Munroe uses not just parenting fails, but also parenting fails that were done with the best intentions. Case in point a couple who didn't want to tell their 8-year-old that they were considering a divorce. She totally picked up on the body cues, the fact that Dad was sleeping on the couch and a world of other things her parents thought were going over her head.

And that's the biggest take home message. Our girls are not dumb. They see things in our world that we hope they don't. They hear us mock our bodies. They see us come home buzzed and drop the car keys on the table. They feel our pushes to be perfect at school and on the playing field. They see how we view other women in the world. They know that we expect them to be good, respectful in the face of frenemies.

Our girls are growing up in a different world than we did. Not better. Not worse. Different.

I say, "We're in the second grade," because it is a family effort. One to two hours of homework, monthly class projects that require more parental involvement than I think is appropriate and a pressure to score high enough on standardized tests to ensure a good school rating, teacher bonus and entrance into a prep high school...Yup, that's a team effort alright. Second grade is vastly different than my experience where my biggest issue was choosing between Chad and Corey, keeping my desk clean and beating the-other-Chad to end of our math workbook. Oh yeah...way different.