Unfortunately, I did not find it shocking for it reflects what I see in schools right across the country. I did, however, find it deeply sad. It left me more passionate than ever about offering both girls and women a different view of self – a more healing, whole view that recognises we are all far more than just our bodies. We are somebodies. We are large, we contain multitudes.

Love to hear your thoughts.

Kate Ellis, the Minister for Youth, put together the group, which was chaired by Mia Freedman, former editor of Cosmopolitan, and  featured big names in the fashion industry and  media such as TV presenter and model Sarah Murdoch, children’s health and psychology experts including Professor David Forbes of the University of Western Australia, and leaders of youth organisations such as the YWCA. They considered submissions from the public–mostly young people, teachers, youth workers, social workers and psychologists–then came up with recommendations for government action to deal with the widespread problem of poor body image.

What excites me, and my colleagues at Enlighten, is that the Strategy gives public recognition to the important role school programs can and should play in helping girls develop positive body image.  The Strategy calls for increased funding for “reputable and expert organisations to deliver seminars and discussions on body image within schools” and for workshops that increase girls’ media literacy so that they can stand up to negative media messages.

Many schools access independent organisations to deliver one-off body image workshops or to facilitate body image discussions among students. A number of these types of interventions have been demonstrated as effectively reducing the body dissatisfaction of students. The Advisory Group encourages government to increase the opportunities schools have to access these activities.

Proposed National Strategy on Body Image

As a first step, I call on the federal government to immediately introduce the Body Image Friendly Schools Checklist in the Strategy (on page 42). It has some great practical ideas that I would love to see implemented in schools across Australia. The best of the recommendations:

• Bring positive body image messages into the curriculum. It is easy to see how body image can be incorporated into health and physical education lesson plans, but teachers need not stop there. In English, students could be asked to write a critical thinking essay on how the media affects our idea of what a woman should look like. A media studies class might focus on the way that programs such as Photoshop are used by magazines to create an unattainable ideal of beauty.
• Consult with students to develop a sports uniform everyone feels comfortable wearing. Being involved in sport has been shown to boost girls’ self-esteem and body image–yet it has also been shown that figure-hugging uniforms are one of the greatest barriers to girls participating in sport.
• Provide Mental Health First Aid training for teachers that can help them identify body image and eating disorders in students and then know what steps to take next.
• Give training for teachers in how to use body-friendly language with students–that is, no “fat talk”, either about themselves or their students.
• Include positive body image in the school’s policy, even writing positive body image and the celebration of diversity into the school’s mission statement.
• Do away with weighing and measuring students. It seems kind of crazy that in this day and age that has to even be spelt out, but it is still done in PE and even some maths classes. And for many students, the humiliation they experience leaves lasting scars.

Beyond the school system, there are some other good (and long overdue) suggestions in the Strategy that I hope the government implements. A standard system of clothing sizes to avoid the distress many feel when they find they can’t fit into a certain size. Stores stocked with a broad range of sizes, reflecting the diversity of our body types. Mannequins that look more like the many different women we see every day in the street.

But as with most such working papers put together by committee, within parameters set by a federal government, the Strategy of course has its limitations. For instance, it can simply suggest that funding should be increased in schools to ensure all girls receive the media literacy and self-esteem workshops they need; it can’t provide an assurance that this will actually happen.

The limitations of the Strategy become clearer when it deals with other avenues for promoting positive body image. The right principle is there: to encourage clothing designers, magazines and TV, the diet industry, advertisers and marketers to finally shoulder responsibility for the shame, disgust and body anxiety they routinely encourage young women to experience. But the Strategy recommends first trying the softly, softly approach: asking companies to follow a voluntary code of conduct and rewarding them for good behaviour by listing them in a roll of honour and awarding them the right to display a logo. Think of the Heart Foundation’s tick of approval, but in this case for creating positive body image rather than lowering cholesterol. Only once this approach had failed to produce results would penalties be considered.

I would be overjoyed if companies voluntarily started treating girls and women with more respect. And I think some would, so long as it was good for their bottom line. Think, for instance, of Dove, which uses the body image issue to sell a truckload of soap–while their parent company’s other key brands include Lynx (Boom Chicka Waa Waa, anyone?), Slim Fast and Ponds Skin Whitening cream marketed in Asian countries. A lot of fashion designers would  simply pull one of those frosty catwalk model faces in response to a suggestion they promote positive body image. I mean, can you really see Gucci saying “Hey, they’re right, we should stop promoting this unhealthy stick-thin image and adopt that voluntary code of conduct”?

I do wish that the proposed national strategy had more to say on the sexualisation and objectification of women and especially of girls. While body size and shape and the lack of diversity in the media are prime sources of despair, the pressure to be sexy–and only within a narrow ideal of sexiness–is increasingly causing serious problems.

Research shows that over time women can come to see themselves as objects and subject their bodies to constant surveillance, feeling disgusted and ashamed about themselves. So even if the code helps industry to get serious about presenting more realistically sized women, the expectation to be ‘‘hot’’ and ‘‘sexy’’ will remain. And industry will have the right product and the latest look we need to achieve this false ideal.

Misty de Vries, COO, Women’s Forum Australia, in The Age

The way I look at it, the National Strategy on Body Image is a great place to start. But its recommendations are only worth something if the politicians, the fashion and beauty product industries, and the media and advertisers follow through on them. It is thanks to all of us voicing our opinions that the government commissioned a Strategy in the first place. Now we have to keep up the pressure!

A PDF version of this feature article is also available to download / share here: dani

In the minds of many parents, a daughter’s teenage years loom like a trial by fire. Cracking the code to adolescent girlhood might seem unachievable, but as Donna Reeves discovers, it all starts with facing up to who you are.

No-one has ever said raising children is easy. While there is a general understanding the early years are tough – sleepless nights, tears, the dreariness of endless laundry – there is a certain terror that fills the hearts of many parents when they come to the realisation their beautiful baby daughters will one day develop into those slightly alien and scary creatures: teenage girls.

All legs and arms and attitude, there is something about teenage girls that induces fear into the most confident of parents. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Behind the prickly, and pimply, surface of adolescent girls lies a genuine psychological and emotional need to remain connected to their parents as they face the challenges of becoming young women. Being afraid of stepping on teenage toes, or believing that adolescence is akin to the lost years, isn’t doing your kids any favours. Instead of setting yourself up to fail, parents, particularly mothers, can grow with their daughters because when it comes down to it, both are facing similar issues.

“There has been this idea that teenage girls are somehow unruly and bitches and divas and difficult; that it’s this awful tumultuous time and the best we can do is bunker down and try and get through it,” says Dannielle Miller, a former high school teacher who has worked with thousands of teenage girls in both Australia and New Zealand. “This is such a ridiculous notion because it sets up this defeatist attitude towards connecting with your daughter and it also sets up conflict because you start to see the conflict as inevitable. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“The greatest gift a mum can give to her daughter is to grow with her and to be honest about that journey of growth. If we pretend we all just emerge as this completely whole woman, we’re doing them a disservice by not helping them understand that making mistakes is just part of that journey.”

Dannielle’s book The Butterfly Effect – A Positive New Approach to Raising Happy, Confident Teen Girls (Random House, $34.95) has just been published. It is well researched and documents with clarity and gritty honesty the issues facing today’s teenage girls, such as drinking, body issues, friendship and sex.

“Sometimes I think other parenting books make the world in which teenage girls live seem so foreign to our world that as an adult, you feel a little bit out of your element in knowing how to step in and help,” Dannielle says. “Yet, the issues really are the same. They might be drinking Breezers while we’re drinking chardies, and they might be watching ‘Gossip Girl’ while we’re watching ‘Desperate Housewives’, but the messages and the reasons why we’re engaging in those things are very similar. If you can start to see the similarities, rather than just the differences, I think it’s a great opportunity to connect with your daughter rather than disconnect from her.”

The Butterfly Effect offers practical advice to parents – in particular mothers – on how to stay connected, or rebuild relationships with their daughters during adolescence. Unlike some other parenting books, where the emphasis is on the child, this book forces parents to examine their own lives and behaviours. It’s an approach Dannielle says she has been using successfully for many years.

“Parents honestly think they’re going to come along to one of my seminars and I am going to sort out their daughter for them, as if she’s the one who needs fixing,” Dannielle says. “Then, within about five minutes of me speaking, I’ll see these little tears rolling down their faces as they realise they need to have a look at what they’re doing in their life. Maybe they’re always on a diet, or lamenting the ageing process, or caught up in a destructive relationship and drinking themselves into a stupor every night. Their daughters see this and that’s the truth of it. Many mothers find it quite confronting, and it is.”

Dannielle says what initially struck her when talking to mothers about their daughters was that they were both facing similar issues. “I was quite surprised that in many ways, despite all the rhetoric about there being this huge generation gap, so many issues that impact on our daughters’ lives really impact on us as women too, and we are really more alike than we are different.

“I noticed in the mothers’ faces that I was really speaking to them as well: they were caught up in the same vortex when it came to things like body image, beauty and drinking. Even when I would talk about things such as managing healthy friendships, the mothers would say, ‘It sounds like you’re describing my friendships with my girlfriends now.’”

One of Dannielle’s key messages in her book and seminars is that mothers have to set a good example and be a positive role model for their daughters. “Girls can’t be what they can’t see,” she says. “If we’re serious about saying to our daughters, ‘I want you to be really sure of yourself, to be really strong, to know how to set boundaries with people, to make healthy choices around alcohol,’ then we have to make those choices and decisions ourselves.”

If there’s one area in recent years that teenage girls have been drastically misunderstood, and perhaps as a result, let down, it’s in the assumption they are more mature than adolescent boys and therefore more independent. Dannielle says that while it is true teen girls do have more maturity than adolescent boys of the same age, they are still emotionally needy.

“The latest research is showing that adolescent girls have the emotional needs for affection and for love as they had when they were seven,” she says. “The first time I heard this, my daughter was seven and I thought about the number of times she might be touched, cuddled, told she’s beautiful. Sadly, by the time girls hit adolescence, and because they’re gangly and look a little bit grown up, we almost leave them to fend for themselves. That’s why they hunt in packs and why their peer groups are so important to them. It’s often the only place where they get that love and affection. It explains why you will always see teenage girls touching each others’ hair, tickling each other, laying all over each other. It’s because they yearn to be touched and to be loved.”

At my official Book Launch with mentor and valued colleague Clinical Professor David Bennett AO FRACP FSAM

Wanting to be loved doesn’t necessarily mean wanting to be best friends. It’s important to set realistic expectations around your relationships. As Dannielle says, you have to understand that for teen girls, pulling away and coming back and then pulling away again is a really important part of them growing into individuals and becoming independent. This seesawing behaviour can’t be taken personally, or else every mother would spend a lot of her teenage daughters’ years feeling offended or hurt.

“In an effort to connect with your daughter, I don’t think it works for mums to say ‘Alright, we’re going to have these big outings every month,’” says Dannielle. “You can’t force it. Sometimes, the best moments can be when you gently brush past each other in the house, or when you write your daughter a note for her lunch box which she doesn’t even bother acknowledging.

“We need to realise these moments we have with them, even if we think they’re not important, can be hugely important. Often we make the mistake of thinking it has to be a big gesture. It is very true that teenage girls don’t want to hang with Mum all the time, but they do really want a connection.”

One of the simplest pieces of advice Dannielle gives in her book – and interestingly, one of the most powerful – is for mothers to let themselves fall in love with their daughters again. Sure, motherhood isn’t easy, but neither is growing up. Think back to how you were as a teenager and the grief you caused your mother.

“As mothers, if we can get back to the core values of ‘I do love this girl’ and realise our daughters have remarkable qualities and focus on those, rather than try to control them, then that can be a good way of finding mutual ground,” says Dannielle.

“If you can get the parenting bits right and focus on being a good role model, there’s nothing more fun than having a teenage girl around. It is their flaws and their little idiosyncrasies, and the fact they are so brutally honest that makes them incredibly endearing. They’re like big labrador puppies – they’re delightful.”

__________________________________________________________________________________________

I will be presenting a public seminar for parents on raising girls at Monte Sant’ Angelo Mercy College – November 11th 2009: this is being hosted by the organisation Young Love. All enquiries should be made directly to them.

Flyer with details may be downloaded here.

Girls use brands to look more mature and hip; their mothers, to look more youthful and hip. This makes the marketers very, very happy. And it leads to some really creepy crossovers. Christian Louboutin — the French cobbler who only the fashion elite had heard of until Sex and the City but whose red-soled shoes all suburbia now lusts after — recently designed Barbie shoes for women. And women’s shoes for Barbie. The Barbie fantasy (or nightmare, depending on your point of view) is now reality: you and your teen daughters can walk in Barbie’s hot-pink stilettos, and she can walk in yours. At last, the circle is complete! The plastic woman and the living, breathing one are united. Childhood and adulthood have merged.

It’s rather pitiful, really, that in order for poor Barbie to be perfect enough for Monsieur Louboutin, she had to get cosmetic surgery on her “cankles” (a word in my top ten list of loathsome fat-talk terms it’s time we pledge to never use again). Barbie was already dangerously thin, people! If a real woman had her figure she would be classified anorexic and she would be unable to menstruate or have children. I thought we all knew that by now. Apparently the fashion world didn’t, because her grossly cankulous lower limbs needed to be made even more slender to be deserving of the designer’s shoes. On one level, it’s tempting to shrug this off as utterly ridiculous, just some designer who’s totally out of touch with reality behaving silly, but the fact that Mattel — a manufacturer of toys for children — indulged his whims actually makes me furious. Deep down, this is the message it sends to girls and women:

You’ll never be good enough. In fact, it turns out that the unrealistic ideal woman isn’t even good enough.

How often has a day of clothes shopping turned toxic for you or your teen daughter? It can be daunting to see the racks filled with sizes that seem suited only, in fact, to a Barbie doll. What do you tell yourself in the changing room mirror? You wouldn’t be alone if you have fallen prey to some pretty self-hating thoughts under the fluorescent department store glare. There are women and girls who buy clothes a size too small for them so they will feel compelled to lose weight. Women and girls who unthinkingly repeat the old chorus “Does my bum look big in this?” as they twist to look at themselves in the mirror. Women and girls who feel ashamed because they aren’t the “right shape” for the latest designer label offering, as though there ever has been, or ever should be, such a thing as the “right” shape.

The tragedy is that too many women and girls diet to fit themselves into “must have” fashions, or they work themselves into an epic neurosis because they can’t achieve the look they see in fashion magazines and on billboards. That ideal look is achievable for only a tiny number of people (models are thinner than 98% of the population), or it is unachievable at all because it isn’t even real. Ralph Lauren recently Photoshopped model Filippa Hamilton to such an extreme degree that they made her look more like an insect than a woman.

It’s not a good example when you see this picture; every young woman is going to look at it and think that it is normal to look like that. It’s not . . . It’s not healthy, and it’s not right.

– model Filippa Hamilton

This was one of the final jobs she did for the company. She says that after 8 years of modelling for Ralph Lauren, they decided she was too fat for their clothes and cancelled her contract. Reality check: Filippa Hamilton, too fat for Ralph Lauren, is 178 cm and 54.5 kg, or 5′ 10″ and 120 pounds.  I’m sorry, Filippa, but  even before this deranged level of Photoshopping, your weight was not normal and healthy; you were already well into the underweight category of the healthy weight range.

Too many women and girls are berating and belittling themselves for being unable to fit into or look good in clothes modelled by skeletal models. I like nice clothes and shoes. I like to feel good when I walk out the door in the morning. And I don’t have a problem with people wanting to be fashionable. What I do have a problem with is clothing companies that make girls and women feel badly about themselves and talk badly about themselves. I have a problem with the fact that in many cases, women’s fashion is designed by male designers who probably know as much about building a rocket ship and flying to the moon as they do about the real lives of real women and girls.

What if we all make a pact not to buy fashion labels that make us feel less than beautiful? What if we say no to marketers who try to make us feel that we will never be good enough? They will  have no choice but to change their products and the way they market them.

During Fat Talk Free Week let’s transform the negative self-talk in the changing room into something far more constructive. Instead of punishing ourselves for not fitting into fashion designers’ narrow ideal let’s demand that fashion designers cater to our needs. And let’s choose to celebrate our differences and our unique qualities — rather than trying to squeeze them all into those designer jeans.

I HATE MY THIGHS.

You look great–did you lose weight?

Fat talk. Many of us do it every day as we play the “compare and despair” game, trying to live up to an impossible stick-thin ideal of what we should look like and what it means to be feminine. But words have power. Even a casual remark about our own or another’s appearance can hold us back, reinforce our worst body image fears and stop us from being all we can be.

We should be celebrating our bodies and all our other amazing qualities and achievements!

So on Fat Talk Free Week, 19-23 October, please join me in trying to end the madness. Fat Talk Free Week grew out of a successful eating disorders program for young women on university campuses in the United States. It has snowballed into an international week to raise public awareness of how fat talk damages women and girls.

To get revved up, take a look at the video that was released last year for Fat Talk Free Week.

Some of the info shocked me, such as this statistic from the United States:

67% of women aged 15-64 withdraw from life-engaging activities such as giving their opinion, going to school or visiting the doctor because they feel bad about the way they look.

And the situation here is equally as alarming. A quarter of teenage girls surveyed in Australia say they would get plastic surgery if they could. Among 15-year-old girls, almost seven in ten are on a diet, and of these, 8 per cent are severely dieting. Six in ten girls say they have been teased about their appearance.

Let’s start freeing ourselves from all these negative and unrealistic body image beliefs–for our girls’ and our own futures. The Fat Talk Free Week website has great practical ideas for raising awareness in schools, such as:

• making and displaying positive body image banners
• writing down negative body image beliefs, screwing them up and cermonially throwing them out
• writing down positive body image beliefs and displaying them in the school
• making lists of friends’ best qualities, with one important exception: their physical appearance
• groups making a pact to put a coin in a jar every time a girl fat talks during the week, then donating the money to an eating disorders organisation
• discussion starters on defining fat talk and why it’s bad.

And I also love these great ideas that any woman or girl can try anywhere–at school, at work or at home:

The Top 5 Things You Can Do Now to Promote Positive Body Image

1. Choose one friend or family member and discuss one thing you like about yourselves.
2. Keep a journal of all the good things your body allows you to do (e.g., sleep well and wake up rested, play tennis, etc.).
3. Pick one friend to make a pact with to avoid negative body talk. When you catch your friend talking negatively about their body, remind them of the pact.
4. Make a pledge to end complaints about your body, such as “I’m so flat-chested” or “I hate my legs.” When you catch yourself doing this, make a correction by saying something positive about that body part, such as, “I’m so glad my legs got me through soccer practice today.”
5. The next time someone gives you a compliment, rather than objecting (“No, I’m so fat”), practise taking a deep breath and saying “Thank you.”

Now is your chance to get prepared to try out some of these ideas on October 19-23. I’ll be sharing my experiences of ridding my life of fat talk, and I’d love to hear yours, too. Watch this space.

More than a quarter of students aged 12-17 had drunk alcohol in the past week. More than a quarter of the boys aged 14-17 who had drunk in the past week had done so at dangerous levels: 7 or more drinks in a day.

The figure was even worse for the girls. Nearly a third of those aged 14-17 who had drunk in the last week had reached dangerous levels: 5 or more drinks in a day (the limit is lower because of physical differences).

The greatest binge drinkers? 17-year-old girls.

These figures are heartbreaking. To me, they tell a story of the pain teen girls are seeking an escape from, and the pressures they face to be sexy, grown-up, uninhibited. They have a false belief that drinking alcohol is empowering, when in fact it’s a train crash waiting to happen. Alcohol companies continue to push “alcopops”, and hotels offer mixed drinks aimed at young women, such as champagne and Red Bull.

But retailers may not be the greatest problem: almost half of the students who drank in the past week got the alcohol from their mother or father.

From my work in schools, I believe that these WA figures are a good picture of what is going on all around the country. Lucy, a 16-year-old student in NSW, told me how obsessed the girls in her year at school were about the alcohol they were going to drink at a party one weekend.

They all made bets on who was going to out-drink who, and who was going to get drunk enough to hook up with random people.

One girl was asking for advice on what drinks she could mix together to get herself “smashed” quicker, and another was bragging about her mum buying her alcohol to take to the party.

No doubt some of the parents who supply their children with alcohol are just plain negligent, but I’m betting many are parents who show great care and concern about other aspects of their children’s lives. They probably taught them to always buckle their seat belt, never talk to strangers and always wear their bike helmet. They probably worry about their kids’ safety getting to and from school, their marks and finding the right career. It just so happens that they also believe old (and dangerous) myths about teenagers and drinking. Some of the arguments I’ve heard:

They’re going to drink alcohol anyway. It’s safer if they do it at home where I can keep an eye on them.

Kids need to learn now how to handle their alcohol so they don’t get in trouble with it later on.

Alcohol isn’t as harmful as other drugs.

If I don’t let them drink, they might do something worse.

It is my great hope that if all parents understand the truth about under-age drinking, we will finally be free of these myths.

There is no such thing as safe teen drinking. It is never okay to supply under-age kids with alcohol or tolerate under-age drinking. And this is why:

Grow a brain. The brain keeps maturing until around 20 years of age. Less alcohol is needed to cause damage to a teenager’s brain than an adult’s, and the damage takes place much faster. The damage can permanently alter the brain. A teenage drinker is more likely to suffer falling marks at school. As an adult, she may be stuck with memory problems, learning difficulties, poor verbal skills, depression and a tendency to addiction.

Have no regrets. A teenager’s brain is also not yet fully developed for reasoning or thinking about consequences; it is far more finely tuned to respond to situations emotionally. Combine this with alcohol and you truly have a worrying cocktail. Many girls regret decisions they have made and embarrassing things they have done while under the influence.

Stay safe. Drinking makes teen girls feel invincible, but they are actually far more at risk when they are intoxicated. Their judgment is compromised; their reflexes are slowed; they are physically awkward. They are at greater risk of violent and sexual assaults. I am not blaming the victim: it is never her fault. But being drunk does make girls easier targets, as predators look for vulnerability.

Stay healthy. Drugs such as amphetamines and heroin are not the only threat to the health of our kids. Each year, more than 260 young Australians die from risky drinking behaviour. Binge drinking can lead to acute toxicity that at the best requires hospitalisation and at worse leads to death. Alcohol increases the risk of injuries from falls and road accidents, and in the long term increases the risk of stroke, breast cancer and liver disease.

Delay now, or pay the price later. There is no benefit in “teaching” kids how to handle their alcohol. In fact, research shows that when parents allow their children to drink at home, it normalises drinking and lowers the children’s inhibitions to drink. Studies also show that delaying a person’s introduction to alcohol lowers their risk of developing long-term problems with drinking.

As parents, we need to take responsibility for our kids’ drinking. A study conducted by St Peter’s Collegiate Girl’s School, in Adelaide, showed that girls actually want enforced curfews and they do not want parents to turn a blind eye to teen drinking. Teenagers crave boundaries and limits, because the pressure is then taken off them to make all the decisions.

So let’s set boundaries. Let’s set good examples.  Let’s talk with our teenage kids openly and honestly about alcohol. And offer them things to do on the weekend that are way more fun than getting wasted.

The ‘really big school’ can seem impersonal and overwhelming. The curriculum is more complex. There are new school subjects today that we couldn’t have even imagined when we were at school. Some of the information our teens are learning is outside our realm of experience. Yet teenagers spend only 15 per cent of their time at school, which means our support at home is still essential.

A simple starting point: get to know your daughter’s studying habits and ask yourself: how does she like to learn? When, how and with whom does she do her best learning? If you are unsure, ask her and ask her teachers. Find out what works and how you can make her learning environment at home even better. For more specific guidance on how to do this, I think Elizabeth Hartley-Brewer, a respected parenting author, has a helpful way of looking at the role of a parent in a child’s education. She likens it to the role a good sports coach has in an athlete’s training:

From sports psychology, we know the best coaches focus on improving technique and skill . . . They make rewards reflect achievements; teach individuals to manage their own mistakes, learning and progress; and reduce anxiety by finding out what is causing it and addressing that directly.”

Rather than being overwhelmed by how to help your daughter learn school subjects you don’t entirely understand, you can use the idea of becoming her coach to break down your role into doable tasks: helping your daughter improve her techniques and skills; rewarding her achievements; allowing her to learn from her mistakes; giving her the freedom to manage her own learning; and offering her your loving support, so that she is not left feeling anxious.

One of the areas that seems to cause the most angst with parents is IT. Particularly if Mum and Dad are not confident users of technology.

I was interviewed for two interesting Sydney Morning Herald articles on this topic last week ( both were published today and were picked up nationally).

Too boring: girls miss the IT boat. Read full article at the link provided.

An extract: 

As new media technologies continue to intertwine into our everyday lives and careers, there are fears girls are being left behind, with many finding computer subjects boring or irrelevant.

A study of attitudes to technology and career skills conducted by the Victorian Government in 2001 showed that 36 per cent of girls, compared with 16 per cent of boys, found information and communication technologies boring.

Almost 10 years later, little has changed, believes the educator Dannielle Miller. She says she has picked up on an alarming trend during her work with girls in primary and high schools across Australia and New Zealand, dealing with things like self-esteem and body confidence.

Miller, the chief executive of Enlighten Education, a company she helped found to foster education and self-esteem among young girls, says a big proportion of future job opportunities will be involved in the IT field.

”Increasingly jobs will require high-order IT skills,” she says.

”If we have a generation of young women who have been excluded from that knowledge then there is going to be a stark gender divide which will be quite problematic.”

So Much Homework, so many distractions. Read full article at the link provided.

An extract:

PARENTS who peer over their teen’s shoulders during homework time may be alarmed by all the distractions that are taking place.

How can they concentrate amid the lure of MSN, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, the internet, music and a nearby mobile? Can this seemingly distracting environment actually be positive to their child’s learning? Can it offer them life skills to navigate today’s increasingly digital world?

”When I’m doing my homework I will have Facebook, MySpace and MSN open and I will flick through all the screens constantly,” says Caitlyn Wilcher, 17.

Wilcher is studying for the HSC at Blaxland High School, yet no matter how pressing her homework is, these screens are constantly open, she says.

”When the pressure is on I still leave everything up but don’t check it as frequently and stop talking so much on MSN. I tend to talk about the homework when it’s crunch time.”

Increasingly, homework done on the computer is becoming a social event. Dannielle Miller says parents need not be too concerned about these apparent distractions but rather should try to help young people navigate this environment.”

Love to hear more about how the girls you care for learn.

Sunrise – Raising Teen Girls – 4/9/09: click on the image below to view the segment or go directly to the URL: http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/index.php?cl=15377569

Podcast – Breakfast radio with Tony, Bec and Mikey - Vega: 2/9/09 (listen about 10 minutes in as they talk about birds for the first segement!)

http://podcast.vega953.com.au/brekky_atbm/atbm_bestof/090902_tbm_bestof.mp3

Podcast – The Conversation Hour with Jon Faine, ABC Radio Melbourne – 31/8/09

“Jon Faine and his co-host, Dr Gael Jennings, took your calls today as they discussed the problems faced by girls in our society, and the problems faced by those trying to raise happy and healthy young women. Their guests were authors Melinda Tankard-Reist, who’s book is called ‘Getting real – Challenging the sexualisation of girls’, and is published by Spinifex Press, and Dannielle Miller, who’s book “The Butterfly Effect’, is published by Random House.”

http://www.abc.net.au/local/audio/2009/08/31/2672012.htm?site=melbourne

Love for you to join in and comment on any of the points raised in the above!

Advance Praise for The Butterfly Effect

Dannielle Miller is the teen girl whisperer.’ Fran Simpson, teacher and mother of a teen

Dannielle Miller’s book is a must-read for all parents of teenage girls. The first thing that literally thumped me in the chest when reading this book was a total awareness and awakening of what is happening to our teenage girls. At a deep level, it resonated with me. The information is real, pertinent and totally relevant. Great work, Dannielle. Thank you for awakening me. Thank you for snapping me to attention and making me want to become a greater part of the solution.’ Karen, mother of a teen girl

This is the book we have been waiting for. It includes the most up-to-date research and finally gives parents positive, sensible strategies they can easily apply.’ Dr Michele Beale, general practitioner and stress management specialist

If you want to develop a deeply connected and loving relationship with your teenage daughter – then this book is for you. This is a time when many girls struggle to cope and really need our guidance and support, even though they may not be asking for it! The Butterfly Effect is written with passion and honesty, and offers insightful and practical advice for all parents who want to do more than ‘just survive’ the teen years!’ Julie Gale – Founder/Director Kids Free 2B Kids.

Dannielle Miller is not the first person to call attention to these issues, to the phenomenon of girls’ lives sometimes falling apart at the very threshold of womanhood. But in this candid and thought-provoking book, written with passion and conviction, she offers not only insight into adolescent girls as interesting works in progress, but also provides encouragement, solace and solution. She reminds us too, I am pleased to say, that we (their mothers and fathers) are also works in progress…’ Clinical Professor David Bennett AO FRACP FSAM, Head, NSW Centre for the Advancement of Adolescent Health, The Children’s Hospital at Westmead; President, Association for the Wellbeing of Children in Healthcare; and co-author (with Leanne Rowe and Bruce Tonge) of I Just Want You to be Happy (Allen & Unwin, 2009).

What was I hoping to contribute to the vital dialogue on parenting adolescent girls?  

A great deal of research on the issues affecting teen girls’ lives has been conducted by psychologists, sociologists, healthcare professionals and other experts. Throughout my book I considered their data, which has been published in various professional journals and research papers. I am focused on keeping up to date with the latest statistics because they give us a measurable insight into what is happening in girl world.

Yet I also know that the raw numbers do not tell the whole story. They do not always tell us how girls feel about themselves, their world and their place in it. So in addition to statistics and expert opinion, I also collated the more detailed and personal information you can really only get by taking the time to sit down and discuss the issues with teen girls. I gathered this research formally and informally over the many years I have worked with young people as a teacher, as a coordinator for students at risk and as the co-founder and CEO of Enlighten Education.

Ultimately, I believe we can join our daughters and work together to find new connections and deeper mutual understandings. In this book, I want to challenge my readers to do just that: to form a new connection with their daughter, niece, stepdaughter – with all the young women close to them – and work with them to bring about change. I do not want us to aim to merely to ‘survive’ girls’ adolescence, as some other parenting books will encourage us to do. We must aim for something far more mutually respectful and rewarding.

If you are currently caught up in screaming fights or in passive-aggressive girl hell – and yes, I do acknowledge that teen girls are gifted at turning their anger on those who are closest – I can see why books that promise survival might appeal. But isn’t the old ‘Mothers and daughters just do not get along; teen girls are hell’ argument just a little clichéd? It is certainly disrespectful to both parties.

If you, like many of us, have been fed that oppositional, woman-pitted-against-woman approach for years, my invitation to begin a more emphatic journey of parenting through self-discovery may seem too simplistic. Or, if you are caught up in conflict with your teen girl right now, it may seem unobtainable. Let me assure you, I am not setting out to make mothers feel any more inadequate than they may feel already. Girls may do seething anger well, but women do guilt well; we’re gifted at blaming ourselves for everything that goes wrong.

I am not one of the ‘Mummy Police’, the smug parenting experts who leave me feeling like I am doing everything wrong. I found myself particularly susceptible to them in my early days as a mother. I spent my time with my new daughter, Teyah, sleep deprived and bewildered by what I was supposed to do with this new and oh-so-perfect creature. I thought I had to be the perfect mother; she deserved nothing less. These were desperate days spent madly reading every book I could find – and becoming even more confused as one only seemed to contradict the next. In the end it was Baby Love, by Australian Robin Barker, that resonated with me. Why? Because she emphasised the need for following one’s instincts, and love was put at the forefront, right there in the title. Isn’t that what it is supposed to be about, after all? Teyah didn’t need a perfect mother; she needed a happy, confident, loving one.

Your teenage daughter does not need perfection, either. It may surprise you to know that out of the many thousands of young people who have crossed my path, including those from very troubled backgrounds, very few have ever questioned their parents’ skills or said they wished their mothers were better at parenting, or were thinner, more beautiful, more successful. Rather, they have told me they want more time, more love, more empathy and more happiness.

I believe the key is empathy. Instead of viewing adolescence as a stage in which fights between mothers and daughters are inevitable, try viewing it as a stage when a new connection can be found and a new level in your relationship reached. And empathy should be easy. Her pain is your pain. Her struggles are your struggles.

Make no mistake, in this book I am not suggesting you stop parenting and become your daughter’s new ‘bestie’. The other thing that young people consistently tell me they want more of from their parents is boundaries. Your daughter needs to see what a strong, confident, healthy woman looks like, how she copes with mistakes and failures, how she sets boundaries, and how she demands to be treated, both within the home and by society as a whole. If you won’t show her, who will?

In recent years a number of books have come out on the plight of teen girls in our hyper-sexual, commercialised and media-saturated culture. These books are valuable because they provide a real insight into teen-girl world – but they risk leaving us in a state of despair, feeling that it’s all too hard to make changes in our daughters’ lives. It’s not! I was determined to offer practical steps we can take to work towards making things better.

The idea of the butterfly effect comes from the science of chaos theory. It suggests that everything in this world is interconnected, to the extent that the beating of a butterfly’s wings in one part of the world may ultimately contribute to a tornado happening in another part of the world. Small changes can make a huge difference. My hope is that you may harness the butterfly effect in your relationship with your daughter, by being conscious that your actions and words – even ones that seem trivial – have a big influence on your daughter, just as her peers and the media influence her.

Once you have read my book, I would love to know what you think. I also have 10 copies to give away to my blog readers! Simply post a comment here and leave your email address. I will select 10 winners at random and email them to get their postal details.

Advance reviews for this important new collection of essays on the pornification of culture include:

Young women and girls today face extraordinary pressures to meet body image expectations that are unhealthy, unhelpful and unrealistic. The contributors to this book make a valuable contribution to an important national debate on how we can help young women to grow up with a healthy self-image and with the freedom and strength to be their real selves.”
The Hon. Kate Ellis, Minister for Early Childhood Education, Childcare and Youth, Parliament of Australia.

Getting Real is an important contribution to the discussion of the sexualisation of girls. This profoundly disturbing issue is a public health problem of international concern. This book is essential reading for parents, educators and everyone who wishes to make the world a safer and healthier place for all children.”
Jean Kilbourne, Author of  So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualised Childhood And What Parents Can Do To Protect Their Kids

My Melbourne readers may wish to go along to the book’s launch, 2nd September in Hawthorn. The invitation is attached as a PDF here:
GR Melb launch

Getting Real will be available in all good book stores from September 1st. Also available in book stores from September 1st will be my book, The Butterfly Effect. I am very excited about this and will share more in my blog post next week.