This writer asked teens what parents can do to help younger girls thrive

A number of studies have found rising rates of anxiety and depression among kids. Kate Rope says those rates — along with those of suicide and eating disorders — are especially concerning among girls.

Rope is a journalist and mom to two girls. Her new book is called “Strong as a Girl: Your Guide to Raising Girls Who Know, Stand up For and Take Care of Themselves.”

Rope says she hopes parents and caregivers of elementary school-aged girls will use it to help instill emotional intelligence and safety at a young age to stave off some of the negative potential outcomes.

As part of her research, Rope spoke with middle- and high-school girls and asked them to reflect on their elementary school years: what was helpful for them becoming who they wanted to be, and what they wished was different.

Rope joined The Show to talk about her new book and what she learned while writing it.

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: Kate, the title kind of implies this, but what are you trying to get across to parents and caregivers here?

KATE ROPE: What I want to impart to them is the ability to actually see the girl in their lives that they’re raising. We have a lot of cultural messages out there about how things should go, whether that’s about being a girl and being nice, or whether that’s about taking a million extracurriculars so you get into the “right” school.

There’s just a lot of pressure on parents and caregivers to produce a certain outcome with their kids. And what I’m attempting to do, is help them step back and actually pay attention and see the person that’s in their home and let her intuitive wonderfulness come through. So that she ends up being able to be the person that she was meant to be, the person that she wants to be.

BRODIE: Do you find that for parents and caregivers, it’s maybe harder to do that now than it has been in years past?

ROPE: I think so. I don’t know if it’s harder. I think it’s probably always been challenging and there’s always been messages. But the pace of the messages and the directions they’re coming from ... there’s just a lot of prescriptive talk that parents and caregivers are subjected to that makes you feel as if there’s a right or wrong way to do things. And there isn’t, because if there were, we would know that by now. There’s a million ways to do it.

And I think all the messages can get in the way of your own, as a caregiver, your own natural intuition about how to raise a kid and then can get in the way of you seeing the innate parts of your girl that are so wonderful and that you want to make sure she maintains and develops and grows.

BRODIE: Are there particular challenges to trying to avoid putting girls sort of in a box, as you’re describing, as opposed to letting them be who they are and sort of find their own path, as opposed to with boys?

ROPE: ... I’m not an expert on raising boys — having not done it, nor talked to all the experts about it. But I do know that for girls, and I’m sure boys have messages that come at them that narrow their scope of experience and expression. But for girls, there is a pretty clear narrative about being nice, being accommodating, being peacemakers, getting along, succeeding.

I mean, there’s pressure on girls that, now that they can be anything, they then have to be everything. They’re just under the microscope in a lot of ways. And I think that that inhibits their natural, messy, expressive development that will help them find a path that feels true to them.

And I do think that all of the messages parents and caregivers are getting, and the messages girls are getting, are just exponentially increased by a 24-hour news cycle, social media, all the different ways we’re receiving information and advice, and all the talking heads out there giving it, it’s just kind of a constant barrage of shoulds.

BRODIE: Well, so I wanna ask you about that, especially the social media and YouTube and everything online. Because it’s hard sometimes, I think, for parents even to break through everything that their kids are hearing. Be it from social media, be it from the internet, be it from other friends at school or from wherever — or just everything else that they’re hearing.

So how do you advise parents to maybe in some ways allow their daughters to be who they are and not feel the pressure to conform to something that they don’t really want to conform to, but that they feel pressure to?

ROPE: Yeah, OK, that’s exactly it. The first thing is your home is a sanctuary of a safe place where they can express themselves and when they can experiment, and they don’t feel the watchful eyes on them. And at the same time, you instill in them critical thinking skills about all the other influences over which you have little control.

You have some control, but in general, the world is going to interact with your child. And so if you can help her become a skeptic and someone who’s going to ask questions before taking on gospel. So I think it’s instilling critical thinking and it’s also really valuing their opinions all along, from age 2 to, you know, 22. So that they know that what they think and what they express matters.

And there will be times when you can’t — they’re going to be influenced. Adolescence is a time when they are supposed to be figuring out how to fit in with the herd, if you will. And so that will happen. But if they’ve got a really strong base and sense of who they are and sense of questioning everything that’s being presented to them, then I think they have a stronger place from which to navigate all the messages and find a path through them that feels good to them.

BRODIE: Well, so what are some of the signs and signals that you think parents and caregivers should be looking out for as girls of that age, of elementary school age, are maybe trying to signal something in ways that they can’t quite verbalize?

ROPE: Yeah. So I think, honestly, it’s not rocket science. The most important thing is just to listen more than you talk.
To pause, and to ask questions. I think there as parents and caregivers, we feel a pressure to have the answers. But actually not having the answers gives them the space to explore the answers themselves.

And in the book, I have very specific activities that are tied to different ages to help them get in touch with: Who am I? Am I funny? Do I like to talk in a crowd? Do I take a while to feel comfortable? And then knowing that about myself: OK, what are my goals?

BRODIE: I’m curious about the focus groups that you did with the girls for this book. Were there any themes that emerged or any sort of trends that you heard over and over again, themes that you heard over and over again, from these kids?

ROPE: Yeah. I mean, the first thing I want to say that was the best part about writing the book. And I would say the biggest thing that they were looking for in their childhood, in their younger years, that they either got and were grateful to have gotten or wished they had had, was just transparency from parents.

Whether we’re talking about puberty, whether we’re talking about the state of the world, they wanted to be treated with respect. And they wanted information to be shared with them.

And I remember one young woman in particular, Adesoye, talked about how as a young girl, she really felt things deeply. She really got upset over big events or things in the news, things that felt unjust to her. And people would say, “Don’t worry about it. You’re too young to worry about it.”

And she’s like, “But I did worry about it. I was thinking about it, and I wish that that had been respected and that people would have engaged me on the topic.”

So I would say for all of them either the fact that they had families in which they felt it was safe to talk about anything and in which they felt their parents treated them with respect and talked with them openly about topics. Or they didn’t experience that and that is something they would have liked because they felt it even as like a 7-year-old or a 10-year-old, they felt when their family wasn’t sort of giving it to them straight.