Young Girls and Self Esteem

A new blog about the pressure on young girls

A coach I know has just started writing a great blog; what is so great about it is that she reads the newspapers and posts some great stuff. Here are three  interesting things that I found.

A six-week, Government funded course is claiming to prepare young women “For the business world and their social life”, by teaching them how to walk in high heels. The course, which is offered as an extra-curricular activity to full time students at South Thames College, is designed to teach students how to walk in heels, improve their posture, walk lighter and improve confidence.

OK, I’m all for teaching our young girls skills but, walking in heels, can that really help? Is that not just saying you are how you look and present yourself? Surely there are better thing the government could be spending their money on?

A major new survey of 4,000 parents and children has found that the average family spends just 49 minutes a day together. Almost half of those surveyed admitted they did not spend enough ‘quality’ time together as a family.

This shocked me. 49 minutes felt like a lot, but what are they doing in that 49 minutes, I wonder? My guess is that it is time with something else going on; what do you think?

Yesterday, I was flicking through The Times, when I came across an interesting article. “Generation Me is too far from reality to care about others.” The article was commenting on some research into the behaviour of college students in the United States. The research found that concern for other people’s feelings is declining among young people. This is being replaced by a ‘Generation Me’ of self-centred and competitive individuals, after the findings found that young people today are 40 per cent lower in empathy than their counterparts 20 – 30 years ago. How sad.

The researchers involved in the study suggest the main reason for the decline may be technology, which has been accused of replacing human interaction. Face book, Twitter, My Space and Bebo, the virtual playgrounds where so many young people love to hang out.

Now this really made me cross when I read this. Lower in empathy; don’t care about others feelings, that is certainly not what I see. I see children who possibly don’t care so much about what others think about them, which I personally think is a good thing, children who may have less respect for their elders, a phrase that always irritated the hell out of me and a generation of children that do feel they deserve more, children that are so galvanised about fairness and ending inequality. How can that be Generation Me?

Oh and guess what, they blame technology because we cannot empathise on-line. Have they not all forgotten that these children have perfectly great social lives with their friends at school and socialise quite well face to face?

Yes, technology does cause some challenges, mainly to do with resilience but it is not making our children self-obsessed. Please stop it with the youth bashing! If you really wanted to look for a Generation Me label, surely is Gen X would fit it much better. Self-reliant rebels who really didn’t care about who they upset!

Motivating the next Generation

Our Young Girls need this

It is very rarely I recommend books but this book on happiness and self esteem for youth is definitely worth getting your hands on.

Now saying that mine only just arrived ( the joys of living in the U.K.) so I cannot review it yet, however what I can say is that the author Gabrielle Bernstein is an inspiration lady on a mission and I totally can support that.

Gabrielle’s first book ADD MORE ~ing TO YOUR LIFE – A HIP GUIDE TO HAPPINESS is released today

I had a chat with Gabrielle about her book and modern day girls.

Read more

Good Girl vs. Real Girl

Raising your daughter’s self esteem

The amazing Annie Fox has interviewed author Rachel Simmons The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence.

If you want to support your teenager daughter I suggest you jump over to Annie’s Blog and listen to the recording.

Teen Motivation/Self Confidence

All parents worry about their children as they want the best for them, right?

Life with a teen can be a challenge, especially if that teen lacks confidence, motivation and self-discipline.

Life is a series of choices and decisions and you want your child to make the best choices.

That is where our Self Sense programme comes in. Developed over a year with a group of 30 teenagers, this programme has been tried and tested with much success for the last five years .

This programme is designed to support tweens and teens to:-

• Make good choices in their lives

• Make sound decisions based on who they are

• Prepare them for the real world

• Improve their self-confidence, self-motivation and self-discipline by understanding who they are and what they want.

Download Self Sense Information

Contact us at parents@genyguide.com or call 07921 166998

Dig into my Expertise

I am determined to make this a no sales pitch zone as I know how totally annoying it can be, however I realise that you want to know that I know what I am doing and if it works, so read  some testimonials from real clients and what they said about working with me. Raves from Parents, Raves from Teens. Read more about me and my experience