Saturday, October 10, 2015

Review: Swimming Upstream; Parenting girls for resilience in a toxic culture

A guide to help parents teach their daughters to resist negative cultural messages.Never before have adolescent girls faced so many confusing and contradictory expectations. From a young age, popular culture teaches girls that their worth is based on their appearance, their ability to gain attention, and an ever-increasing accrual of accomplishments. With such unattainable standards, it is no wonder that many girls experience stress, self-doubt, and even mental health problems. Girls struggle to develop an authentic sense of self, even as they attempt to meet a set of impossible cultural expectations. 
Many parents feel helpless against the onslaught of negative influences targeting their daughters, but in Swimming Upstream: Parenting Girls for Resilience in a Toxic Culture, Laura Choate offers a message of reassurance. This book provides parents with a set of straightforward tools they can use to help their daughters navigate the trials and demands of contemporary girlhood. 

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My Review:

In Compliance with FTC guidelines, you all should know I got this E-arc for free from NetGalley but am not obligated in any way to post a positive review--just an honest one.

When I was pregnant and heard we were having a girl, I cried. In my defense my logical reasoning skills were not at their highest and my hormones were definitely out of control. But I was thinking about what huge responsibility a girl is. I would have to teach her to love herself and question what society and the media says about her worth when I still had my own lessons to learn in those subjects. I enjoyed reading this because the author seemed to really understand pregnant-me's panic. She offered studies and suggested observations that should be done "as if you were an alien doing a study". And it helped. As I read I got the sense not so much of a research book, but that I was getting calm advice from a trusted friend. I did only get the E-arc, but I'll definitely be buying the physical copy for my shelves.

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