Thoughts from a Head - Bringing out the best in girls...

How do we prepare the girls of today to face the challenges of being the women of tomorrow? This is surely one of the key challenges in raising girls today. Perhaps we can begin by identifying those things which I believe make girls distinctive, and the ways in which parents can address these characteristics in order to bring out the best in girls – to support, encourage and inspire them. I know this will lead me into some stereotypical generalisations so I will say that at the outset. There are some girls that don’t readily conform to type, just as there are some boys who don’t. But at the end of a 30 year career working with thousands of girls and boys, separately and together, this is what I’ve found.

1. Girls often need help to build their confidence. I think girls and women are fantastic, but in my experience they can underestimate themselves. The brightest, most talented and conscientious girl can undervalue her capabilities and only hear the criticism and gloss over the praise. Helping girls to feel good about themselves and encouraging them to have faith in their capacity to face challenges is hugely important. We must give girls lots of opportunity to succeed and so to feel successful both within the classroom and beyond it, in sport, music, drama, debating, clubs and societies, as well as in their lessons. Building their leadership skills and giving them positive female role models to look up to is also an important way in which we can encourage them to have faith in what women can do, and so what they can do.
2. Girls can be reluctant to take risks. They like to operate within their comfort zone and aren’t always good at making mistakes. Boys tend to worry far less about getting it wrong. You have to help girls feel safe and encourage them to have a go. Ask them to think about what’s the worst that can happen? The worst thing is that they’ll perhaps get it wrong but then they’ll probably learn more than they would have done if they’d got it right. You can’t just tell girls they can do it – they won’t believe you! You have to show them they can do it, support them through it and see them emerge two inches taller on the other side.
3. Girls can have a tendency to be perfectionists who try to do everything perfectly and who can get upset if they haven’t reached perfection. You need to encourage girls to give it their best shot and then to be satisfied and move on to something else. For example, some girls spend too long on their homework or struggle to complete coursework because they want to do multiple drafts to try to get it just right – it becomes difficult for them to put in the last full stop and say – that’s good enough. I’m content. Challenge the tendency to perfectionism when you see it. Make girls aware of what they are doing and encourage them just to aim to be the best they can be and then feel proud.
4. Girls are very interested in relationships and emotions – much more than boys are. They like to interact. They like to talk. When I watch the girls at play at my school, for example the 7 and 8 year olds, I realise that everything they do is about relationships – making connections with each other, sometimes jostling for position and popularity in the group. So if, for example, a boy has a new cricket bat and he brings it into school to find his friends don’t want to play cricket, he will find a different group to play cricket with. If a girl wants to play a game and her friends don’t, she’ll find a new game…
5. Because girls care so much more about relationships and friendships they can be much more sensitive when friendships shift, as they inevitably do as children grow older. I don’t accept that girls are more unkind than boys, or more likely to bully, and I really don’t recognise the recent research that says girls are becoming increasingly apt to bully physically. That hasn’t been my experience across the last 30 years at all. But girls care more, feel it more deeply and they have far longer memories than boys where this kind of thing is concerned. Boys get over things much more quickly. So unfriendly behaviour becomes more of an issue for girls. And if girls do choose to be unpleasant to each other, they are much more subtle about it than boys are. It isn’t so likely to be physical, and it may not even be overtly verbal, such as name-calling and unkind comments. If girls want to make each other suffer they exclude. They decide who is within the charmed circle and who is kept out of it. Sadly, the development of technology and the increasing popularity of social networking sites on the internet has given young people new tools to include/exclude/ostracise should they choose to. As a parent you can deal with this by encouraging your daughters to be fully aware of what they are doing – girls aren’t attracted by the idea that they might be seen as bullies. Tap into their sensitivity, their powers of empathy (which are considerable).
6. Girls and boys learn differently, and if you educate them separately within the classroom, you cater for these differences and bring out the best in each. Ideally, they will have the opportunity to mix and to develop their wider social skills outside the classroom with social events and a range of extra-curricular opportunities – Combined Cadet Force, Music, Drama, Debating etc – outside school time, but in the lessons both girls and boys can be taught in a gender-specific way which works for them. Girls like to talk their way into understanding. Because of their interest in relationships, pair work and group work tends to have significant benefits for them. We can build their confidence and encourage them to take a risk, make a mistake because they are in a safe setting.

So there you go – some suggestions of ways in which girls can be distinctive, with some strategies for how we can use this to bring out the best in them. As parents and teachers we care very much about each individual girl, and generally they know that and appreciate it – though sometimes only in retrospect!