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Girls Just Want to Have Likes
How to Raise Confident Girls in the Face of Social Media Madness
Laurie Wolk
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eBook - ePub
Girls Just Want to Have Likes
How to Raise Confident Girls in the Face of Social Media Madness
Laurie Wolk
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About This Book
Are you concerned that the daughter in your life is spending too much time living in the world of social media? Do you wish you could stop the madness that social media brings into your home? You are not alone. Girls are in the midst of a crisis of confidence and communication. They are learning valuable life lessons from mentors like the Kardashians and Instagram "stars"whose heavily edited photos and videos leave them feeling badly about themselves and second guessing their own lives. Physical and psychological changes in her adolescent brain mixed with the impact of the media, most importantly social media, has girls feeling lackluster about themselves and uncomfortable communicating in real life. An average 12-15 year old sends over 40 texts a day, 1 in 2 teens believe they are "addicted" to their mobile device, 78% of teens check their mobile device hourly, and 77% of parents say they are concerned that their children are distracted and don't pay attention when spending time together (Common Sense Media Report, 2016). With these statistics, parents feel powerless and paralyzed by fear that their daughters will be lacking in self esteem and the necessary communication skills to survive in the real world.The worst part is that parents are letting their fears surrounding social media get in the way of parenting their daughters the way they intuitively know they should. Well, not anymore. In Girls Just Want to Have Likes Laurie takes families back to the basics by using real life examples and powerful communication and leadership skill lessons to help parents build a family connection and confident capable young women. Girls Just Want to Have Likes will help parents reclaim the power in their homes away from social media, the uninvited guest, and go back to the basics of creating a stable and loving home, accepting and encouraging their daughters and gently nudging them to take risks and experience real accomplishments. Parents can step (back) into their roles as mentor and guide and stand side by side with their daughters helping them unwind and decode the different messages that social media is sending them. As this begins to take shape in the home, social Media will start to blend into the background. Allowing the things that matter most to stand front and center â your daughter!
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Chapter 1
Growing Beyond a Pleaser to Become a Leader
Building Confidence From the Inside Out
I have always been smart enough, pretty enough, athletic enough and well-liked enough to feel confident in most situations.
I have a home in suburbia that I share with my three kids, my adoring husband, and our dog. I have a successful private practice in which I work with families on building confidence through communication and leadership skill training. I often speak in front of large groups of people about parenting, building confidence and leadership skills in girls. I do all of this with ease.
If you met me for the first time at a cocktail party, you would probably think to yourself. âWow, that girl has got it together.â âShe sure is confident,â you might say, and therein lies what I always felt was my dirty little secret.
Ever since early childhood, I had this pervasive feeling that I was not âenough.â Sure, I had all the outside appearances and performance trappings of a confident girl, but deep inside I never really believed the feedback the universe was giving me. I spent so much time outwardly focused â trying to please and impress others with my academic achievements, athletic abilities, physical appearance, and ladylike social skills â and I never spent much time looking inward.
I did not build my confidence on any solid foundation. Nobody is to blame for this. In fact, I didnât even fully realize it until my daughter was born, and it brought a flood of emotions to feel that piece missing.
I asked everyone and looked everywhere for answers. No one could show me the way. It had to come from within me. I have a sneaking suspicion that this may ring true for you too. You, like me, show the world what you want them to see. A confident, capable, courageous and caring (wo)man. We even believe it ourselves, until something pokes a hole in our solid exterior. Daughters poke these holes. In fact, they can leave us with big, open, gaping wounds. Our insides exposed for all to see.
Even right now, as you are reading this book â which I already know deep in my soul will help countless parents and young girls â the critic inside my head keeps popping up and asking, âWhy you, Laurie? Why are you to be their guide to tame the social media beast?â
I pause. And I think.
The insecure child inside of me wants me to run. âRun, Laurie, run. This book publishing stuff isnât for you!â
That insecure child that still lives inside of me wants to protect herself from disappointing others, failing, and/or making herself vulnerable to outsiders. She built her confidence backwards: from the outside in. She lost sight of her own strength and natural intuition as she was so busy trying to avoid making mistakes, pleasing others and appearing to have it all together.
She comes out even now when I am faced with tough decisions that most often involve some level of risk and possible failure.
I, like so many women and girls, have always equated my âlikabilityâ to being confident. People like to be with people who are easy and fun to be around, or at least that was the message many of us girls receive. Be likable â itâs that simple. And if you can make being âlikableâ look effortless, well then youâve got yourself one perfectly-formed âgood girl.â But being universally liked and pleasing everyone, as you hopefully know by now, is an impossibility.
When your goal is to be âlikedâ by all, you are forced to disconnect with your internal compass and voice. And the more âgreatâ you are told that you are, the more you feel that you have to be great. All the time. Thatâs a lot of weight to carry.
Like cars that go on automatic drive, so do we humans. Playing out the programming of our childhoods without question, acting on the knowledge and experience we came to know as our truth. We grownups tend to continue to do and believe what we were told to do and believe when we were children, and we never really evaluate whether it still applies or makes sense for us in our adult life. (This is especially true when it comes to the beliefs we no longer even consciously realize we carry, but more on that later.)
That doesnât serve us well when it comes to parenting our girls.
We adults need to get off the road from time to time and evaluate the thoughts, beliefs and rules of behavior we have been carrying with us since childhood. After all, how can we teach our girls how to have a positive self-image when we arenât even quite sure we know the road to get there?
It became very apparent to me, when I had my first daughter, that I needed to get off the road, shift out of automatic drive and do my own internal social and emotional skill building. In turn, I could build my confidence the right way, from the inside out. That way I could role model for my own daughter what real confidence looked like.
And that is when my Girls Leadership journey began.
As I set out to get to know myself âso that I could role model for my daughter what confidence, leadership and compassion looked like â I found my truth.
My truth was that I wanted to help girls of all ages build confidence from the inside out, not the other way around.
Once my discovery about what lights me up inside was illuminated for me, I realized my high profile job in the entertainment industry â the one that impressed other people, but no longer me â didnât suit me anymore.
So now, instead of allowing that insecure inner childâs words, the one that are telling me to run, take hold of me, I know to simply notice her chatter. I notice that she comes from a place deep inside of me. A place of fear, and an insecure and urgent adoption of the mindset that âgood girls please others.â But now, I can stop and notice the fear in the adult situation, and choose to change my thought. I change it to something that serves me far better.
I say to myself with confidence, âWho better than me to write this book?â
As an educator, author, certified life coach, I see firsthand what your lives look and feel like. It was my own life, too, before I chose to take the reins.
I am in the trenches with you, maybe a step or two ahead, and that is exactly where you want your guide to be. As Martha Beck always says, âYou have to live it to give it.â And live it I do â every day â with my clients, my two girls and my son (who, by the way, also benefits from these important lessons).
My daughters arenât perfect, my family is not perfect and my clients still struggle with themselves, their daughters and their families at times, too. What we all share is a sense of connectedness and calm knowing that whatever life throws our way we can handle.
We, along with countless others, are doing our best to incorporate the ideas and principles set forth in this book. We try things, we allow space for change and imperfection, we get feedback and we learn. Most of all, we believe in ourselves, and in what we are doing as effective parents.
Wonât you come join us?
Chapter 2
We Are All in This ⌠Together
As of late, the topic that Iâve noticed coming up often with my clients was technology and social mediaâs place in their daughterâs life. âItâs ruining our family life,â they exclaim, and their fear is palpable.
My clients, like you, are highly educated, successful and emotionally intelligent adults â yet they all had this pervasive sense of powerlessness over the little screens that proliferated among their teens and tweens.
As I watched them search for more parental control technologies and clamp down on rules of media usage in their homes, I noticed that this was coming at the price of their relationships with their daughters, their familiesâ wellbeing, and their sense of calm and peace.
So I did what I do best: I set out to find the antidote to this problem. And that is exactly what this book, and my workshops and private coaching, is all about.
The goal of this book is to provide you some easy to understand, highly actionable things you can do to begin to release your fears surrounding social media, reconnect your family, and help build confidence in your daughter. Confidence isnât necessarily the obvious antidote to your daughterâs craving for social media connection, but it is proving to be a vital ingredient in growing up surrounded by 24/7 digital connectedness and making constructive and healthy choices.
If you are anything like me, you often wish that social media would just go away. Sure I enjoy a good Instagram post from my favorite celebrity or brand, but when it comes to my children, I wish it would just go away. But it wonât. And thatâs why we are here, facing it together.
They say, âKeep your friends close and your enemies closer,â and that is exactly what the second lesson in this book is about (remember the first lesson was reminding you that you were not in control).
I am suggesting to you at this point that you collect as much data as you can about how your daughter is using social media and what she is doing on it.
Note: If you already consider yourself pretty social media savvy, you can skim through these pages. It is an ever-evolving space, with a wide array of apps and platforms, and different kids are drawn to different spaces.
When we were buying our home in suburbia, we were told by the real estate broker that we were bidding against another family. We didnât know anything about them at the time, but we knew that we had a much better chance of âwinningâ the house the more we knew about the family.
Things like âŚ
Were they tidy? Were they loud? Did they have kids? Pets?
Do they like to throw big parties every weekend?
What negatives do they possess that would make us more appealing?
You get where I am going with this, right?
Of course you do, we already established how smart you are.
Well, you need to do the same reconnaissance on your social media âcompetitorâ if you want to win back your âhouseâ and the attention of your girl. It will take a little time, but itâs worth it.
Social Media Basics
The first thing you will want to do is learn the basics of social media if you donât already know them. You will want to learn what are the most popular apps that your daughter and her peers are using. I suggest you look online for this basic information, and then after that, go ahead and ask your daughter. In talking with her about social media on her own terms, you will be showing her that you are interested in learning more about things that she enjoys. You can tell her that you are figuring out how to build it into your family and school life so you can stop fighting about it all the time.
Hereâs a quick snap shot of current popular items to get you started:
Apps come and go, however, the tenets that follow will apply to any social media your kids are using. This approach to building strong relationships is timeless, even if the apps arenât. The vehicle may change, but the reason kids use them doesnât â they want to be connected, they want to feel important and noticed, and they want to individuate from you, the parent. This is all totally normal!
â Instagram. A mobile social networking service where girls share photos and videos either publicly or privately to others. More followers = More popular and quite often they donât even care who the people are. (90% saturation amongst higher income households).
â Snapchat. A mobile messaging application used to share photos, videos, text, and drawings wherein the messages disappear from the recipientâs phone after a few seconds. Teens love it for the ease with which they can connect with others in real time and Snapstreaks are all the rage â they send âfriendsâ a Snap each day in order to be able to keep their streak alive (Also, 90% saturation amongst children at the highest income bracket).
â Twitter. A social networking service that enables its users to send and read short 140-character messages called âtweet...