Girls can do anything

Beloved author and parenting expert Maggie Dent says girls deserve to be healthy, happy and heard.

- SAMANTHA TRENOWETH

Parenting

Maggie Dent is best known for books on bringing up boys but is grandmother to a brood of girls, and, as she says, was once a girl herself. In her latest book, Girlhood, she turns her attention to our girls. Here, she shares a little of that wisdom.

Why are a girl’s first 100 days so important?

When we arrive as a baby, most of our brain cells – our neurons – aren’t yet connected into networks. So, every experience that happens from there is building the way that unique little brain is being shaped. It’s not only about how we’re going to manage this sensory world, the whole human mind – our sense of who we are, our identity, where we fit in the world, our belief systems and mindsets – are all shaped in the first five years.

Another thing I think is really important is that I believe our children arrive with their own spirit. They’re not a blank slate we have to fill in. What we have to do, in those early years and later too, is work out how we can honour the amazing human who has arrived, who is a one-off, who’s never been here on this earth before. How can we support her to grow and be as healthy, happy and heard as she can be? So, raising a girl is about honouring who she is, not about who we might want her to be.

How can we build a strong emotional foundation for our girls that will see them all the way through their childhood and adolescence?

Our ability to manage our emotions later in life is laid down in those first five years … So, we need our girls and our teens to get a sense of what their emotions feel like in their bodies, and we have to help them to decode what those body sensations mean.