Raising Girls: Why girls are different – and how to help them grow up happy and confident. Gisela Preuschoff
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and your own childhood, talk about these things with your daughter if she is old enough. This conversation is likely to stay with you for many years to come.
Then
When you were a girl/boy, what did you look like?
What were your favourite clothes?
What toys did you have? What games did you play?
What was your personality as a child?
What did you like about being a girl/boy?
What did you find difficult about being a girl/boy?
What were you not allowed to do as a girl/boy?
What duties and chores did you have?
Who were your role models?
What was your dream?
What did you often imagine?
Which insulting comments can you still remember?
On which occasions were you especially sad?
On which occasions were you especially excited or thrilled?
Now
In which situations do you behave like a typical female/male?
Which qualities do you particularly like in girls?
Which qualities do you particularly like in boys?
Which qualities do you particularly like in your daughter?
What do you wish for your daughter?
Which aspects of her life are you happy about?
I hope that Raising Girls provides you with concrete guidelines on how to approach your daughter’s upbringing. I have drawn on experiences with my own daughter, scientific findings and the experiences of parents derived from my own research and consulting work. I have thought of the little girl I once was, and all the girls and women I have known during my life.
Fathers and brothers also play a critical role in raising girls. The experiences a girl has with the male members of the family follow her all her life. A woman does not allow herself to be defined without a masculine counterpart (and, of course, the opposite also applies), just as there is no loud without soft, no light without dark and no large without small! And so there are no daughters without fathers, even when the latter – for whatever reason – live separately from their daughter and/or have completely broken off contact.
You have a girl – who has her own distinct personality – and it really matters to develop this gift in the true sense of the word. I would like to accompany you on this journey. My point is to emphasise dangers and to prevent them; but above all, I would like to reveal an excellent pathway to cooperation.
Apart from this, I would like this book to be a journey of discovery of your own roots and notions, during which you may recognise what opportunities the birth of a girl offers you personally.
Gisela Preuschoff
All parents worry about their children. They want to do their best and do everything properly – or at least avoid big mistakes. These days, most parents’ expectations of their son will be very similar to those they have of their daughter. They merely want their child to be strong – strong in the sense of being socially responsible, independent, somewhat assertive, clever and affectionate.
And they want their child to be able to handle all the tasks that she will confront in life.
We’re all individuals…
Long before a baby sees the light of day, a film is playing in the minds of the parents-to-be; they imagine what their life with the baby will be like, and they often have fixed ideas about the qualities a boy and a girl will have. This is completely normal – it is fun, and it increases their joy in their child.
While she was pregnant with a girl, one woman wrote in her diary, ‘I have the feeling that I could just pull the finished picture, which is a perfectly formed little figure inside me, out of a drawer. She has already been born, because my imagination has already shaped her; she’s a beautiful, strong, self-confident, lively and intelligent creature.’1 On the other hand, the father of this little girl imagined a lovely, sweet, affectionate little girl he could snuggle up to and cuddle.
Apart from these images, parents should try to remember that there are many prejudices with regard to the sexes, and that most children develop quite differently from what their parents imagined in their dreams. Girls are by no means always calm, loving and good, just as boys are not automatically wild, aggressive and intelligent. Each child is unique: each child brings a distinctive personality into the world, and each is also shaped by her or his environment.
Most women who know they are expecting a girl identify completely with the unborn child. They see the baby as a miniature version of themselves and feel a strong symbiosis with the child in their belly: ‘We’re the same – we want the same things and are interested in the same things.’
The biological part of the story
What do the biological facts say? In the first weeks of pregnancy, when women as a rule don’t even know they are pregnant, male and female embryos are identical, because they have the basic structures of both male and female sexual organs. They are only distinguishable through their sex chromosomes (XY for boys and XX for girls). The X chromosome originates from the egg cell of the mother, and the father’s sperm has either an X or a Y. If the egg is fertilised by an X sperm, it will be a girl; if not, it will be a boy. Most genes lie in the X chromosomes, of which there are around 2000, among them the intelligence gene. The reproductive genes romp around in the Y chromosomes.
Purely statistically, more boys than girls are conceived, but more male than female foetuses are miscarried or stillborn. No-one knows exactly why this is so. It is assumed that either male foetuses are more sensitive to harmful environmental factors, or the mother’s immune system classifies the male foetus as foreign and tackles it, in error, as an ‘enemy’. Could that also perhaps have something to do with the mother’s thoughts?
In the sixth week of pregnancy, the male Y chromosome gives the command to form male gonads; the X chromosome of the developing baby girl only induces ovary development from the twelfth week. During the course of the pregnancy, ovaries and gonads excrete sex hormones, which are involved in the formation of physical characteristics and also influence future behaviour.
The ‘male’ sex hormones are called androgens, and include testosterone; the ‘female’ hormones are oestrogen and progesterone. I have placed these classifications in inverted commas because all these hormones occur in both the male and female organisms, though in differing quantities.
When psychologists talk about a woman’s ‘inner man’ and about men’s ‘feminine side’, that is exactly what they mean. We all have male and female parts in us, and it is sensible to use both!
If the embryo has enough androgens, a penis grows and the female sex organs waste away and disappear. A vagina, fallopian tubes and womb will grow in the female embryo, and the male sex organs will die off. The fallopian tubes of the female embryo already store 6–7 million eggs, but by the onset of puberty this number has fallen to 400,000. On the other hand, boys only produce sperm from puberty onwards.
Between the ears
With sexual differentiation, male and female embryo brains start to develop differently. The clearest distinction can be seen in the hypothalamus, the hormonal centre or ‘relay station’ of the front and middle brain. From here, numerous