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Talking to Daughters

Girls and assertiveness

Q. I'm concerned that my daughter tries too hard to please others. I wonder if she should be more assertive especially in her speech. What's going on?

A. We send girls potent messages about operating in a society obsessed with self, all the while teaching them to be concerned about others. Girls often develop a strong ethic of care, cooperating more readily, sharing time and energy, and maintaining “best friends” by developing insights into their friends' needs and preferences. Girls get complimented about their willingness to be polite or considerate of others. But girls may not receive a balancing number of messages about being concerned about themselves.

Pleasing others.

Your daughter may have doubts about herself that are exacerbated by the flood of contradictory, often nonverbal messages she receives from everyone around her about who she is and who she should be. Should she put herself first? Or should she think of others before herself? Likewise, her detailed observations—sometimes in the form of story-telling or narration of a day's events—often will be seen as tedious (“Clare, can you get to the point?”).Yet at the same time, she will get many messages encouraging her to observe details, especially complicated details about nonverbal, emotional expressions.

As a consequence, girls often develop a pattern of pleasing others at every turn. Coaches for girls' soccer teams often remark that they have to train the girls not to say “Excuse me” when they hit another player. Girls often develop skill at deference but little skill at assertiveness.

Assertive role models.

This lop-sided development can be changed by exposing our daughters to assertive role models. We can take our daughters to movies where assertive women are positively portrayed. We can speak up when an unassertive character is presented on television. We can attend sports events or after schools activities that include well-respected, assertive older girls in school or in the neighborhood. We can practice at home to develop whatever interest our daughters show so they will feel more confident to present themselves as skiers or artists or soccer players or musicians or mathematicians. We can look for balance.

Follow the leader.

We also can listen to our own language to hear the conditioned ways we have learned to talk—ways we now are demonstrating for our daughters. For example, women often speak in conditional ways, such as using tag questions: “We ought to go, don't you think?” instead of “Let's go now!” These “tag questions” can be helpful in a conversation to encourage others to join in. As a constant pattern, however, they can be interpreted as powerless and “wishy-washy.” We parents can assess our own communication patterns and present a model more balanced between concern for self and concern for other.

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