10 Things Girls Need Most: To grow up strong and free. Steve Biddulph
for warmth, mobility and the kind of individuality that they can create themselves without ever going near a shop. Dressing our kids up to be cute can be fun for adults, and a little won’t kill you, but it’s the razor’s edge of turning a girl (or boy) towards self-consciousness and focusing on how they look, which in this era of massive anxiety about looks will be total poison to their mental health.
And then there are toys. We got rid of the little ovens, washing machines and toy irons that girls had in the 1950s, but substituted false eyelashes, pouty fishnet stocking dolls, pink pretty princess outfits (‘some day my prince will come’) and cut-to-the-crotch dancewear. Not exactly progress.
My sister actually had one of these, a toy iron! You could put a battery in it and it lit up the ‘on’ light. That’s all it did! So she could have fun practising ironing. Just like mother!
It isn’t a bad thing for kids – of both genders – to play at being grown up. Making food, building houses, playing at being families. But when toys are made that way – and there is a girls’ aisle and a boys’ aisle in the toy store – then we have a problem.
The real solution to sexist rubbish foisted on girls (along with not buying it) is to make her so strong and free, so early, that she just laughs at this stuff at eight, or fourteen. So the answer is – girls need wilding! You learn this through making messy artwork and building stuff in the backyard, gardening, and making things from mud and leaves. And mum and dad joining in. Through dancing and leaping about in the living room to loud music with mum and dad and friends. In having and keeping animals, fish and tadpoles, and growing every kind of plant. And whenever possible, being in the rain, woods, and on the beach. Encourage her to be messy, uninhibited, alive and moving about. Never complain about the state she gets in. Choose her clothes to be dirt-proof and damage-resistant, water-excluding or so sturdy it doesn’t matter. And whenever you can, get outdoors into natural places and let her run free.
So here is a quick assessment on the natural wildness opportunities your daughter has (tick any that fit):
□ 1. My daughter is frightened of soil. She rarely ventures outdoors.
□ 2. We live in an apartment or flat where there is very little nature around.
□ 3. We have a garden or a park nearby, and do go there sometimes.
□ 4. We get out into nature whenever we can, have a pet, and do a lot of playing outdoors.
□ 5. We live in the countryside, and she plays in wild woods and I have to get twigs out of her hair.
And on inner wildness:
□ 1. Our family is neat. We are quiet. Our goal is achievement. That takes discipline and there is no room for messing about.
□ 2. We do occasionally let our hair down and it’s actually quite good fun.
□ 3. Our daughter/s are very happy making a creative mess with paints and paper and glue and bits of stuff. They get it all over themselves, but it’s nothing a warm bath won’t fix.
□ 4. Our kid’s favourite activity is wild dancing to loud music in the kitchen and living room. Everyone goes mad. When we go to mountain tops we end up shouting our names very loud.
If you ticked 1 or 2 on these two lists, don’t panic!
That’s what this chapter is to help you with. Please note – wildness should not be confused with being chaotic, disorganized or lacking routines. Kids and families do work best with boundaries and structure. You can only be truly wild when you know not to cut yourself, and there isn’t cat poo on the bathroom floor – at least, not from last week. And especially if you don’t own a cat!
EVERYONE CAN DO IT
Not everyone can live beside the woods, or the beach, or in a village where you can walk safely about with friends when you are seven. Where you can light a fire and make toast, or create your own shelter and wait with your dad to watch a badger emerge from its den at dusk. But can you see how wonderful and enlivening and freeing such a childhood could be? And begin to bring even some of that into your daughter’s world? Even in the city, adventure is there. And nature can be found somehow, even just on holidays. So have that kind of holiday or weekend whenever you can. Many women remember being a child, totally blissed out on their first time on a lonely beach, or a hilltop they walked up with mum or dad, where they could see for miles around, and the wind blew in their hair.
“Our daughter would play with sticks, pebbles, pieces of leaf and strange insects for hours in our garden. (And we lived in a place where there were snakes, large lizards called goannas up to a metre long, swooping kookaburras and sometimes hawks or eagles.) Her attention span was so great that it wasn’t even a ‘span’ at all, it flowed all day long. She would make up stories, voice the dialogue between the characters, breaking off only occasionally to bring something to show us or to get something to eat or drink.”
Jasmine, 37
Can you see how, added together, these experiences might immunize her – even just a little – against the stupidities of social media or putting on make-up and fretting about being hot enough for boys?. From being cruel to friends. From needing to take drugs to feel good at fifteen.
And of course, the best wilding she can receive she learns from you, her mum and dad. If you demonstrate a free and exuberant nature, laugh, sing, dance, love nature, love music, love life, then she will just catch that as naturally as breathing. She will see a competent, caring, protective person, who is nonetheless unfettered, unconventional, untamed. Who takes joy in the moment and draws her out of reticence into exuberance.
THE VERY HELPFUL ROLE OF DADS
Dads have proven to be very valuable in helping girls be explorers. It’s known from research that dads do more adventurous, active and physical kinds of play with girls than mothers do. They take children to wild outdoor settings and participate in riskier activities (and have more accidents, so do be sensible). Daughters with dads get knocked over by waves at the beach, graze their knees, wrestle, run and climb things far more. They go fishing. Dad is slightly less aware of mealtimes or having a balanced lunch! Within reason this can result in girls being more stress-resistant and hardy. But better still, they will be comfortable in male company, able to meet boys on their own terms. So dads – do stuff with your girls! (There’s a whole chapter about this later in the book.)
Keeping Out the Hyenas
It’s incredible how aware small children are of the world around them. So we have to be alert about the media that floods into our homes – television, the internet and magazines, as well as the advertising they see everywhere in the street, in shop windows and shopping malls. Advertising can accidentally impact our girls or be very deliberately targeted at them. In either case, its message is almost always harmful to their emotional wellbeing and self-image. We can choose what we let into our homes, and as they get older we can equip our girls to see what is being directed at them. We can fence out the hyenas until they learn how to fight them themselves.
“When she was barely three, our daughter was playing on the carpet in front of the TV. We were in that half-daze of early evening, sitting chatting about something, when her voice rang out loud and clear. She had raised her head and was looking at the TV.
‘Isn’t that nice! That lady’s husband will love her now she is thin.’ My wife and I almost levitated in our rush to turn off the TV, while also looking casual and relaxed. The ‘errkkk’ feeling was so strong. Australian TV has ads – I am sure the UK does as well – for diet products that show vivid before and after footage of chubby people suddenly grown thin and happy. Our toddler had taken in every word.
Love