Excerpt from The Wonder of Girls by Michael Gurian, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Kristen, Margeaux, and millions of other adolescent girls are moving through three to five years of internal transformation to womanhood while feeling abandoned, in differing ways, by family members and community. For hormonal, neurological, and psychological reasons, a girl of this age group is now desperate for love. Adolescence is, after infancy, the most vulnerable time in a child's developing life. As we will explore in Chapters 2 and 3, our culture as a whole has forgotten how normal it is for children to experience a series of self-esteem drops in early to middle adolescence: the changing brain and hormones require these. The mistake our culture has primarily made in nurturing its daughters is the pull-away that occurs among the generations when a girl enters puberty.

How often have you yourself seen it in your community? By the time a girl discovers puberty, the family has moved on to the business of parents back in the workforce, of kids left alone, of parental divorce, all of which may in some way be necessary for the adults in the family system, but all of which also affect the attachments and bonds the girl feels during this most tumultuous time in her development.

Gail and I have found ourselves using two primary strategies to help parents look behind the smokescreen of "gender stereotypes" and into the attachment needs of girls. The first is to educate parents fully in female adolescent development. Usually, when parents fully "get" their daughters, they know how to make life better. The second is to help families make choices that keep and build three or more very close family attachments for the growing girl. Often these three are mother, father, and grandparent, but there can be many different sets of this adolescent triad, as we will explore in later chapters.

Guiding Kristen's and Margeaux's parents, as well as the girls themselves, through deepened knowledge of themselves and their broken attachments was life-changing for them. Anorexia began to make etiological and biological sense to a girl and a family that had earlier defined itself by the idea that "girl diseases" were not biological or chemical but caused by cultural imagery and stereotypes a mother and father had not protected a daughter from. Margeaux's "I can't get my mother to understand me" hid a deeper pain. Her mother, who had worked part-time during Margeaux's early childhood, had gone back to work full-time when Margeaux was in fourth grade, and her father was not around every other week because of his work schedule -- a high-tech sales rep, he traveled a great deal. With both mother and father working, Margeaux, the eldest of three, entered adolescence among fading attachments. Her family was pulling away from her (and she from them), but it hurt, and she suffered unnecessarily.

During counseling the trauma of divorce was dealt with honestly in Kristen's family. Kristen explored with her parents how the broken attachments had altered her ability to live. The family learned to heal its daughter by becoming closer -- not in remarriage, but in post-divorce restructuring of family time, rituals, and bonds.

A THEORY FOR SOME, NOT FOR ALL

In providing what I hope is useful insight into four of the defining theories of our last half century of feminist thought, I have tried to stay focused on what is most important to parents, teachers, and other intimate caregivers of girls. When offering an analysis such as I have in these last few pages, there is the risk of overstating one's case -- of saying, "Well, there, you see, that feminist theory is all bunk, and we should throw it out." That kind of overstating regarding our patriarchal history has led to excesses of feminism. I am not offering an extremist response to feminist theory. Feminist theory is crucial for the lives of many girls.

What might interest us most now, in the new millennium, is which girls.

Copyright © 2002 by Michael Gurian