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

The next two chapters, and the practical application of their material throughout the rest of this book, utilize nature-based theory and nature-based parenting. This is an interdisciplinary approach to neurobiology, biochemistry, psychology, anthropology, moral theory, and sociology. In preparing to provide you with this new approach, I have studied thirty cultures' (listed in the Notes and References section at the end of this book) approaches to parenting girls, and included studies conducted in six school districts in Missouri; I have also relied on my own family practice, and on the daily journey of raising daughters. In all walks of life, I focus on the base, in human nature, for a child's actions. As you read Chapters 2 and 3 especially, you'll find new sciences of female biology on display which are groundbreaking and provide one of our best, natural allies in raising our girls.

You'll discover that many of your daughters' interests, moods, attitudes, self-esteem drops, desires, and ways of relating, once thought to be caused by culture are products of her neurobiology, and as you find her mind and heart clarified, you'll be able to alter the way you relate to her, especially during her adolescence, between ten and twenty years old. You'll discover how large a part biology plays in girls' distresses -- from depression and anorexia to self-esteem crises -- and what you can do, from the inside-out, to help girls in trouble.

You'll discover the ways in which girls' biology differs significantly from boys' biology. Because of structural and functional differences in the female and male brain, girls sense, remember, enjoy, and experience personal needs and desires differently than boys. They use their bodies differently, and their words. They even experience God, religion, and spirituality in neurologically differing ways.

As you explore this book, I hope you'll experience the degree to which femininity (being female) is an immensely complex neurobiological process that takes place, even more than masculinity, in separate stages, which each have discernable needs. This staged female development process is not suitable for the kinds of theoretical simplifications we've based social policy on over the last decades. It can only stand for so long the attempt to limit itself to one stereotype of what a woman is or should be: financially independent and able to compete successfully in the workplace with males. This "different stages/different needs" femininity is a process, a way of being, which we have neglected for decades -- but one on which human civilization has always been grounded.

As you gain support in these pages for your daughter's journey through life, I hope most of all that you will enjoy a deep sense of peace for yourself and your girls, the kind of peace that comes, almost like a whisper, late at night, when we know we are living out to the best of our ability our fragile parent/­daughter relationship.

Copyright © 2002 by Michael Gurian