Chapter 1 | Your Daughter’s Friends Shouldn’t Be Raising Her: Who Is Teaching Her How to Be a Woman?

A Three-Part Series on the Importance of Intergenerational Friendships

Part 1: Girls Need More Than Friends Their Own Age

Peers raised by peers is just about the worst thing this society has given our daughters.

Helping your daughters have friends is so good, and we feel so thankful when they do have friends. But maybe—just maybe—those friends are pulling our children further and further away from vulnerability and connection, which seems like the complete opposite of what friendship should be.

Girls don't just need more friends. They need a wider-aged female community. Girls don't just need friends their own age to have healthy relationships; they need women who are already women to learn how to be women from.

The reality is that, especially in a world where we are often only around children our own age or grade, when we are looking for answers to questions about life, we turn to girls our own age who do not quite know the answers either.

Sadly, the girls who often seem to “know” the answers have sometimes had to grow up much faster because of woundedness in their families. Their worldview may be shaped by the brokenness they have experienced, and from there, young girls can become informed by other girls their own age who are also trying to understand life through a broken worldview.

My heart is especially big for girls in foster care for this reason. They have a beautiful natural mothering instinct and may become leaders at school because of being independent most of their lives. But their lives can also be wrought with brokenness and suffering because of abandonment and instability. Because of this, some may begin to see their bodies as satisfied only when they are used by others.

This does not mean every girl will have a perfect outlook on life. But girls need to be informed—no matter what the girls at school are saying—by people who see their worth and dignity and want to protect it as the highest good.

Leonard Sax writes in Girls on the Edge:

"A girl shouldn't have to learn womanhood exclusively from other girls who are simultaneously trying to figure out what womanhood means"

Another way of saying this is that a girl should learn what it means to become a woman by actually knowing women.

You may say, “But girls only want to be around people who are cool and their own age.” But think back to our own experiences as little girls, when we were ten or twelve. The people we admired most were often the older girls, our moms, our moms' friends, our aunts, and our grandmothers.

It was magical to spend a couple of days alone with grandma. To ride in the car with our aunt or mom for moments alone. We could feel shy and embarrassed when she spoke to us, but we were honored and inspired when moms friends spoke to us. We wanted to be like her.

Somewhere along the way, something happened that stole our whimsy from us as little girls. Something told us that it was silly. Our goal went from being beautiful to being sexy so that we can be "loved." Our younger slef no longer saw the inherent beauty and worth that had been in us all along. It was lost. Gone.

At some point, we stopped believing in fairies. Whether fairies are real or not never mattered. What mattered was our ability to believe in whimsy.

Maybe it was the boys at school making fun of us. But more likely, it was the women in our lives—women we trusted—who had also failed to receive whimsy in their own lives because work, money, and academics became the highest measure of success.

None of those things are wrong on their own. But when we become boxed in by money and rigidity, our beauty becomes pushed down and stale. As much as that desire gets squashed, the desire for whimsy still remains in us.

This Week's Call to Action

Think of the women in your daughter's life who could help her learn what it means to become a woman. Reach out to one of them and invite her to spend intentional time with your daughter and for them to bring their daughters along too.  A great invitation is “hey there! I just got this R2K magazine and I want to do some activities in the magazine to remind myself and my daughter of how amazing our bodies are! I’d love for you to join us!”

Our next article in this series focuses on menarche, but as girls approach adolescence, looking at studies that show that when a girl has her first period she is at her most vulnerable and how this shapes how she sees her parents and her friends. 

If they do not know they can turn to us—whether because of busyness, resentment, or because we have not created intentional safe spaces for conversation—they are more likely to turn to a girl at school who is willing to talk about questions they have about their bodies.