Many agree that teen girl bullying is at an all time high and that awareness and education about bullying needs to be increased. Increasing the awareness and the resources available at the school level is what happened when Sandra in Singapore decided that despite her daughter's pleas, it was time to reveal the identities of the three classmates who were bullying her daughter. (If you haven't already, read Sandra's teen bullying story here.) It's interesting that bullying seems to be commonplace even in Singapore, even in a country where there's a high level of homogeneity in the culture and where you can get a ticket for things like … [Read more...]
My Teenage Girl Was Bullied – And The Anti-Bullying Remedy That Finally Worked
August 29, 2013 by 1 Comment
By Sandra My daughter started her first year in secondary school with joy and excitement. At age 13, she was proud to be seen as more an adult than a child. Her happiness, however, was short lived. By mid January, she shared that her classmates were rude, used profanity and disturbed the class regularly. She asked me if she could be home-schooled. I told her to view the situation in a positive light, that she was placed in that class to help and guide others. Did I do right? I don’t have the answer but this is what I came up with to deal with the situation. My girl did her best to encourage others to stop smoking and to refrain … [Read more...]
Teenage Girls + Media = Low Self-Esteem
August 15, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Is it really true that teenage girls + media = low self-esteem? The issue of media's impact on teenagers has generated a lot of interest in the last decade. Despite contradictory findings, all researchers agree that teenage girls as a group are focused on their looks—especially on what they don't like about themselves! Marketing departments and ad agencies spend millions each year targeting teenage girls who spend much of their hard-earned dollars (and their parents' hard-earned dollars) on looking good. Although the message of "girl power" is prevalent in today's marketing messages, so is the irrefutable idea that "sexy" and "thin" are … [Read more...]
Raising Your Daughter To Be A Leader
July 29, 2013 by 2 Comments
I decided to launch Parenting Teenage Girls magazine because I know that most parents do not just want to survive their daughter’s teenage years without a major catastrophe, they want to raise confident and successful daughters that become leaders. Raising Tomorrow’s Leaders is the magazine’s tagline and slogan. But what does it mean to be a leader? We all have different ideas of what a leader is and I don’t mean “leader” in the narrow, traditional sense of the word, such as a government or a religious leader. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of good examples of great leaders these days—at least not in the mainstream press. Rather, what I … [Read more...]