A preteen girl can benefit immensely when she learns these skills. A preteen girl is at a unique moment in her life.
The spark that is her potential grows more intense, yet she’ll have to fight against gender norms that threaten to diminish it.
Those expectations might convince her to sacrifice ambition for popularity, shame her for rejecting feminine beauty standards, or negatively affect her mental health. There are countless ways she’ll feel pressured to hide or change her authentic self.
Most adolescent children, regardless of gender, feel that tension, but girls often face distinct challenges. Research shows, for example, their self-esteem plummets during adolescence compared to boys.
“Girls are at their fiercest and most authentic prior to puberty,” says Rachel Simmons, author of four books on girlhood and cofounder of Girls Leadership, a national nonprofit that provides training, education, and workshops to girls, nonbinary youth, and gender-expansive youth, and the adults who support them.
SEE ALSO: 4 ways to help girls thrive online
While there’s growing awareness of what girls experience during adolescence, particularly when it comes to social media and comparison to others, Simmons says navigating these dynamics has only become more complex.
“It’s not that we’ve really updated our expectations of girls – it’s that we’ve added to the old expectations,” she says.
Simmons believes that girls face “unrelenting pressure” to excel at everything they do, a sense that has become “inextricably intertwined” with pleasing those around them. This is partly due to the competitiveness of college admissions, according to Simmons.
Indeed, new survey data published by Ruling Our eXperiences (ROX), a nonprofit research organization dedicated to promoting confidence in girls, found that more than three-quarters of respondents felt they were going to “explode” due to pressure. They named grades, school, friendships, and family issues as their top stressors. (The survey collected answers from 17,502 fifth through 12th grade girls, between 2022 and 2023.)
Simmons, who wasn’t involved in the research, notes that girls are dedicating a significant amount of their time to managing their relationships via digital technology and social media. That means keeping up with notifications, group chats, and their own social media posts, often at the expense of sleep, hobbies, and physical activity.
Thanks to social media and other perceived obligations, like getting into a four-year college, Simmons says many American girls are consequently experiencing “role overload” or “role conflict.” This may also look different depending on a girl’s characteristics, like her race or ethnicity. A Black girl, for example, may experience “adultification bias,” a phenomenon in which Black girls are seen as older and less in need of nurturing.
Parents, caregivers, and adults who regularly interact with preteen girls can prepare girls for adolescence by teaching them vital skills early on. These include honest communication, assertive behavior, self-compassion, and developing a positive relationship with their body. It’s equally important for girls to learn how to use these skills in the context of social media, which can affect their development in positive and negative ways.
Talking about these and other issues, says Simmons, should also be an exercise in learning about a girl’s interests and who inspires her. Draw from pop culture examples after you’ve asked about, for example, her favorite song, celebrities, and YouTube videos.
“That’s your best way to get an education and win some love and respect from your kid in the process,” says Simmons.
Here are three skills to consider teaching your daughter by the time she turns 13.
1. How to respect and express her feelings
One popular stereotype portrays girls (and women) as in touch with their feelings and naturally good at communicating them. That idea, however, has a harmful corollary: When girls and (and women) are overcome by their emotions, they can become incapable of making decisions.
We so frequently assume that girls and emotions are a natural pairing, for better or worse, that we neglect to actually teach girls emotional intelligence. That skill, says Simmons, means having the ability to describe and convey the full range of human emotion. But when girls are taught to value being happy and liked, they often suppress or can’t acknowledge their more difficult experiences.
More than two-thirds of ROX survey respondents said they withheld their thoughts or opinions because they want to be liked. To combat this impulse, adults need to show girls how to “flex the muscle of expressing their strongest feelings,” says Simmons. They can do that by modeling their own emotions with an expansive vocabulary using words like happy, nervous, excited, scared, angry, frustrated, and confused.
Parents can also “authorize” their daughters’ emotions by honoring their experiences as opposed to diminishing or questioning them.
“When your girls express authentic emotions — even if they’re difficult — you take them seriously,” says Simmons, “you don’t deny them or challenge them.”
Black girls and girls of color can encounter specific barriers to self-expression, says Dr. Marketa Burnett, an assistant professor of Human Development and Family Sciences & Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut. While they may, in fact, know how to express themselves, they may also have to consider and navigate how their self-expression will be interpreted by peers and adults, especially in school settings.
Burnett, who studies Black girls’ identity development, says they may be reprimanded in school more frequently than their white peers for behavior that teachers or staff define as defiant or disrespectful when exhibited by a Black student.
“What does that teach Black girls about their ability to speak up?” asks Burnett. “We’re almost telling Black girls they have to be silent.”
Burnett notes that Black girls in education have been criminalized and urges schools to adopt policies that don’t inflict disproportionate disciplinary measures on them. She adds that encouraging self-expression among Black girls and girls of color will require self-reflection from the adults around them to “ensure that all girls have the opportunity to thrive in all settings, and that’s just not the reality currently.”
2. How to develop a positive relationship with her body
Lost in a sea of selfies and TikToks, where the lines between self-objectification and self-empowerment are frequently blurry, girls might not know how to view themselves beyond a brand or object of desire.
One way to help them develop a holistic, positive relationship with their body is to introduce them to sports. Physical activity gives them an opportunity to see their bodies as capable of strength and stamina, rather than being defined by appearance only. Research published by ROX shows that sports can positively affect a girl’s self-confidence.
But even girls who feel physically capable and confident might still feel ashamed of their body and its sexuality. Simmons recommends talking with girls about their bodies from toddlerhood. Parents should know and use the right names for genitalia and do their best to “represent sex as a healthy, beautiful experience that should be had with joy and consent.” And yes, that means talking about what consent means early on and emphasizing that a girl’s body belongs to her alone.
Parents who are uncomfortable discussing sex and the body communicate those feelings to their daughter.
“When girls feel uncomfortable with their bodies,” says Simmons, “they can also disconnect from how they are really feeling, and worry more about how someone else is feeling, or what they want, instead.”
3. How to learn from friendships
Girls are frequently told that friendships are paramount, and that may be why they can be so singularly focused on those relationships.
But we shouldn’t take female friendship for granted, says Simmons. Relationships help girls learn to assert themselves, compromise, and set boundaries.
Parents should view friendships as an opportunity to show girls what healthy relationships look like and how they can relate to others and themselves.
One example might be helping your daughter respond when her friend doesn’t save a seat for her on the swings. That could start with asking her what choices she has in the situation and working with her on role-playing an assertive response. Encouraging her to communicate honestly and reasonably assert herself provides her with skills that she’ll need to push for a raise as an adult, says Simmons.