Bringing Up Girls

 

I’ve been anxiously anticipating James Dobson’s book about Bringing Up Girls that is coming out this spring.  Between now and then I’ll be doing some thinking and sharing every now and then what it’s like to bring up girls “these days.”  My blogging buddy Shelly Wildman is a brilliant writer who has girls a few steps ahead of mine wrote an article about this the other day.  Go read her post,  then come back and check out the 5 best and the 5 hardest things about bringing up girls I have found to be true so far.

The Hard Stuff:

1. The drama.  Oh, the drama.  Every day, every where I look, some dramatic event is playing out before my eyes.
2. The competition. Looks, skills, personality, it is in every area of their little lives.
3. Books.  Books are awesome.  So many good ones, way too many bad ones.  It gets so hard to sort through them all and decide which is which.
4. TV commercials.  We guard our girls from watching smutty TV shows that degrade women.  Commercials do that in between shows we let them watch.
5. Clothes, and the money they would LIKE to spend on them. 

The Great Stuff:

1. Clothes.  I love seeing them develop their own fashion sense.
2. Their feelings and emotions.  Good and bad, their emotions on their sleeve or hidden, I love the processes of their emotions.
3. Creativity.  I love to watch them interact with one another and come up with creative dances, plays, and stories.
4. Chatter.  Their chitty-chatty-ness is always going on somewhere in our house. 
5. Friendships.  With their sisters or their friends, their friendships are deep and full of life and love.

Those are my observations for now.  How about you?  If you have girls (or know one)  what is the hardest part of raising them?  What’s the best?

Comments

[Shelly W.]

Oh my goodness! Imagine my surprise and delight when I saw this post! Thank you so much for linking to me, Michelle. I have more posts coming, actually, because one of my friends has been asking me about this.

I love your list above. The books are so hard. I have one daughter who reads SO much that I could never keep up with what she was reading. At some point I had to just trust God and her that together they would make wise choices.

[Shelly W.]

P.S. Forgot to mention that I sure wish I had thought of writing that book before Dr. Dobson did! Tee hee!

[Jenny Maust]

Interesting... I would say pretty much the same things about my boys. Drama, Competition, Books, Clothes, Creativity, Friendship, Chatter, Feelings, oh yeah. Amazing to me how children are so different and yet so much the same.
I am looking forward to Dr. Dobson's book as well. I have read "Bringing up Boys" a few times and it is a keeper!

[betsey]

Very Very good.

[Samantha Hartzell]

Michelle, I attend GCC-Elkhart and I have been following your blog. We are blessed with 4 (YIKES) wonderful girls. They are 12, 10, 5 and 3 mos. The thing we struggle with the hardest with them is staying true and pure in a society that tells them the complete opposite. Our oldest was struggling last year b/c she has different values and morales than others in her school and she was an outcast b/c of it. She said that she would disguise questions to her friends and she would see the devil answering her. She told me she was mad at God. Asking why He would put her in this position and everytime she would think of going with the crowd, she would remember her foundation and not be able to stray from it.

And yes, there is ALWAYS the drama! :)