Resources | Youth Outreach

How can parents help their daughters develop healthy self-esteem?

Although the media, peers, and pop culture influence children, parents still hold more sway than they think when it comes to having an impact on a daughter's developing self-esteem. Here's how parents can help:

  • Monitor your own comments about your self and your daughter.
  • Get dads involved. Girls with active, hardworking dads attend college more often and are more ambitious, more successful in school, more likely to attain careers of their own, less dependent, more self protective, and less likely to date an abusive man.
  • Watch your own stereotypes; let daughters help fix the kitchen sink and let sons help make dinner.
  • Encourage your daughter to speak her mind.
  • Let girls fail - which requires letting them try. Helping them all the time or protecting them, especially if done by dad, can translate into a girl feeling incapable or incompetent.
  • Don't limit girls' choices, let them try math, buy them a chemistry kit. Interest, not just expertise, should be motivation enough.
  • Get girls involved with sports/physical activity, it can reduce their risk of chronic diseases. Female athletes do better academically and have lower school drop-out rates than non-athletes. Regular physical activity can enhance girls' mental health, reduce symptoms of stress and depression, make them feel strong and competent
  • Watch television, movies, and other media with your daughters and sons. Discuss how images of girls are portrayed.
  • Counteract advertisers who take advantage of the typical anxieties and self-doubts of pre-teen and teenage girls by making them feel they need their product to feel "cool."

It is within the family that a girl first develops a sense of who she is and who she wants to become. Parents armed with knowledge can create a psychological climate that will enable each girl to achieve her full potential. Parents can help their daughters avoid developing, or overcome, negative feelings about themselves and grow into strong, self-confident women.


Taken from "How to Raise Girls with Healthy Self-Esteem"
by Anita Gurian, Ph.D., NYU Child Study Center. For more information please go to http://www.aboutourkids.org/articles/how_raise_girls_healthy_selfesteem