Raising a girl

How to raise a girl? The question is important and not simple. There are two lines in the upbringing of a girl: a general line and a special line. The general line does not distinguish whether you are raising a boy or a girl: in any case, there are things in common, namely, the upbringing of a healthy and developed child, a harmonious and thinking personality. But this article is about a special line in education, namely, what is special to know and take into account when raising a girl as a future woman, as a future wife and mother. If this is important to you, I invite you to think about it together.

Health and physical development

Since mothers are more likely to bring up girls, they feel sorry for girls, and this is the main mistake. Smart mothers are not afraid to temper girls in the same way as boys, that is, from childhood, a minimum of clothes, more movements and dousing with ice water (an option is a contrast shower). Do not be afraid: it is the girls who are brought up in warmth and “no matter how bad things happen” who catch cold. Dousing with cold water gives hardening and excellent vigor, but if this conflicts with long hair and, in general, with a hairstyle, look for compromises.

A lively and cheerful girl with a slender and athletic figure is more likely to have an excellent family and success in life, so sports are a must. It is advisable to choose sports that are associated with being outdoors and with physical activity — running, cycling, rollerblading, in winter — figure skating and skiing. Important: in any sport, a girl does not need strength, but three other things, namely: a) flexibility, b) general coordination of movements (dexterous hands) and c) grace, beauty and smoothness of movements. Therefore, from power loads — we swing the press and do squats, but we replace the horizontal bar with push-ups.

Swimming is very good for health, but with professional training, girls form quite masculine shoulders, which is not quite feminine. For the same reason, rhythmic gymnastics is more useful than sports gymnastics. Tennis is useful both big and small, both yoga and fitness are good, while team sports are more for guys, for girls individual and pair dances are more useful. Once again: the most important and absolutely obligatory sport for any girl is dancing. Dance, dance, dance! You can start with folk dances, continue with any modern ones, but sooner or later, the experience of pair dances is required, at least hustle (the simplest and most affordable) and salsa (a little richer). In pair dances, the fear of the partner’s body disappears, in dancing you can stand close and take the hand, which is not easy for teenagers. If hustle is a minimum program, then ballroom dancing and sports dancing is already the world of princesses.

When choosing a specific sports section or dance studio, it is usually more important to pay attention not to a specific sport and not a type of dance, but what kind of people are there and what is the style of communication there, first of all, what is the culture of the coach. A high-quality, worthy coach teaches not so much a specific sport or dance, he teaches attitudes towards people and life. If you have found such a coach, you can be calm. However, for a girl of different ages, you need to select different coaches …​​​​​​​​

Neatness

Our daughter should not be a slob, so we teach our daughter to order. Three absolutely obligatory things in the morning: make the bed, put your hair in order, get dressed. Regarding the bed, our grandmothers knew well: whoever has a mess on the bed, that (that one) has a mess in life. Remove the bed (first air it out, and then remove it) — only two minutes in time, and the room becomes beautiful and there is a feeling of comfort. Similarly, combing your hair and putting your hair in order is, among other things, collecting your thoughts, collecting all of yourself. An unkempt girl feels and behaves unkempt: can you imagine an unkempt queen? And to get dressed is to complete putting yourself in order. The princess does not allow herself to walk in the morning, especially to have breakfast in a crumpled T-shirt or nightgown. Clothes are part of our mood, so it is important to dress for the task of a particular morning and day.

By the way, about shoes: it’s good for little girls to run barefoot, for older girls and adult women tight-fitting slippers. Throw away all the soft flip flops, in them the most collected girl quickly turns into a disassembled disgrace.

Little housewife

From early childhood, we teach our daughter the skills of a housewife. It is wrong if the mother is in the kitchen and the daughter is playing her games. That’s right, if your daughter’s favorite game is helping her mother in the kitchen. The main difficulty here is usually in the mother: it is easier for her to cook everything herself than to call her daughter and explain everything, correcting her mistakes … But if the mother thinks about the future of her daughter, by the age of twelve she may well achieve that she is already responsible for “feeding everyone”. not her, but her daughter. It is not right when the mother cooks and the daughter helps. It’s right when a daughter cooks and her mother helps her: she continues to teach her how to cook deliciously, cover beautifully, do everything easily, not worry in vain and involve everyone who is able to help her to help.

Wipe the dust, water the flowers, wash the linen, iron everything, vacuum the floor, sort out the closet, wash the windows … — all this many things the little housewife should do as easily and naturally as she runs and breathes.

In raising a girl, there should be a slightly different position of dad and mom. Mom can (and should) be tougher than dad here, drive her daughter and demand from her daughter. Combing your hair, making the bed, not walking around unassembled, preparing breakfast for everyone and washing the dishes — all this a mother can demand harshly from her daughter. But dad — let dad be softer to his daughter. The daughter fulfills her mother’s requirements because she needs to, and her father’s requests — because she wants to. It’s normal if dads spoil girls a little: and if she didn’t comb her hair and ran to him in a crumpled dress, let his reaction be hug, kiss and admiration “You are my beauty!” And after that — “Go comb your hair, dear, and it’s better to stroke the dress!” To love and pamper — yes, but if suddenly the daughter wants to compete with her mother for the attention and love of her father — no, she should not have a single chance …

beauty keeper

A beauty is not one who was born a beauty, but one who knows how to create and preserve beauty — her own beauty and the beauty around her. Your daughter should know that she is a Beauty, but it is even stronger to be able to follow her beauty and take care of her. Doubt in their external attractiveness is a heavy cross for a teenage girl, the source of many complexes and failures in her personal life. No matter what external data nature has awarded your daughter, you must educate her from the most tender age in the belief that she is a beauty. Emphasize her virtues, do not laugh at her shortcomings: fullness, freckles, snub nose — all these are unique features of her personal charm.

And at the same time, do not let your daughter relax. Completeness — let’s go to sports! Problematic skin — do not be lazy to take care of it! Sharp gestures — dance! We do not laugh at the shortcomings, but we do not allow them to remain: when necessary, we will say everything in plain text and discuss how we can fix it.

At the same time, do not teach her to admire herself ahead of time, let her learn to create beauty around herself before the age of twelve, and not start the race at a vanity fair. The habit of cleanliness up to a certain age is more important than jewelry, and the ability to see beauty and create beauty needs to be laid right now: to learn music, drawing, needlework. Learning music is learning rhythm and melody, learning to draw is learning to see the whole and the details, to feel the beauty of the line and the integrity of the image, to understand the combination of colors. Needlework is the art of subtle movements and the school of patience: the most useful school!

Turned twelve — teach the art of cosmetics, let him try lipstick, eye shadow, and mascara. When she watches beautiful actresses and looks at beauty ratings, let her learn to understand that even a very beautiful woman always takes good care of herself. Hair care, skin cleansing, masks — this is a skill of reasonable attention to appearance. In clothes, learn to choose colors, style and wardrobe as a whole, this will eliminate impulsive purchases in the future: I bought a beautiful dress, but it’s not clear why …

Active Sun

There is a lot of confusion about whether a girl should be a strong person and leader. It is true that men prefer women who let them lead, and at the same time avoid women who are weak and helpless. What does this mean in raising a girl?

Rule one: knowing your interests, but «no» to whims. A smart girl is always with her head and should be perfectly aware of her interests. At the table, from what is offered, she easily chooses what she personally likes, but she is never capricious. «I want it!» — wonderful, but the dissatisfied “I don’t want to!” And even more so, hysterics are prohibited.

Rule two: we are not crybabies, we do not play the unfortunate victim and helplessness. Distinguish: it is possible for a girl to cry, but it is impossible to achieve something with tears, unhappy eyes and helpless hands. So say: “You can cry, it’s not scary, it’s good for health, but everything you need to do, you must do!”

One of the simplest and most effective tricks in this matter is to follow the expression on your girl’s face and her vocabulary. Just make sure that she does not accustom herself to: move her eyebrows in suffering, lower her lips or shoulders, and also that she does not master the female vocabulary of the Victim: “Horror, nightmare! I’m shocked!.. I don’t know, I don’t understand, I can’t cope… It’s all of them, it’s all because of the teacher…” and so on.

Our daughter should be the Sun, and this is done in two ways. The first is that the parents themselves set an example for her, meeting each other and their beloved daughter with warm smiles and kisses. The second is a ban on a disgruntled face, dissatisfied phrases, dissatisfied intonations, resentment and whimpering. From childhood, a daughter should know a simple rule: “Do you not like something? Don’t pout, just say it. Ask gently and kindly, whatever you can — they will do it for you.

And if they don’t? — So, be grateful to your parents and life for what you have, and think about what needs to be done to get what you want later. The face is always satisfied, we say “Thank you” to our parents, we discuss all issues with them together. Perhaps this will help the girl in her future family life, when her main role is a leader, but hidden. She must be able to obey and at the same time unobtrusively lead her own line.

Clever

Usually, just obedient girls who do not contradict their parents are called smart. If a girl does this thoughtlessly, out of laziness or fear, this is bad, but if she learns to achieve her goal not by war, but by quick wits, attentiveness and affection, this is good.​​​​​​​

Today, the world of men welcomes girls who play fools next to them, but this is not the best game. The wisdom of a woman lies elsewhere: in the ability to find a common language, hear the interlocutor and be in cooperation, and not in negativity and protest. Teach your daughter not to be categorical, to agree with the reasonable and calmly do what needs to be done. To say to her husband the magic words “Yes, dear! Of course expensive! As you say, so be it!”, girls must learn to tell their parents: “Yes, mom!” and “Of course, dad, I’ll do everything right now!”. If a daughter obeys her parents because she appreciates their knowledge and experience, she is really smart. The desire to object and do everything in one’s own way leads in the future not to intelligence and independence, but to an internal saboteur, to difficulties in organizing one’s own life and conflicts with others.

The girl needs to be taught obedience to teach her courage and teach her to think. If girls are not specially educated, they often grow up to be cowards. In female culture, it is customary to be afraid, talking about fears is welcome, but prudence is more useful to your daughter, and instead of fears and worries, the calculation of reasonable risks. Teach your daughter to think. Many girls replace the ability to think with a good memory: it is easier for them to repeat what they want to hear from them than to think and understand. It is easier for girls to share and even cry than to think and draw conclusions. If your daughter loves to share her experiences with you, that’s great, but as you grow up, teach her to remove her “share”, that is, just chatting with emotions, develop the ability to speak in clear theses. Perhaps it is for this that the future husband of your daughter will thank you.

Controversial issues

Is it necessary to allow the girl to be “afraid”. «I’m afraid of an injection!», «I’m afraid of the dark!» — it is generally accepted that this is natural, and most importantly, the typical reaction to these complaints is to regret and help: to make it so that it was «not so scary.» Why is this controversial? Because the girl develops an attitude: in case of difficulties, do not solve them herself and wait for someone to help her.

A woman from Germany has just called, asking for a consultation: she has mastered a new profession for herself as a cosmetologist, but now she is scared to open this business and start earning the truth. And if it’s scary, she pulls month after month and does nothing. She lives on her husband’s (small) money and worries about everything …

I wonder how a graduate of a cadet school would behave in her place — would he also tell that he was scared? It seems that this is impossible, he had a different upbringing: «Boys are not afraid.» But then — why do we educate girls like that?

The memoirs of Princess Ekaterina Alexandrovna Meshcherskaya describe how, after the 1917 revolution, she and her mother settled in a workers’ settlement, where her mother got a job as a cook. The first night they had to sleep on the bare floor with planks under their heads. The girl hardly slept and besides, she hurt her ear. When in the morning her mother pulled out a splinter for her, Katya burst into tears, not even from pain, but “from our poverty, the reasons and meaning of which were incomprehensible to me, she cried because our future seemed hopeless to me. “I didn’t know that my daughter was such a crybaby,” the mother said almost indifferently. — (…) Where does such cowardice come from? .. So that I never see a single tear of yours again … ”Then, when Katya often did not sleep and knew that her mother was now also“ tormented by memories ”, the girl bit her tongue painfully,“ so that do not speak and do not burst into tears in complaints.

This is how the Russian nobility was brought up. How do you plan to raise your daughters?

Video from Yana Shchastya: interview with professor of psychology N.I. Kozlov

Topics of conversation: What kind of woman do you need to be in order to successfully marry? How many times do men get married? Why are there so few normal men? Childfree. Parenting. What is love? A story that couldn’t be better. Paying for the opportunity to be close to a beautiful woman.