Maggie Dent on Raising Our Little Girls to be Healthy, Happy and Heard

There’s a saying often thrown around by parents in the depths of frustration and despair: “What Would Maggie Dent Do?” I’ve asked this question about five times already today!! Including, whilst trying to work out the modern-day rules of Pass the Parcel for our four-year-old’s birthday party. Very intense!

Maggie Dent is known as Australia’s queen of common-sense parenting. She’s anti-guilt, and wants us to lower the bar. As an author, educator and mum of four boys, Maggie has all the answers when it comes to teaching kids resilience and finding their inner calm.

Maggie’s known for her books on parenting boys - and her ABC podcast Parental As Anything has just won gold at the Australian Podcast Awards - but she’s now released Girlhood: Raising our little girls to be healthy, happy and heard.

The idea for the book came from Maggie trying to work out why girls and women can often seem to lose their sense of power and their voice.

We chat about the ridiculous pressure on women to be the perfect parent, and the unfair pitting of mums against each other.

Plus, the link between self esteem and social media; the importance of grandmas and aunties; and how to stop the conditioning of our girls, which leaves them feeling timid and weak.
Maggie also reflects on her struggles and how writing Girlhood took her on her very own personal journey.

SHOW NOTES
Buy Girlhood.
Maggie’s Website
Maggie’s Instagram
Maggie’s Facebook

We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we have recorded this podcast, the Darug people. We pay our respects to their Elders, past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. 

TRANSCRIPT

STEPH: You're an author. You're our favorite parenting guru. Mamma of 4, you've obviously written amazing books about raising boys, but of course, you're a woman. You're a grandma. So, what's behind the push for girlhood?

MAGGIE Well, I really was witnessing my beautiful granddaughters. I've got four of them. Look, there were things I'd never seen in my house with four boys. You know, the coloring in and the gluing and the crafting that could take hours, like, never seen that, ever. The imaginary play, yeah, no, that could go on for hours as well. And the depth of that imaginary world was, blew me away. And then their memories, the things that they could remember that no boy I ever knew would remember. Like, their problem-solving capacity, their capacity to ponder things through and to think things without being impulsive. So I just thought, maybe it's just because they're my granddaughters and they're clever. But, you know, in the light of that Chantelle Contos' survey, where the most hideous stories of middle-class, well-educated women who had allowed apparent things to happen to them in the intimate spaces with boys and men. And I thought, what is going on. And that is not a journey I wanted from my granddaughters. So I wanted to kind of dive into, where do you get to where you lose your voice? Where does a female feel she has no power, has no capacity to stand up and say, this isn't okay? And of course, I thought, oh, look, I'll do a survey first. Because I just, you know, it's not my lived experience, other than the fact, I am a girl, you know, I had sisters, I had a mother. I taught co-ed, so I've taught exactly the same number of girls as boys. And in my counseling, 75% were troubled girls rather than boys. And then I've forgotten that I'd run, you know, women's retreats for 15 years. And I've heard all the stories of the broken child, broken girl within women. And I thought, no, hang on a minute. I actually have a bit of skin in the game. And the response was almost 5,000 that really validated the areas that really concern us when raising girls and the areas we need to celebrate about raising girls. And so I feel, I just needed to shine a light.

TBC