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Title details for Girls on the Brink by Donna Jackson Nakazawa - Available

Girls on the Brink

Helping Our Daughters Thrive in an Era of Increased Anxiety, Depression, and Social Media

by Donna Jackson Nakazawa
Sarah Mollo-Christensen
Audiobook (Includes supplementary content)
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
15 revelatory strategies for raising emotionally healthy girls, based on cutting-edge science that explains the modern pressures that make it so difficult for adolescent girls to thrive
Anyone caring for girls today knows that our daughters, students, and girls next door are more anxious and more prone to depression and self-harming than ever before. The question that no one has yet been able to credibly answer is Why?
 
Now we have answers. As award-winning writer Donna Jackson Nakazawa deftly explains in Girls on the Brink, new findings reveal that the crisis facing today’s girls is a biologically rooted phenomenon: the earlier onset of puberty mixes badly with the unchecked bloom of social media and cultural misogyny. When this toxic clash occurs during the critical neurodevelopmental window of adolescence, it can alter the female stress-immune response in ways that derail healthy emotional development.
But our new understanding of the biology of modern girlhood yields good news, too. Though puberty is a particularly critical and vulnerable period, it is also a time during which the female adolescent brain is highly flexible and responsive to certain kinds of support and scaffolding. Indeed, we know now that a girl’s innate sensitivity to her environment can, with the right conditions, become her superpower. Jackson Nakazawa details the common denominators of such support, shedding new light on the keys to preventing mental health concerns in girls as well as helping those who are already struggling. Drawing on insights from both the latest science and interviews with girls about their adolescent experiences, the author carefully guides adults through fifteen “antidote” strategies to help any teenage girl thrive in the face of stress, including how to nurture the parent-child connection through the rollercoaster of adolescence, core ingredients to building a sense of safety and security for your teenage girl at home, and how to foster the foundations of long-term resilience in our girls so they’re ready to face the world.
Neuroprotective and healing, the strategies in Girls on the Brink amount to a new playbook for how we—parents, families, and the human tribe—can secure a healthy emotional inner life for all of our girls.
*Includes a downloadable PDF of resources from the book

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    September 13, 2022

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780593628393
      • File size: 249374 KB
      • Duration: 08:39:31

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      July 4, 2022
      This clarion call by science journalist Jackson Nakazawa (The Angel and the Assassin) explores threats to girls’ mental health. The author examines the reasons behind the uptick in depression in girls over the last decade by telling the stories of three young women in their early 20s—Anna, Deleicea, and Julia—and offers parenting advice on how to counteract negative influences. Anna’s cliquish high school dovetailed with unrealistic beauty standards on TV shows to give her low self-esteem, a process the author elucidates with research showing girls have stronger harmful biological reactions to social threats than boys do. She also details the dangers posed by social media, noting that “the more time a teenage girl spends on social media platforms, the more likely she is to develop depressive symptoms” and describing how Julia felt compelled by the incentives of social media to sexualize herself when she was still a preteen. To help parents guide their daughters through these pitfalls, the author provides 15 “antidotes” that include helping daughters discover a “sense of something bigger” and encouraging them to pursue their passions. The smart analysis and wealth of neuroscientific and psychological research adds nuance to public discourse around girls’ mental health, and the three profiles drive home the human stakes of these societal problems. Timely and incisive, this issues an acute warning that the kids are not alright.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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