Permission for Pleasure
A podcast to educate and equip women with the information and confidence they need to express, experience and enjoy their sexuality. Cindy Scharkey RN, BSN, brings her 35+ years of experience as a healthcare professional to open the doors to healthy conversations about sex. This is a community where you can listen and learn to give yourself permission for pleasure. Visit www.cindyscharkey.com for educational blogs and newsletter.
Permission for Pleasure
The Growing Mental Health Crisis Of Our Girls
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Our girls are struggling more than boys. Why? Did you know that 1 out of every 4 teen girls has symptoms of major depression? This is compared with fewer than 1 in 10 boys. Girls are also twice as likely as boys to suffer from anxiety. We have a crisis on our hands. Award-winning journalist, Donna Jackson Nakazawa, joins me to discuss the topic. We talk about how the toxic stressors of social media and our culture are uniquely affecting girls' mental health. We share action steps from Donna’s book, Girls on the Brink, that you can use to help the girl in your life thrive - not just survive!
Donna Jackson Nakazawa is the author of Girls on the Brink as well as four books that explore the intersection of neuroscience, immunology, and emotion, including The Angel and the Assassin and Childhood Disrupted.
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And it's been a while now that I've been collecting the research on how the mental health of girls is tanking. Rising rates of depression and anxiety we've seen for about the last 10 to 15 years, really in girls who are now 27 and younger.
SPEAKER_01Hello and welcome to Permission for Pleasure. I'm Cindy Sharkey, your host. And wow, today's conversation is what I've been waiting to share with you with award-winning writer Donna Jackson Nakazawa about her book Girls on the Brink. As a mom of three daughters, and one that's in that 27 and younger age group she talked about in the clip. I just can't get over the importance of what she's talking about in this book, and I had such a strong desire to share it with you. This conversation, my friends, is not for just those of us who are parents or parents of girls. Our lives are all influenced by social media and our constant use of phones. Literally, even as I was editing and getting ready for this episode, someone came at me on social media. And I read it right before I went to bed. I was obviously not keeping to my healthy pre-bedtime routine, which means no screens. And so what happened is I couldn't fall asleep. I just was thinking about the rudeness of this person and now they came at me. It was just yucky. And when I woke up the next morning, I thought to myself, this is exactly what Donna and I were talking about. And not just for young girls and young women, but all of us. I'm glad you're here. I'm glad you're here connecting and listening, and I do realize it's just an audio connection, but some of what Donna and I talk about is just how we're using phones as a substitute for real human connection. Oh, I so hope that you feel some connection and community here, knowing that there's others who are listening and learning right alongside you. Before we jump into this episode with Donna and the conversation, I want to encourage you to stick with us through the first part of the episode because I understand it is a little bit of neuroscience and research, but it will give you a better idea of why you want to use the practical tools we talk about in the second half of the episode. So let's jump in. Donna, welcome to Permission for Pleasure. So great to be here. Thanks for having me. I'm delighted to get to talk to you and wonder if you might just introduce yourself in your words about your work in the world and a little bit about you.
SPEAKER_02I'm a science journalist and I teach at universities. I teach uh online courses and programs. And really, my bailiwick is that intersection of what we know about the latest science on the brain and the latest science about the nervous and immune system with our lived human experience, kind of like what we're experiencing in the human heart and how we love and work and play. And so bringing that together around what my agent always tells me, you love those gnarly problems. Bringing that uh together around some really gnarly societal problems. I come by it naturally, I come from a long line of newspaper publisher on one side of the family, on my father's side, and on the other side, a large group of NIH scientists and kind of grew up between those two worlds of the newspaper editor always sitting there with a red grease pencil, and you know, the old guys in the old presses who would let me make my own little newspapers. And then the gang at NIH who was working on cancer research and biochemistry and other things. And sort of I just in the middle through my career as a journalist and journalism school and cutting my teeth in the world of New York journalism, have kind of landed in this place where I feel very lucky to wake up and investigate what I think is important. And I certainly have been told, and it is true, and I'm proud of it, that everything I do has a slant of what's happening to women because we've been under-reported, our issues have been underreported. The scientists I go to are predominantly women because they've been ignored. And when you're in this area as a journalist, you see how women have been treated as individuals, as patients, as girls, as scientists. And so I'm also really about shifting that in a way that we're amplifying the female experience from whatever direction we do it.
SPEAKER_01Beautiful. And we're going to talk about your newest book today, which is Girls on the Brink and the Mental Health of Girls, according to the research. And it is grim, grim. So I would love for you just to walk us through some of the recent findings that got you moving into writing this book.
SPEAKER_02Sure. So a couple things were happening at the same time, which, you know, is kind of when you take on a topic like this and bite it off and chew it up and come out with what you think about it based on the research that you've done. So I three trends were happening at the same time. You know, I always have like hot files going where I'm really interested in something, and I'm thinking maybe I'm gonna follow that and report on it. And it's been a while now that I've been collecting the research on how the mental health of girls is tanking, rising rates of depression and anxiety we've seen for about the last 10 years, 10 to 15 years, really in girls who are now 27 and younger. So that's been a really drastic shift in the emotional well-being of girls. And at the same time, public health researchers have been able to parse out well, this isn't just higher rates of depression and anxiety. This isn't just because girls are more likely to say I don't feel good. They don't look at it that way. Public health has been able to really tease out, no, what we're looking at here are reports of how that lived experience that I talked about a minute ago is being made manifest for this cohort of young women and girls. A period of six weeks or more of feeling hopeless, not wanting to get out of bed. The number one words that mark girls of this generation who are feeling depressed, which again is not about their diagnosis, is a loss of interest in their former activities, not feeling that they're part of something, unworthiness, guilt, and shame. So that is a cohort, that number of kids cross puberty and adolescents who are female and also reporting symptoms of depression and anxiety, that gap between that number of girls and the number of boys reporting that is growing, right? So that we're seeing more and more this trend among girls to have depression, self-harm, and anxiety and kind of not want to be part of this world that we the adults have created. And whereas boys are also suffering, and I write a lot about this in the book, because I'm the mother of a daughter, but I'm the mother of a son. Boys are also struggling. It's a really toxic world out there between what kids told me, you know, school shootings, global warming, everything that they're facing that we didn't face when we were young. They now have social media coming in on top of that, which presents a lot of toxic feminine ideas about what it means to be female for girls and also toxic masculinity for boys. But we begin to see big differences where girls are spending more time on social media, where girls have to be on social media for any kind of social currency at all. As girls told me, you know, you figure out by the time you're 10 that if you want to be popular at school or socially, you've got to be popular on Instagram and now TikTok. And to do that, you have to be okay with being treated as if you are a sexual grown female and viewed that way, even though you know you're just a kid. And this is where we begin to see some of that difference in girls and boys, on top of the fact that girls are already coming of age in a society which is so much more gendered, where there's so much misogyny, where the messages they get about growing up female are, you know, so objectifying, and where more than 90% of the violence and harm that is done to them is done by men. Like girls are smart. They told me, like, we're growing up, we see every Bill Cosby, Jeffrey Epstein, you know, we see what power men do. Girls are more likely to be critiqued over their face, their body, their hair, their boobs, their poses. They're schooled by, you know, the crowd to take poses where the cameras at a certain angle and stand on their toes so that their, you know, shin muscles show and pretend they have on like Barbie slippers. And it just goes, the stories you hear goes on and on. And that's the road now to belonging. But it's a lot like empty calories, right? It's like if you ate Twinkies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and you thought, I'm gonna get full that way. It's not belonging, it's not mattering. So the more time that girls spend on social media, the more likely they are to be depressed compared to boys who spend the same amount of time on social media. And when we parse that out, we have to look at why. And it's really just an amplification of the messages that girls are already getting in our society, right? It's bringing it in in a way in which those algorithms are formed so that the hotter it gets, right, the more posts give us a sense of shame, anger, disgust, or fear, the more those posts are amplified. And so this is the world that our kids have entered, and it is particularly harmful for girls for other reasons we'll go into.
SPEAKER_01That is quite sobering and so true. You know, having raised three daughters myself and one still in that angel age you're talking about. It is why I really was excited to talk to you and have you on the show and introduce your work to the families that are part of my community, because this is so important to be talking about out loud and to be actively engaging our children about and and coming alongside them, which is what a lot of what you offer in this book is your antidotes to combating this messaging and just mess. I don't know. Sometimes that's how I think it's just a mess, you know.
SPEAKER_02It is a mess. It's a mess, it's a world that we've given them, and it's a bad mesh for their development for them across this period of time.
SPEAKER_01Yes, and in the book you said, you know, science tells us that chronic stressors affect the female brain very differently from the male brain, which is what you just talked about. And although these changes begin early on in development, they most often start to manifest during puberty in often harmful ways. And this is a lot of what you talk about in the book. I'd love for you to speak to that.
SPEAKER_02Well, sure. So I have to start with the fact that it was only a very few years ago that neuroscientists even began to look at the intersection of stress on the female brain. So imagine, and I've written a few books, as you know, this is my seventh book. Well, I've reported a lot on that intersection that we talked about earlier of stress and adversity and neuroscience, immunology, and psychology. And all of that reporting that I did was based on a male research model of a male brain. And the reason that I was told by really four of the leading female neuroscientists in the world who are starting to look now at the intersection of stress across development on the female brain and immune system, that researchers kept women out of these studies, female, females out of preclinical and animal research because they didn't want those pesky hormones in the way. Don't get me started. Okay. Right? So, personal tidbit, I just I have had heart issues since I was very young. And I just had a heart surgery about a month ago. I'm doing great, but you know, we didn't even look at the female heart until very, very recently. Everything that we thought we knew about female heart health was based on a male research model. And in neuroscience, it's taken even longer. Now, I'm not talking about epidemiology, that's different. Where you're standing on top of the mountain and you go, okay, well, this group of people who are female and you know, living and have X experience versus this group of humans who are male having Y experience, yeah, like their chromosomes, are having these different experiences and we can extrapolate from that. I'm talking about the research that is preclinical, the way that we base our very thinking about how what we experience affects us on a biological level. That research, females not included, and yet no too many pesky hormones. So that meant that we had no understanding of how female puberty intersects with stress and adversity in the environment in ways that might be different. And you won't be surprised to find that as these kickbutt female neuroscientists have begun to look at this, that it turns out that puberty for females as estrogen comes in has a profound effect on how stress and adversity affect females across development. So let me just see if I can kind of like encapsulate that, the why of that. So to begin with, estrogen is a really big, what we call stress amplifier. Now, this is good. This is an evolutionary advantage. It is the reason why women are awake 16, 18 hours a day, often way after their husbands go to bed, still like folding the laundry and getting ready for the next workday. Even though, even though, Cindy, we have much smaller organs. We have smaller bodies traditionally, and we still make room for a uterus, right? To carry another blight. And estrogen is the amplifier that is this groovy master regulator in the body and the brain. As puberty comes in, it surges in, it's helping to wire and fire up the brain in all these juicy, lovely, lovely ways, right? And sending messages to all the organs. It is so much more than just like the thrum of sexual excitement, right? Way beyond that. It is master regulator. We can thank it for the fact that women not only can do so much more on less, but that we have a more robust response to vaccines, for instance. That's estrogen. On the downside, in the face of too much stress, in the face of too many what scientists call environmental insults, that basically means bad things going on around you, whether it's social, emotional stress, you know, threats in the world around you, infection, um, you know, exposures to pesticides, so environmental insults, including social emotional threats. When there are too many of those and the immune system gets activated, estrogen amplifies those effects in a way testosterone just doesn't. And that's ultimately across evolutionary time very protective, right? Because it meant women were more able to carry a child to term and provide that maternal warmth and breastfeeding and protection during those crucial early years of childhood. So that is an evolutionary advantage, but it's also when it flips to a disadvantage in the face of too much stress, it's why women have autoimmune disease, right? At four, five, six times the rate of men, depending what autoimmune disease you're looking at. I myself have four. They're all go to the clinic, it's all women sitting there, right? And it's also why women right now are suffering from more long COVID than men. It's that flip. Now, when you've had a lot of stress across childhood, which most kids have had right now, and we talked about the stressors being amplified by social media, the brain at puberty, as estrogen comes rushing in, it's kind of like a computer chess game. It's factoring in everything that you've ever experienced to answer one question. How safe am I in this world that I'm going out into in just a few years on my own? If that answer is pretty safe, pretty safe, the brain wires and fires up in some pretty lovely and beautiful ways. And honestly, the female adolescent brain is an absolute superpower when it wires and fires up in healthy ways, in healthy environments. But when the answer to that question is it's not safe, which many girls I spoke with feel, the brain is more likely to wire and fire up in ways we don't want to see, ways that when we look at MRI and brain scans and PET scans, are those patterns of neural pruning or lack of connectivity in important areas of the brain that we associate with depression and anxiety, right? So, what I'm saying is complicated by the fact that puberty is coming in earlier and earlier. It was 15 in 1900, it's 11 today. This means all that we're talking about, that history of adversity in a ramped up, heated up world that's heating up socially, emotionally, politically, environmentally for sure. Estrogen comes rushing in, and it's kind of like a renovation happening in a house at the wrong time underneath a major hurricane. Wow. The brain is not firing and wiring up on the right things at the right time. Adolescence used to happen before puberty. You had a few years of early adolescence to figure out, well, what am I really interested in the world? Like, what do I say when my friends are mean to me? Like, what am I interested in? Who am I? And how do I respond to things? It's really Ericsson, right? Like, what makes me unique in this world? And yet, how do I fit in? But now we've put puberty before adolescence, and the brain hasn't had time to go through adolescence. And puberty is happening before that, meaning that the brain doesn't have the scaffolding to do three crucial things know when something is an emergency or safe or not safe, as in it's gonna pass tomorrow and everything will be okay, versus this is the end of me. Number two, think through and process difficult things. And number three, verbalize how to ask adults for help. And that is a problem.
SPEAKER_01That is a problem, a real problem. There's so much we could unpack here, Donna, but this last thing that you are mentioning, you called it the be careful filter. And this is very concerning for me in the sexual health space with young women, them not having a good parameter for that. Let's tell me more about that and why you called it the be careful filter.
SPEAKER_02So researchers have been looking at how social media affects the brain over time. And it turns out that when young people see a lot of engagement, and remember, we talked about social media media algorithms, which actually, you know, reward posts when it is shame, fear, disgust, and anger. And those are, you know, all you do have to do is look at what's trending on Twitter today. It's like a bunch of mad, you know, really mad thoughts that people. Are having getting a lot of engagement. But when we see a lot of engagement around posts that are centered on high health risk behaviors, you know what that is, of course, but for those who don't, it means early sex, drug, alcohol use, and self-harm, just to put the basics, right? That when there's a lot of engagement, even though you're sitting at the kitchen table with your beautiful three daughters and they're going, like, I would never drink eight beers at a party, you know, this weekend. I don't know why Sylvia did that last week. When they see this kind of engagement, and remember what we said that social media is your currency to belonging. It may be fake belonging, but it's the currency to belonging, which kids really want at this age, it turns off in the brain, neural circuitry that we could think of as the be careful filter that goes, okay, well, let me process this. I know that I don't want to do this, and I'm not going to do it, even though three friends are asking me to do it. Now that's a problem of adolescent, that's as old as time, right? If your friend said jump off a building, would you jump off a building? And no, mom, I would never do that. But when there is that kind of engagement around a high health risk behavior, let's say jumping off a building, and it's getting amplified in these spaces on TikTok and Instagram and Snapchat or whatever, that not a good idea voice is overridden. It just goes down. And in general, even a very well-loved, sensible girl's sense of who she is and what she wants to be will diminish over time in the face of a lot of hot messaging. Now, part of this is because the adolescent brain, our brains too, we process visuals hundreds of thousands of times faster than we process words. And so it's shifting the adolescent brain at a vulnerable window, as we've discussed. And it means that the conversations that we need to have with our kids about what they're seeing and how it might affect them require a degree of critical thinking or social media literacy that is just crucial.
SPEAKER_01Well, let's talk about that then, because any parent listening is probably going, tell me what to do, tell me what to do. Let's just talk about that social media literacy piece a little bit, because I speak to this on my platform as well, and in the sense of are we teaching our children how to be literate? Not just how to read and write, but how to gauge and filter and make decisions about what they take in from the media. I'd love to hear one or two tips for parents.
SPEAKER_02What I can tell you from the many, many people I interviewed, including girls themselves and pediatricians, is girls would say, No, no one, no one is teaching me how to do this. My mom is on her phone as much as I am. My dad is on his phone even more. You know, technology has taken over family life in ways that we very little question, right? And what pediatricians will say is that they are the ones who have to have this conversation with kids and families, that it slid into our way of being, especially during and after the pandemic, but way before that as well, because it is addictive. It is addictive. Um, we didn't talk about how just getting a text, getting a ding that someone liked or post on Instagram, but hopefully you have all those turned off on your phone. But if you don't, those dings, they activate the reward circuitry in the brain the same way that sex, drugs, and alcohol do. Or maybe, you know, just thinking about winning the lottery. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. You know, maybe I'm gonna get it this time. Maybe this is the one that will be the thing. And that's just how our brain works. And I could talk about reward circuitry in the brain all day, but that has slid into our lives because it's so seductive, because we want that dopamine rush as adults, as kids, and without our really having conversations about it. So I suggest a ton of things in the book, but just to run through a couple of them, you know, we want to make sure that we're building in that critical thinking, that social media literacy. Like, wow, I wonder why this post got so much interest. I wonder how, who's making money? Hmm. I wonder, let's chase that down. I wonder what her life is like when she's not taking selfies. Or I wonder who is taking those pictures, huh? How is she making a living? Huh. I wonder what it would be like if we spent less time on this platform. I wonder how you feel after you've spent an hour. Like, what are some of the emotions that you're having after you are on Instagram? Because we know that girls are also more likely to feel what we call upward comparison. What is that? It's they're there, I'm here, I'm not good enough. And boy, do girls tell me that over and over and over and over again. They do not feel that they are making it, they feel like they're physically, emotionally, socially, academically less than on these platforms because what gets elevated is so unrealistic and performative-based. So then we have to start having questions and building in the scaffolding for intrinsic, intrinsic sense of self-value and mattering versus extrinsic value, which is what social media is trying to provide, right? And we've locked our kids inside an arrow where everything is about extrinsic value. What grades are you getting? Are you in the gifted and talented? How fast were you on the soccer field? Are you going to Harvard? You know, and how many likes do you have on Instagram? But we want to start moving the conversation away from that extrinsic value into different ways that build up intrinsic value. And those turn, you know, of course, I have millions of them in the book, turns out to be really, really important for girls' mental health.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I agree with that a hundred percent. And I think one of the things you did bring up in the book that I keep encouraging in relation to, you know, sexual health conversations, but this goes across the board, is setting the stage for these difficult sometimes conversations with our kids. And you spoke to this so well in the book, saying, you know, we can even say out loud, this is hard for me too. This is hard for me to talk about, even as your mom. Right?
SPEAKER_02I don't have all the answers, and don't expect me to be perfect, but we can't brush things under the rug. And just of course, when kids are little, we're the fixer, we're the detective. Like, you fell down. Oh my God, where did that happen? You know, here's the back team, here are the band-aids, yes, let's get to it. But as they get older, it's not appropriate to jump in as the detective or the fixer. Of course, we want to. We want to keep them safe and well and healthy. There's nothing we think about more than our kids. We wake up thinking about them, we dream about them, we go to bed thinking about them. We just love them so much. But if you put together everything I've said about how difficult it is for kids today to process the world that they're in and what's coming at them, and that all of this is coming at them in much earlier ages and stages than what we experience, we have to build in a different level of what I call parent-child attunement, where we're managing our own stuff. We have worked on our skills to be non-reactive, because look, I've written a lot about this. But the more adversity and trauma and stress we've faced, the more likely we are to be flipping our lid in the moment. And that's okay. Every parent has done it. It's part of parenting. But knowing how to bring yourself into a different place of grounding so that you're self-regulated, so that your child can self-regulate in your presence through these difficult conversations is an art and a science. And I really break it down in the book to so that, you know, the New York Times called it until it was simple but powerful, right? Like that is my goal because we're busy, we're running as fast as we can, but there are ways to create this sense of parent-child attunement or biosynchrony, as researchers call it. And the way I describe it is like every cell in you is offering up a sense of safety and stabilization and nurturing and acceptance into every cell of them. And guess what? Kids need that more than ever. There's an art and a science to it. It is doable no matter where you begin, no matter where you start. You know, I've had so many parents at parent events go, oh, it's too late, you know, I messed up, I've messed it up. It's never too late to start this. And kids know, they know the difference between trying to get out a jumble of words in front of somebody who's ready to dive in. And, you know, well, where did it happen? Well, what happened? Well, here's what we're gonna do, versus hey, this sounds really hard for you. Well, what do I do? I'll tell you what I think. I promise, I promise. Right now, I just want to hear what you think. What you think about what happened to you is so much more important than what I think. And sure, you can get to the advice and the fixing later, but ask first. Hey, I really like your permission. I'm having some thoughts, but I want to know is this the right time to share them with you? Some of my insights. Just shifting how we are around this idea of attachment and attunement is one of the most powerful things we can do. And of course, then there are 14 others. And just to throw out a little statistical backup for parents, because I think science really can help us put our flag on the ground so that we change in the ways we need to and we do the things we need to do to better serve our children. A researcher out of Hopkins, Christy Bethel, who's really our leading adolescent health researcher in the world, she directs the children and adolescent index that is used by the CDC. She found that the odds of a child flourishing across puberty and adolescence are 12 times greater when parents can answer yes to one question. Can this child come to you to talk about anything no matter how hard? And that means when kids come to us and we think something hard might be going on, or maybe they just are sitting there silent, and your little spidey sense as a mom is like something and they're not even able to articulate it. When that moment happens, they come to us, and we have the skills, and I have tons of them in the book, like including writing exercises. If your kid's not a talker, we have to make that a good experience for them. We have to make that a good experience for them. So their brain goes, This is where I come, a place I can come to when shit happens. And I know that I'm gonna get what I really, really need here, which is to know that I'm a good person, that I matter, that I am safe, that no matter what the threats are out there, I am not alone, and that I belong.
SPEAKER_01Yes, and the other question that is often asked is am I normal?
SPEAKER_02Am I normal?
SPEAKER_01Is this normal?
SPEAKER_02Is this okay? Yes, is it okay? Am I lovable even when I am stinky, horrible, made mistakes, screwed up, failed out? Am I lovable by this person who is my caregiver, even though X? This is a lot of work for us, but I promise you it's doable.
SPEAKER_01That's great advice. I do love you offer so many options in the book. I wanted to just one thing I just really wanted to address was your antidote of helping her or him, but specifically for girls before we wrap up, this developing a voice of resistance.
SPEAKER_02Oh, I love that you that you pulled that one out of the hat. It's from my paper.
SPEAKER_01This is huge. As a mom with three daughters, you know, they're all adults now, but it it's talking about building resilience by reverse engineering our culture's sexist lens in family life.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Yes. Could you please just speak to this piece before we wrap up?
SPEAKER_02Yes. So I put this caveat, I think I put it in the book. I definitely want to say it now. This is in safe situations. Okay. This isn't safe. This is not if you and your daughter are out and you're somehow out on the street at 11 o'clock, and you know, there are a group of men harassing you. This is not if you're in a home where you are not physically and emotionally safe. So because many, many women have lived experience of domestic harm, you know, domestic abuse, sexual abuse, and being harassed or otherwise harmed in our society. Let's be clear, this isn't a situation where you make sure that you are safe, your daughter is safe, and that she knows if she's going to do these things, she does them when she's safe. And it's very simple, like at the heart of family life, that looks like, well, let me just throw out a stat. Half of girls say it's not always easy to talk to their moms. Sorry, a third of girls, half say they can't talk to their dads. Okay. Now, some of that is the age, some of it's just normal parent-child stuff. But when half of girls say they don't feel good having a conversation with their dad, we've got to reverse engineer that. And the first place we start is like in the kitchen. Make sure that you and your partner are talking about your daughter, can't just blow off her mom. Like, are you a mom? I'm a mom. We have daughters. We all know that when girls are going through adolescence, they're going to come a lot harder at their moms, right? There's just, you know. Oh, yes. Yes, they're going to come a lot harder. And I've talked to thousands of parents, moms, who are like, you know, she doesn't do this to my husband. Well, here's a place where you can begin with reverse engineering sexism. She's got to be able to blow off her dad too. She can't be afraid to do that. Let her say, you know, what she has to say the same way she would to her mom and walk out of the room in the middle of an argument. And just, you know, if you can say, you don't understand me at all to your mother, you can say it to your father too, and walk off stage. At a party, what does that look like? It looks like teaching your daughter, you do not have to be polite and talk to a guy just because he's talking to you. Guy staring at your boobs, hey, something interesting down there. You know, it's a matter of having and letting your daughter see that you are this person in the world, and your friends are these people in the world, right? That there are other women in the world who are not going to sit there and tolerate the way that it's always been. Well, you know, why are you getting up and walking away? Well, you know, Jane and I are too busy breaking down this ridiculous, stupid patriarchy to sit around and listen to this crap. Just build it in. There it is. It's not that hard when you know that you're all safe.
SPEAKER_01Call it out. I think the idea of modeling these things for our kids is key in the space of your family values and how you operate in your home and when it's safe, of course. But a lot of times as our kids are growing up, I think this idea that you're talking about is providing opportunities for them to not practice because, but in so many forms, you know, at home is where they can practice being assertive and reversing this, right? And then being able to go out, as you said, and be at a high school party and say, no, or I don't care to talk to you, no, thank you, or you know, whatever. It just goes on and on and on. So I love that idea of modeling those things for our child, and then letting them practice at home.
SPEAKER_02And the girls that I followed for two years, they just over their own development and coming into a place where they could reverse engineer the sexism around them, they just told me amazing stories. Like, you know, girl ended up being very good at coding, and she ended up in this high-end program, and like guys coming up and looking over her shoulder and going, like, do you need help with that? And like turning up, did I ask you? Have I ever asked you to help me? You know, well, I'm working at the CIA this summer. Have I ever asked you? And the power that that voice gives them when the older creepy guy hits on them when they're like out, you know, helping with a community organizing event, and just the power to speak back and speak up in a way that shuts it down also creates in them a sense of the their mattering and of their voice that will really serve them across their lives. And tools to circle back of safety.
SPEAKER_01Tools to feel safe.
SPEAKER_02Yes, absolutely. There's so much more in the book about all of this. I hope people pick it up because I always feel like at the end of 45 minutes, like, oh, but there are 800 other things I wish you knew, and that I wish I had known when my kids were a little bit younger. I just so wish we'd had this science. Yes, and that I'd reported this before my kids hit puberty. And yet I will say that having learned it and bringing it in as a parent of young adults, which my kids, my daughters in her early 20s, it's still very life-changing for everybody.
SPEAKER_01And I'm continuing to evolve and change and bring these things up and repair with my own daughters who are, you know, 20s and 30. So it's not like you said, it's never too late. Never too late. I promise you.
SPEAKER_02I've absolutely 100%.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Thank you so much for the work you're doing. And tell people how they can find you and your book.
SPEAKER_02So easy. The book is Girls on the Brink. You can Google it anywhere. It's been on CNN, the New York Times. It's not hard to find. But really, if you want to find out more about my work, buy the book, which I hope you will, or take my online courses. We're in the middle of developing courses for parents, girls. So that's really exciting. You can do that at donajacsonakazawa.com. You can follow me on Instagram at donajacsonnakuzawa.com. I'm on Instagram, Donna Jackson Nakazawa. I'm on Facebook. Mostly I'm on Instagram. I'm not on Twitter quite as much anymore because it's getting a little toxic over there.
SPEAKER_01But yeah, my website and Instagram are probably the best. Wonderful. And on this podcast, Donna, we like to have guests share something that delights them day to day, something that just brings you pleasure. Is there something you might share that brings you pleasure?
SPEAKER_02Well, what delights me right now is that my husband and I are involved in a stream restoration for a stream near our house. And we I will be running out in a minute because we are working with some environmental groups to plant 1,200 trees around the stream. We have blue heron here, we have fox, we have deer, way too many deer. You know, we have everything that you can imagine, and hawks, and we're trying to preserve the wildlife here as best we can. So I think what's really delighting me and delights me a lot is nature and just being able to see these trees going in and knowing that we're going to preserve this stream life and this wildlife for a few more generations. That delights me.
SPEAKER_01Good work too. Thank you for being with us and community. We'll wrap up with a quote from Donna's book about another antidote, which is power up on joy. Searching for joy and finding pleasure is the antithesis to non-stop doing and productivity. When you model amplifying pleasurable experiences and sitting with them, it helps regulate not only your child's nervous system, but your own. You teach your nervous system and your child's that it is a safe to inhabit a soothing mental space throughout the day. Taking a few moments to create a deliciousness around an experience also helps to create a happy and sticky memory, one replete with tiny measurable visual images that the mind can return to and draw solace from at any time in the future. There is your neuroscience backing you up to give yourself permission for pleasure.
