5 Conversations You Must Have with Your Daughter: Revised and Expanded Edition

by Vicki Courtney

Overview

From the cradle to college, tell your daughters the truth about life before they believe the culture’s lies.
 
For mothers with girls newborn to eighteen, Five Conversations You Must Have with Your Daughter is simply a must-have book. Youth culture commentator Vicki Courtney helps moms pinpoint and prepare the discussions that should be ongoing in their daughters' formative years.
To fully address the dynamic social and spiritual issues and influencers at hand, several chapters are written for each of the conversations, which are:
1. Don’t let the culture define you
2. Guard your heart
3. Have a little sex respect
4. Childhood is only for a season
5. You are who you’ve been becoming
The book also includes questions at the end of each conversation to help facilitate individual or group study.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781462796243
Publisher:	B&H Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/01/2019
Edition description:	Revised, Expanded
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	3 Months to 18 Years

About the Author

VICKI COURTNEY is a speaker and the best-selling author of many books and Bible studies. She is a past ECPA Christian Book Award winner and a trusted resource among parents. Vicki and her husband have three grown children, a son-in-love, two daughters-in-love, four grandsons and a granddaughter. They live in Austin, Texas where they are blessed to have their children and grandchildren living nearby. More information can be found at VickiCourtney.com.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

More Than the Sum of Your Parts

The Lord does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart. (1 Sam. 16:7 NIV, 1984)

Have you ever been lured by pretty packaging? Product manufacturers who aim for successful sales know the importance of packaging. Whether it's a pack of gum, a tube of toothpaste, or a bag of chips, you can bet that countless dollars and hours have been invested into analyzing everything from the target audience to color palettes and shelf placement. The end goal, of course, is for the product to stand out on the shelf and, above all, to get picked up by the consumer and scanned at the checkout.

Now, what if I told you that your little girl is also a product? Her brand managers work around the clock to make sure she knows exactly what it will take to get noticed. If she is to catch the eye of her target audience, the packaging must be perfect. And by perfect I mean "flawless." By the time she celebrates her twelfth birthday, she will have seen an estimated 77,546 commercials. Add to it the images she sees daily from magazines, billboards, and the Internet, and you can be certain that by the time she blows out sixteen candles, she will be clear of her role as defined by culture. Over and over again she will be told to lose weight, tone up, dress provocatively, and flaunt it. Pure and simple, she is an object for the male viewing pleasure. She is bidding for male attention among a sea of contenders. And her target audience is picky. He, too, has been inundated with images of picture-perfect women. He has zero tolerance for flat chests, chunky thighs, cellulite, blemishes, split ends, or facial wrinkles. Why should he settle for less than a PhotoShop best? He has come to believe that the airbrushed images are the standard of beauty.

Your daughter has been duped, and it's up to you to expose the lie. If she conforms her identity to the culture's narrow definition of beauty, you can be sure that it will permeate every corner of her life from this moment forward. Ninety-three percent of girls and young women report feeling anxiety or stress about some aspect of their looks when getting ready in the morning. More than three-quarters of girls and young women admit to partaking in unhealthy activities when they feel badly about their bodies. Fifty-eight percent of girls describe themselves in negative terms, including words like disgusting and ugly, when feeling badly about themselves. Nearly four out of ten engage in unhealthy eating behaviors, such as anorexia or bulimia.

Don't be fooled. Your daughter will be exposed to the lie. Most will fall for it. Some will show outward manifestations when the foundation begins to crack. Others will suffer in silence. They will wear a smile on their face and appear unbothered by the pressure to measure up to this narrow definition of beauty. Their secret will be safe for now. The self-loathing they feel will only be revealed in private when they step out of the shower and catch a glimpse of themselves in the bathroom mirror. Or step on the scales at the doctor's office. Or stand in the department store dressing room as they wrestle into the size they wish they were. Most will never question where this ingrained habit of appearance dissatisfaction took root. It's all they've ever known.

Think about it. How often do you see ad campaigns featuring women that focus on inner beauty? Whether it's advice on fashion, dieting, or pleasing men in the bedroom, the message to our girls is loud and clear. The packaging is of utmost importance. And the reward for a pretty package? A wink perhaps, or a catcall from an onlooker. Some may even be labeled "hot" or "sexy." The grand prize is that the "package" would succeed in becoming the object of the male desire. Isn't that what it's really all about? Ironically, we are almost five decades past the women's movement, and yet women have never been more objectified than they are today.

A Narrow Definition of Beauty

Moms, can you relate to the pressure your daughter feels? I'm betting you can. And trust me, you are not alone. A study commissioned by the Dove Foundation found that 57 percent of all women strongly agree that, "the attributes of female beauty have become very narrowly defined in today's world," and 68 percent strongly agree that "the media and advertising set an unrealistic standard of beauty that most women can't ever achieve."

The challenge to redefine beauty is nothing new. God cautioned His people long ago against judging a person based on the sum of their parts. When Samuel, the prophet, was called by God to anoint the next king to follow Saul, God chastised him for assuming that David's older brother, Eliab, might be next in line to the throne based on his handsome appearance. In 1 Samuel 16:6, Samuel took one look at Eliab and thought, "Surely the Lord's anointed stands here before the Lord." The verse that follows reveals God's standard for judging beauty when He tells Samuel, "Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things man looks at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart" (1 Sam. 16:7).

Together we are going to tackle the culture's lies in order that you might initiate some necessary conversations and arm your daughter with the truth about beauty — God's truth. Whether your daughter has already built a foundation on the culture's lies or is just beginning to be exposed to the brainwashing, trust me, the battle is not lost. Where God is present, there is always hope. Only by speaking up and addressing the lies head-on will we equip our daughters. Our silence, on the other hand, will endorse the culture's lies and leave them with the impression that they amount to nothing more than the sum of their parts. Our daughters need to know that God's standard for beauty is the only standard that matters. Amazingly, His standard used to be the culture's accepted standard. Today we are witnessing the results of a culture that long ago took its eyes off God as the standard for beauty, goodness, and morality.

Vintage Beauty Secrets, Circa 1890

If your daughter were to keep a journal or old-fashioned diary, can you imagine opening it up and reading "Dear Diary, help me to be pretty on the inside." That's what a mother in the late 1800s might be likely to find. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, author of The Body Project, researched girls' diaries and journals from the late 1800s to early 1900s to track the shift in attitudes regarding appearance. She found that "before World War I, girls rarely mentioned their bodies in terms of strategies for self-improvement or struggles for personal identity." She stated, "When girls in the nineteenth century thought about ways to improve themselves, they almost always focused on their internal character and how it was reflected in outward behavior. In 1882, the personal agenda of an adolescent diarist read: 'Resolved, not to talk about myself or feelings. To think before speaking. To work seriously. To be self restrained in conversation and actions. Not to let my thoughts wander. To be dignified. Interest myself more in others.'"

Interestingly, Brumberg noted that girls from the nineteenth century were discouraged from showing too much attention to appearance — to do so would be vanity. The book noted that "character was built on attention to self-control, service to others, and belief in God." Young women from the nineteenth century were guided by the wisdom of Proverbs 31:30 that counsels, "Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised." Women in the nineteenth century prized virtue over vanity.

Today, one need not go to the trouble of accessing the private diaries and journals of young women to get a pulse on their priorities. They have taken their innermost thoughts and struggles public through social media posts and pictures that would leave their nineteenth-century sisters weeping buckets full of tears. The emphasis on inner beauty has long been forgotten, replaced by a vanity-obsessed selfie generation, desperate for virtual likes and positive comments. A century later the word virtue is long forgotten and certainly not part of the average girl's vocabulary. So when and how, exactly, did the shift from virtue to vanity occur? Believe it or not, your bathroom mirror can be partially to blame. In The Body Project, Brumberg stated, "When the mirror became a staple of the American middle-class home at the end of the nineteenth century, attention to adolescent acne escalated, as did sales of products for the face. Until then, pimples were primarily a tactile experience, at least for the girl who had them. But that all changed in the late 1800s with the widespread adoption in middle-class homes of a bathroom sink with running water and a mirror hung above it. She further noted that "mirrors play a critical role in the way American girls have assessed their own faces and figures."

As mirrors became popularized, women were able to scrutinize and compare their features with the women they saw in movies and magazines, not to mention one another. In the 1920s, American women began to take an interest in cosmetics. From facial powders to rouge, lipstick, and even eyelash curlers, women flocked to the local drugstores to stock up on these beauty accouterments. The flapper movement further boosted sales of cosmetics among women and especially teenage girls. Blumberg noted that "sales of compacts (small handheld mirrors with a compartment for powder) soared because they allowed women to scrutinize and 'reconstruct' the face almost anywhere, in a moment's notice."

Shortly thereafter, home scales became available, and managing weight became a preoccupation among young women. Until then, the only place a young woman could weigh herself was the drugstore or county fair. Prior to that, dieting and exercise were virtually unheard of, and again, would have been considered a measure of vanity. In fact, I was shocked to discover in Brumberg's book that when young women in the late 1800s left home, they would often write their mothers and speak of healthy weight gain and voracious eating habits. It was almost considered a curse to be slender! Slender girls were thought to be unhealthy and subject to worries of infertility. The ability to bear healthy children was of far greater importance than looking svelte in a swimsuit. As mirrors became more prevalent and the flapper movement gained momentum in the 1920s, women began to express worry over gaining weight, and soon after dieting or "food restriction" became a common topic. The shift from virtue to vanity has been a runaway train ever since.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

Stop for a minute and imagine what life might be like without easy access to mirrors and scales. I, for one, stopped weighing myself some years ago in an effort to deconstruct the culture's lie that my happiness is dependent on a certain number on the scale. Having struggled in my teen and college years with an eating disorder, I had cultivated the bad habit of weighing daily, sometimes multiple times within the day. Should the number exceed my defined range of acceptable by even a mere pound, it set the tone of my entire day. Now my focus is on looking healthy rather than stepping on the scale and allowing it to have the final say.

I am certainly not suggesting that we gather up our mirrors and line them up for target practice and toss our scales into the dumpster, but I am questioning the impact they have had on body image among women. Years ago I spoke to a group of young women who were in a sorority at a large university. One of the officers who had invited me had heard my story of misdefined worth in my own college years. She specifically asked that I share about my own experience with an eating disorder as many of the girls living in the sorority house were suffering from eating disorders that ranged from starving themselves to bulimia. In fact, so serious was the issue that they were experiencing plumbing problems due to the pipes prematurely corroding or the toilets stopping up from all the forced vomiting.

When I arrived at the sorority house on the evening I was scheduled to speak, she gave me a quick tour of the house. Along the way I couldn't help but notice that there were mirrors everywhere. Entire walls had been turned into mirrors in the large meeting room and in the living area. In addition, full-length mirrors were staggered up and down the hallways and along the grand stairwell. When I made a comment about the mirrors being everywhere, she quickly replied, "Why do you think so many of our girls are starving themselves and throwing up? The mirrors serve as a constant reminder that they can never measure up." At that moment I longed for the mirrorless days of the late 1800s, a time when virtue was considered beauty and vanity was considered sin. While it might not be possible to do away with mirrors, it is possible to do away with some of the expectations women have when they see their reflections in the mirrors.

Geometry 101

Few girls are prepared for the stage when they transition from little girls to young women and their bodies began to develop almost at warp speed. As if it's not enough to manage the influx of hormones and the start of the menstrual cycle, they must also make peace with their bodies as they begin to take on a more womanly shape. This should be one of the most celebrated times of life for all that it symbolizes, but sadly, that is not the case for most girls. One survey found that by age thirteen, 53 percent of American girls are unhappy with their bodies, and by age seventeen 78 percent are dissatisfied. If we are to counter the culture's lies regarding body image, we must first go to the root of the problem and address body shape. I am talking about the God-given body shape your daughter was born with rather than the hourglass ideal the media insists she should have. Amazingly, a study found that the hourglass figure is the least dominant shape of women, having made up only 8 percent of the 6,318 U.S. women that were scanned for the study. Keep in mind that the average woman is 5 feet 3.7 inches and weighs 168.5 pounds. The same study found that the garment industry assumes that the hourglass figure is the dominant shape of American women and designs their clothing accordingly. Because of this misconception, many women are unable to find clothes designed to flatter their body shape, and as a result, they struggle to make peace with their God-given body shape. In fact, 46 percent of women were found to have more of a rectangular shape, 21 percent were spoon shaped, and 14 percent were shaped more like an inverted triangle.

Putting the geometry lesson aside, imagine a world where there were no manufactured sizes. A world used to exist over a century ago when clothing was made at home. In The Body Project, Blumberg noted, "In general, mass-produced clothing fostered autonomy in girls because it took matters of style and taste outside the dominion of the mother, who had traditionally made and supervised a girl's wardrobe. … So long as clothing was made at home, the dimensions of the garment could be adjusted to the particular body intended to wear it. But with store-bought clothes, the body had to fit instantaneously into standard sizes that were constructed from a pattern representing a norm. When clothing failed to fit the body, particularly a part as intimate as the breasts, young women were apt to perceive that there was something wrong with their bodies."

I doubt many of us are willing to retreat back to the days where mothers sewed their children's clothes (nor would our daughters allow it!). However, knowing the history and time line of manufactured sizes reminds us that a time existed when allowances were made for unique shapes and sizes without the pressures many women feel today to fit into a certain size. Not to mention, they were less likely to compare themselves to others since they didn't think of their bodies in terms of a certain size.

The Weight Debate

A published report by Common Sense Media found that more than half of girls as young as six to eight feel their ideal body is thinner than their current body size. Young girls say that they are more afraid of becoming fat than they are of cancer, nuclear war, or losing their parents. Additionally, a survey by the Today Show and AOL.com in 2014 found that "80 percent of teen girls compare themselves to images they see of celebrities, and, within that group, almost half say the images make them feel dissatisfied with the way they look." Approximately 50 percent of teenage girls will engage in unhealthy weight control behaviors.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "5 Conversations You Must Have with Your Daughter, Revised and Expanded Edition"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Vicki Courtney.
Excerpted by permission of B&H Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Conversation 1 Don't let the culture define you 7

Chapter 1 More than the Sum of Your Parts 9

Chapter 2 Girlhood Interrupted 27

Chapter 3 Identity Crisis 43

Conversation 2 Guard your heart 61

Chapter 4 Hooked on Screens 63

Chapter 5 The Friendship Factor 77

Chapter 6 Boy, Oh Boy 91

Conversation 3 Have a little sex respect 107

Chapter 7 Beyond the Birds and Bees 109

Chapter 8 Play Now, Pay Later 125

Chapter 9 A New and Improved Sex Talk 143

Conversation 4 Childhood is only for a season 165

Chapter 10 Forever Young 167

Chapter 11 Ready, Set, Launch! 181

Chapter 12 It's Okay to Dream about Marriage and Motherhood 191

Conversation 5 You are who you've been becoming 209

Chapter 13 Who Can Find a Virtuous Woman? 211

Chapter 14 Grounded for Life 221

Chapter 15 The Heart of the Matter 237

Appendix 249

Notes 271