Halloween is supposed to be a night filled with fun and candy. However, the pressure to find a great costume that fits within the “norms” portrayed in the media can leave teenage girls feeling insecure. Your daughter may want to dress up like Eleven from Stranger Things, but feel pressured to be a “sexy” bunny instead.

So what can you do to help boost your daughter’s self-esteem? Below is some advice from The Child Mind Institute:

1. Model body acceptance. Moms should be cautious about obsessing out loud about food or putting down their appearance in front of their daughters. This negative talk can have a huge impact on your daughters’ own body image.

2. Make your daughter media literate.  Watch TV with your daughter and ask questions about the media portrayals you observe. This can help your daughter develop a critical eye through which to decode and filter media messages.

3. Direct your praise away from appearance. Challenge yourself to match every compliment you give about your daughter’s appearance with at least two compliments about something non-appearance based.

4. Encourage positive affirmations. Teach your daughter to stop looking to external sources for self-validation and instead look within and find their own strengths. This can be encouraged by asking your daughter to write down four things she likes about herself each morning before school.

5. Praise your daughter for her efforts rather than her performance. Your praise should focus less on the outcome and more on efforts and the development of new skills. Mastery is what builds confidence, and learning to tolerate failure fosters resilience.

6. Make sure she know you love her no matter what. Even though teens are heavily reliant on their peers for feedback, they also truly care what their parents think of them. Make sure your daughter know you’ll love her no matter how she looks or how she performs at something.

Want more information on building your daughter’s self-esteem? Here is an article from The Child Mind Institute providing information on how to help girls stop saying ‘sorry’ and express confidence.  Also, check out Barb Steinberg - a local life coach and workshop facilitator who focuses on improving the lives of adolescent girls and the adults who care about them.

Have a healthy Halloween!

Kristi, Katie & Elizabeth

With a focus on social emotional learning, self-awareness and self-management become increasingly important. Self-awareness focuses on identifying emotions, accurate self-perception, and recognizing strengths. Self-management focuses on stress management, self-discipline, self-motivation, goal-setting, and organizational skills.
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One of the ways to meet these needs is to journal. Beyond self-awareness and self-management, there are also some interesting benefits to journaling:

• Form new Conclusions and Perspectives (Stevens & Cooper, 2009, p. 3 & 9)
• Increase Creative and Reflective Thinking (Stevens & Cooper, 2009, p. 15-16, 33)
• Enhance Immune Function, Drop Blood Pressure, Improve Sleep (Grothaus, 2015)
• Lessen Depression and Anxiety, and Increase Positive Mood (Grothaus, 2015)
• Stretch your Vocabulary, Evoke Mindfulness, Boost Memory and Comprehension, Strengthen Self-Discipline (Nguyen, 2015)
• Improve Memory and Problem-Solving Skills (Werrell, 2017)
• Gain Clarity, Feel Calmer, Boost Cognition, Track Patterns ("Confined to Success”)
• Help Prioritize Problems, Fears, and Concerns
• Provide Opportunities for Positive Self-Talk (University of Rochester)

If you are interested in starting a journal, but uncertain where to start… try some simple prompts. The ones shown below (and linked here) should take no more than 10 minutes. They are PDF’s so they can be physically printed and/or annotated with an app like Notability.