Dr. Jo-Ann (00:00):

It’s complicated because we want our kids to embrace their budding sexuality, or at least be unashamed of it. But seeing themselves through a system that values young women packaged for the marketplace of male desire leaves little room for pimples and tummy rolls.

Dr. Sarah (00:21):

Starting from the moment they’re born, the messages our children receive and eventually internalize shape how they see themselves, their potential, and their place in the world, often in ways we don’t even realize. Joining me today to discuss how these explicit and implicit messages can impact girls and women is Harvard educated psychologist and the author of sexism and sensibility Raising empowered, resilient Girls in the Modern World, Dr. Jo-Anne Finkelstein. Together we dive into the cultural forces at play, why girls often feel unseen or unheard, and how gendered assumptions can start as early as infancy and how media and education reinforce a lot of these biases. Dr. Finkelstein offers really practical strategies for parents to combat these influences and empower their daughters to feel comfortable embracing their authentic interests, whether they lean into girly identities or challenge societal norms. Plus, we explore ways to help boys also unlearn toxic masculinity messages that they might be internalizing and promote healthier communication with all of our children regardless of their gender. This episode is packed with really valuable insights on how we can teach kids to recognize and challenge stereotypes while fostering self-confidence and resilience. So let’s get started.

(01:46):

Hi, I’m Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist and mom of two. In this podcast, I’ve taken all of my clinical experience, current research on brain science and child psychology, and the insights I’ve gained on my own parenting journey and distilled everything down into easy to understand and actionable parenting insights. So you can tune out the noise and tune into your own authentic parenting voice with confidence and calm. This is Securely Attached.

(02:15):

Hello, Dr. Finkelstein. Welcome to the show. I’m so happy you’re here.

Dr. Jo-Ann (02:24):

Yeah, I’m so glad to be here.

Dr. Sarah (02:26):

So for people who are tuning in and are maybe intrigued by the title of this episode, let’s orient them a little bit to your work. How did you get into this work? What drove you to write this book?

Dr. Jo-Ann (02:40):

Yeah, I always love this question. It really brings together my personal life and my professional life. So I grew up in Canada. I live in the United States now, but I grew up in Canada where hockey is a national obsession, and I have three brothers who loved hockey and I wanted to play too. So I asked my parents for a hockey stick, and to my delight, they bought me one for my birthday. But to my horror, it was bright pink and it looked like a toy version of my brothers. So I’ve worked with girls and women for the last 24 years in my private practice, and what I discovered is that every girl has a pink hockey stick story or multiple stories. Girls constantly guess messages that make them feel unseen, unheard, not taken seriously. And I witness how harmful these messages are to my patient’s sense of self and sense of potential. They’re spoken and unspoken messages that are tiny. They don’t seem that bad, but they’re tiny psychological paper cuts that become festering wounds of self-doubt.

(03:57):

In my family, when I would push back or get upset about the gender differences that I noticed, my parents insisted that they didn’t treat me differently than the boys or they would say, you’re being too sensitive, stopping so dramatic classic comments that I now know that girls and women hear a lot. And so to avoid criticism, I learned to hide my feelings. And it wasn’t until so many years later, too many years later when I was doing a master’s degree that I began to truly understand my experience. I mentioned in a paper for my developmental psychology class that I’d been accused of overreacting when I felt deme. And here’s the thing, the professor, here’s the turning point, the professor scribbled in the margins. That’s what people say to talk girls out of their feelings. And it was such a validating moment for me. So validating girls…

Dr. Sarah (04:51):

Was it a female or male professor? I’m curious.

Dr. Jo-Ann (04:54):

It was a female psychologist who’s a powerhouse.

Dr. Sarah (05:00):

Which is why we need female representation in these types of positions.

Dr. Jo-Ann (05:03):

Absolutely. And so validating girls’ experiences and opening parents’ eyes are two reasons why I wrote the book.

Dr. Sarah (05:12):

And it’s so interesting, and I’m sure we’ll get into this, but I imagine your parents in hearing your pushback, your sensitive overreaction to the pink hockey stick, I could really understand a parent being like, I’m getting you a hockey stick to play hockey with the boys. I am seeing you. I am hearing you. I am validating your desire. I’m not lumping you in an a gendered category. And it’s these super subtle things. You said these, I love that sort of phrase, these paper cuts we’re not receiving. Granted, I’m sure a lot of people, women are receiving aggressive hostility sometimes in terms of this, but it even comes with these really well-intentioned efforts because there’s an internalized story that we’re not aware we’re telling ourselves.

Dr. Jo-Ann (06:06):

Absolutely. And it’s not like that getting a cock stick. I’m not suggesting that was a trauma, but it’s just the trauma does not have to be a single event. It can be an accumulation of being unseen and unheard. Many girls would want a pink hockey stick, especially today. This was before the Disney-ification of all the pink stuff. So it’s not that pink is certainly not bad. I have nothing against pink. It’s just when we foist this sort of femininity on girls when they’re not asking for it and we’re not allowing them to be their whole selves.

Dr. Sarah (06:47):

Right, the femininity, but also the separateness, right? It’s like I could see a kid who’s holding a pink stick at hockey practice in a group full of kids who have the black and white sticks and feeling different, feeling like I’m a little bit of an outsider here. So it’s not even…

Dr. Jo-Ann (07:03):

You actually just gave me chills because that was how it felt in my family, just this separateness. I could never join the boys if we’re using the hockey stick metaphor. They had these ones that were taped up with black tape, not pink tape, and they looked like the professionals, mine looked like some toys.

Dr. Sarah (07:25):

You can pretend to do this with us, but you’re not really one of us.

Dr. Jo-Ann (07:30):

You’re not really one of us.

Dr. Sarah (07:33):

So it’s like I hear that as I see the child experience in that, and I see the parents experience that, and I see how this mismatch can occur a lot.

Dr. Jo-Ann (07:45):

So often it’s just unconscious.

Dr. Sarah (07:46):

Yeah. Can you speak to that a little bit for parents who are like, because the parents, the ones listening to this podcast, right? They’re saying, I don’t want to perpetuate this, but I imagine your parents didn’t see that that was happening. How do we become more aware as parents of maybe our internalized biases or blind spots, the things that we’re repeating that we might not realize? One, how do we become aware of it and what are some common things that might happen a lot that we could shift?

Dr. Jo-Ann (08:18):

Yeah. I would first say that stereotypes are normal. It’s our brain’s way of simplifying the complexities that we encounter every day so that we can make sense of the world and recall things more quickly. The problem is the small differences that we’re seeing at birth, and there are some small differences, but they get magnified by parents and teachers and other people and how they talk to and play with their children, which is why we need to be aware of what the stereotypes are and how we’re perpetuating them. Well, okay, we start by constructing boxes for our babies even before birth, right? Moms who know that they’re having a boy are more likely to describe their baby’s movements as strong and vigorous, but mothers who don’t know the sex don’t describe such differences.

(09:16):

And then once they’re born, infant girls are described as little and beautiful, and they’re rated as finer featured, less strong, more delicate and more feminine than infant sons even when there’s no objective differences in birth length, weight or Apgar scores. Interesting. We’re interpreting behavior through a gendered lens. So crying for parents means a girl is sad, but a boy is angry. We use more emotion focused words with girls and achievement related language, like proud win and best with boys. So it just infiltrates our entire interaction with kids and everyone’s doing it. It’s just a matter of being really conscious that we also grew up in a gendered culture that told us girls are relational, girls are going to respond better to emotion, and it’s okay to make boys competitive and allow them to own their competitive feelings.

Dr. Sarah (10:18):

So where are you seeing shifts in this now as people are becoming more aware of this or are you not seeing shifts?

Dr. Jo-Ann (10:28):

Well, I mean, I think for sure as a society we are seeing shifts. There is so much more consciousness about it, but what I don’t think people understand is that there’s only so much consciousness you could bring to it if you’re not actively seeking to look at your own implicit biases. I mean, even children’s books today, tons of them are still so gendered. And so that would be a place where parents, before kids can read, they might want to flip flop the pronouns to make it so girls can be doctors. And it’s like most of the children’s books are still written by men today and have a male perspective.

Dr. Sarah (11:18):

Even if the protagonist is a female, it’s still tends to be more, the narrative might be more of caregiving, relationship building, emotion focused language. And then when the books have the male protagonist, it’s more action more.

Dr. Jo-Ann (11:37):

And the thing is, I would say the same thing for boys. Our entire, everybody has a need for relationality and for autonomy and independence. And if we’re saying the latter is for boys and the former is for girls, we’re cutting off the humanity of both boys and girls.

Dr. Sarah (11:59):

Yeah, no, I can see how this goes. Two, it’s bidirectional and it’s funny, and I am curious your thoughts on this. I have a son, he’s my older one, he’s seven, and then my daughter’s five and a half. And honestly, they were either 19 months apart. So my son Ollie was like a baby when my daughter was born.

(12:22):

And I was like, I know a lot about gender biases and I don’t want to perpetuate them. And so I was very much, and I was also very, very tired. I had postpartum depression with my daughter, and so I was like, I’m not buying baby clothes. I have a ton of baby clothes. They’re fine. And I would dress her up in all of his clothes, and I didn’t get a whole new set of everything. I had a girl part. It was like, I want to raise her in this sort of more neutral or space. She put her dresses and she was cute, but I didn’t redo everything we had in her house from the first baby. And I remember at one point she was older, she was two and a half, she was just starting to talk more, and we were standing in her room and she has a mirror in her room, and I standing behind her and she looks at me, she goes, where are my princess dresses?

(13:21):

Where are my jewelries? And I Google forever stay in my mind is it was the cutest thing. She said, jewelries and it was so cute. And I was like, oh, you are telling me you need this. It’s part of what you’re looking for. And to be fair, this she’s a girl. It’s because that’s my daughter. Daughter to this day is super into accessorizing. She’s always wants to do people’s hair. She just likes to dress up, and she’s certainly getting stuff from her environment. And it’s probably not probably coming from me too, and it’s probably not coming deeply from my house. So I’m curious, would that raise a red flag for you? Would you be, is it like, oh, we’re following her lead, or are we thinking about is she taking in certain messaging at two and a half that she’s supposed to have dresses and jewelry and where’s it coming from?

Dr. Jo-Ann (14:21):

Yeah, I mean, it’s not inborn that they don’t come out thinking I should be wearing dresses and jewelry. That’s definitely a socialized thing, but it’s not a bad thing. It’s what we associate with femininity, and we don’t want to denigrate femininity. So I wouldn’t suggest anyone be like, Ew, dresses jewelry’s bad. But we have to understand that at that age, they’re starting to form their gender identity and they don’t understand that sex is permanent. They think if I go and I put on a pair of overalls, then I’m going to be a boy. But if I put on a dress, I’m a girl, and they’re looking around and they’re seeing all the women and the girls around them that are wearing pink and are wearing dresses and they’re saying, well, I need that to be a girl. That’s what girls do.

Dr. Sarah (15:18):

Which is totally developmentally appropriate. All kids developmentally go through this sort of, when I put on a fireman’s hat, I am a fireman. It’s not about gender for them at that point. It’s about roles, roles and identity. It’s like, this is the outfit I wear to be this. It’s super concrete.

Dr. Jo-Ann (15:38):

And it’s why you see when they start to turn seven or eight, they give up the pink frilly dresses. There’s actually psychologists call PFD like print Philly dresses. It’s like this phenomenon. And some people are like, see, it’s biology. And they’re saying, no, it’s all of the socialization that we do. But they’re more willing to be, or they start giving up the princess dresses and start to think that they’re not as cool because they have a more stable sense of their gender identity. And B, we sort of denigrate femininity in this culture. And so they don’t want to be this pink frilly person. They want to be taken seriously. And on the other hand, boys…

Dr. Sarah (16:27):

That’s so loaded, right? Because on the one hand, it’s like when they’re really little, they’re sort of very reinforced from a social standpoint to seek out those really pretty beautiful, that’s kind of reinforced. So they’re internalizing that story that’s ideal when you’re really little. And then there’s a shift in the messaging that at some point there’s a turning point where it’s like that’s actually not only was it hyper idealized when they were little, but then when they get across a certain developmental threshold, it’s almost like, no, no, this thing that you hyper idealized actually, it’s bad.

Dr. Jo-Ann (17:06):

Well, I think you’re really getting to the ambivalence we have and the confusing messages that we’re giving our girls because I mean, I think there is this sweet spot around seven or eight where they start to sort of say, I’m going to just wear what I want. Or maybe they’ve gotten a little bit of the denigration of femininity and they’re like, that’s not cool. That’s not going to have me taken seriously, but very quickly around nine. And they start to go through puberty and they start to be objectified. And there’s again, so much focus on how beautiful and cute. And so it’s like they’re getting these two messages that they have to be beautiful and sexy and focus on their appearance at the same time as they’re saying they get that that’s their most important asset. And also on some level, that isn’t a very important asset.

Dr. Sarah (18:02):

It’s almost like it lowers their status. It puts them in the hockey rink with the pink stick. You’re here, but you can’t really play with the boys.

Dr. Jo-Ann (18:13):

Yes, yes.

Dr. Sarah (18:15):

Oh, that’s complicated because that doesn’t feel easy even because I am fairly certain that most people listen to this podcast are pretty progressive in their interest in preserving their daughters and their son’s self-esteem, right? And are interested in learning the science behind self-esteem, identity building, relationship building, all that stuff. That’s what we talk about in this podcast. And so if you’re interested in that, you’re interested in how our kids internalize messages about themselves, and we’re setting kids up to have a really complicated, the messaging is getting twisted. How do we, I don’t know. On the one hand, I’m like, I want to give my daughter when she’s two and a half who’s asking for princess dresses. I gave her princess dresses. I’m all about that. And I definitely see that for her as part of who she is, not because she’s a girl, but because she wanted it.

(19:14):

If my son asked for a princess dress at two and a half, I would’ve gotten him a princess dresses at two and a half. So it’s not for me about the dresses, it’s about asking for something and wanting to play with it, wanting to try that on as an identity. And then I’m mindful of, I guess I’m at a loss. I’m like, what do I tell my daughter? I want to make sure that I’m supporting her sense of self and also supporting what she’s drawn to naturally, even if what she’s drawn to might be societally reinforced.

Dr. Jo-Ann (19:51):

Yeah, I mean, I think that we’re playing the long game here, right? We’re not saying, I want you to change how you dress now, or there’s anything wrong with how you’re dressing. But we want them to understand, we want them to become critical consumers of their culture and to know what messages they’re getting from the culture about who they’re supposed to be and how they’re supposed to look right. And so everyone on this who’s listening to this podcast, if they have a girl who’s going, who’s eventually going to be going through puberty, they’re going to have at least feelings about how their kids are dressing. And so it’s complicated because we want our kids to embrace their budding sexuality or at least be unashamed of it. But seeing themselves through a system that values young women packaged for the marketplace of male desire leaves little room for pimples and tummy rolls. And it’s so hard because as a girl, liking how you look in this culture is a revolutionary act in my mind. But it’s nearly impossible to tell the difference between what we’re doing for ourselves because we want to and what we’re doing because we feel as if we have to in order to be acceptable to other people.

(21:34):

And that’s particularly true for teens who are in the throes of figuring out their identities and trying to express that through personal style. And so here’s what I hear from girls, at least until the older teen years, that they’re not doing it to attract attention from boys, right?

Dr. Sarah (21:55):

Mhmm.

Dr. Jo-Ann (21:55):

They’re doing it to be fashionable, not sexy. And skimpy is what teen brands are selling. So when we call attention to their clothing choices, they feel sexualized by us and become self-conscious and defensive. Trust me, I’m a mom of a teen. I’ve been there. So the popularity of revealing clothing has stripped it of its sexual power in the eyes of girls who may not understand sexual signaling, mostly because they don’t have a sense of their erotic power. So rather than debating the dangers of their sexuality or assuming why they’re choosing to dress a certain way, we want to be curious about it. And that also goes for princess dresses, like, oh, what makes you wearing princess dresses? Do you think all girls need to wear princess dresses? And I want you to know that you can wear pants and you’re every bit as much a girl to me as you are when you wear a dress or jewelries.

Dr. Sarah (23:01):

Yeah, I like that because, and I think this is true in so many aspects of parenting with intentional parenting, we can only control so much of what they take in from their world, but we can inform their ability to be curious about what they’re taking in and increasing their ability to notice, oh, hey, I’m getting a message from a TV show, or I’m getting some kind of, this TV show is trying to tell me a certain story, and do I agree with that story or not that critical thinking, that reflective capacity is probably the best thing we can do for any of our kids to set them up to be able to withstand the impact of some of these societal pressures. Because to your point, we parents might see our kid go out, my kids are still pretty young. I have a lot of control over the clothes that come into the house, but when they get older, I won’t.

(24:06):

And I might be interpreting what those clothes are saying or what they’re trying to say with those clothes through a bias through, I could project onto them my own narrative around objectification of women. That’s a full grown adult woman’s narrative. I’ve been in the world almost 40 years. I know what men see when they see a young girl dressed up in a certain way, but my kid might not. And they actually, because I worked with a lot of teenagers in my practice and body image and other things related to social currency get brought up a lot. And we talk about it, there is a social currency, and it’s not about, for them, it’s really not about sexual anything. It’s about, in fact, they’re probably not doing it for the boys, they’re doing it for the other girls. They want to be dressed like the coolest girl in school. They want to be dressed in a way that helps them compete in the social hierarchy. And that’s really complicated because that’s also riddled with some very misogynistic, internalized misogyny, but they’re not aware of it. It’s tricky.

Dr. Jo-Ann (25:27):

And as parents, we are sort of stuck between, or we feel stuck often between a rock and a hard place because we want them to feel comfortable in what they’re wearing. We want them to fit in. And we know, especially as they’re going through puberty or have gone through puberty, that they’re going to be looked at by older men as women when they’re really just still children.

Dr. Sarah (25:58):

They’re also going to be looked at by their peers. I know that I have more teenagers who talk to me about their negative views of their body because other girls are judging them peers and not because they’re uncomfortable when a adult man is around them. That’s not the thing. The thing for them is she’s wearing that. I don’t like the way my body looks when I wear that, but I feel like I need to wear that. And if I do wear it, people look at me or they say things and I feel really bad about how I show. That’s, I think where it becomes really tricky for girls is the actual peer dynamics.

Dr. Jo-Ann (26:45):

Well, I think what you’re getting at though is the intense emphasis that we put on girls’ bodies from the time they’re very, very young on their appearance and their bodies. And so you mentioned the media before, and I think that’s a really great place mean from the minute they’re watching TV or you’re watching a show with them, you can intervene in these ways. I think this is how we teach girls about the culture and about gender bias and sexism is through teachable moments. And of course, not every, there’s endless teachable moments and they will tune us out or roll their eyes at us if we do it too much, but we want to do not too much too soon, but not too little, too late. And so in the media, you can point out how many times this character has changed her outfit, yet the boys in his same outfit the whole time, why do they make such a big deal of girls’ appearance? That’s not fair. We’re so much, we’re so more than how we look, or we can point out because this actually is true how much girls on television, children’s television girls are shown to solve problems using magic where boys are shown to solve problems using stem and their physicality.

(28:23):

And so you can say, boy, it’s almost like they’re saying girls can’t solve problems in real life because girls don’t have magic. But we know that girls are really quick on their feet and clever and good at science. So that’s just so silly.

Dr. Sarah (28:41):

And I think too, I’m thinking of shows and I wonder if you have ones that you like in terms of for kids, but I’m thinking of Ada Twist, Scientist. Or like, Vida the Vet. I love those shows because they do the exact opposite of that. And they not an A to twist scientist, there’s three of them, two of them are girls and one is a boy, and they’re all just, they’re solving problems together using their different sort of STEM skills. And then there’s shows, and I don’t want to bash any shows, but there’s a show that my daughter, my kids love to watch Netflix, and it’s really, I try to make certain controls, but ultimately there’s a lot of shows they have access to that I’m like, they’re totally benign from ratings content thing. But the characters, I’m like, why are we watching this? I don’t know how I feel about this messaging and it’s just so dumb. Sorry, it’s mind numbing content. And even there’s plenty of stuff my son is drawn to that’s equally mind numbing, but it doesn’t bug me in the way that the girls’ content does.

Dr. Jo-Ann (30:04):

Well, I would say even in something like a to twist scientist, even though it is showing this fantastic role modeling, it’s also really helpful when parents can point out what they’re seeing. They’re like, oh, they’re working so well. This boy and this girl are working so well together on this science project because it’s emphasizing that boys and girls can work together, that they’re both involved in the science because they’re also getting messages from outside. They’re getting many more messages from outside that that’s not how things work. So the more we can sort of point it out, the better.

Dr. Sarah (30:49):

And I would imagine to take it a step, yeah, you pointed out, but if you want to take it a step further, and I do this a lot with some different things where it’s like, first we lay the framework, I’ll point it out in a show. I’ll point it out here, I’ll point it out there, and then I’ll try to help them draw a connection to a counterpoint in real life, is this same thing happen here or here? Or do we get a different message sometimes from this? So I’m trying to help them not just notice the thing that the messaging I prefer to reinforce, but then help them look at where do you see something that kind of conflicts with that so we can help them? That’s where that critical thinking comes in. Oh, not just this is a good message, but oh wait, this message conflicts with that message. How do I navigate that?

Dr. Jo-Ann (31:35):

Yeah, I think that’s amazing. I think tying it all together is very helpful for kids. What I’m thinking of though is a lot of parents, and I was one of them, was very afraid of pointing out sexism to my daughter. I had an easier time with my son, he needs to learn this. But for my daughter, I worried that it would create feelings, that it would create feelings of inferiority that weren’t there yet, or would rob her of the sense that she lived in a fair world.

Dr. Sarah (32:17):

Right, like the fear of planting a seed that might not be there.

Dr. Jo-Ann (32:21):

The thing is, it is there. That’s my point is that as I listened, there’s a whole story in the book of how I introduced sexism to my kid, and she was about six, and it’s not that I wasn’t working on gender issues before that and gender bias before that, but I would stick more to pointing out positive counter stereotypical role models. Like, oh, cool, Helen’s dad stays home with her and her mom owns this business, stuff like that to show her that we don’t have to stay in this sort of gender binary. But we were watching when she was six, we were watching these reruns of Master Chef Junior.

(33:06):

And every season she would say, look, the first season, she was like, oh, the girl’s going to win. I hope the girl’s going to win. I think she’s going to win. And then the next year, and it wasn’t year after year because we were watching, we were sort of binge washing them one after the other and as a family. And then she said, I really hope the girl wins this year. And of course she didn’t. And then the next year she’s like, the girl never wins. And I was like, you know what? She is asking to understand what is going on. But it’s delicate because there I, there was some overt sexism that had my sort of sexism detector blaring. They would say to the boys, there were three male judges, and they would say to the boys, this is an incredible dish. I cannot wait to see you. Remind me of myself, and I can’t wait to see what restaurant you’re going to have when you’re older. And to the girls, they would say, and of course this was completely unconscious on the male judges part, but when you’re all male judges, you’re going to identify with somebody who looks like you. So they would say to the girls, wow, what an incredible dish. Is this a fluke? Or do you think you could do it again?

Dr. Sarah (34:20):

Really?

Dr. Jo-Ann (34:21):

And then we wonder why everyone who walks into our office, why every single woman who walks into our office talks about imposter syndrome.

Dr. Sarah (34:29):

Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about imposter syndrome and what you feel like the roots of that are connected to?

Dr. Jo-Ann (34:36):

I mean, I think that’s what they’re connected to. I think that we, well, I think for, alright, okay. Stick with me here. We Google parents, Google are two and a half times more likely to Google is my son gifted than is my daughter gifted? And we’re twice as likely to Google is my daughter overweight. So we naturally, we believe that boys are naturally smarter than girls, even if consciously we are like, that is ridiculous. There’s big enough studies that show parents believe that their boys have higher IQs than their girls, even when there is no difference in IQ between boys and girls.

(35:26):

And then on top of that, I write about in the book that girls don’t have a lot of exposure to female genius. Right? History books don’t show female genius. When I googled female, I googled male genius, I’m trying to remember, it’s in the book, but I googled male genius and all of these real life male geniuses came up and I Googled female geniuses came up and I got ulma from Scooby-Doo, and it was just, oh my gosh. So I think there are all these ways that we’re giving girls the sense that they’re not as smart as boys. You know what I’m thinking of another study that girls, when they’re five years old, they’re just as likely to say that girls are really, really smart as they do boys. But by the time they’re six, they say that boys are really, really smart and they’re less likely themselves to choose to play a game that they’re told is for really, really smart kids. And so what happens between four and six?

Dr. Sarah (36:42):

Yeah, what is happening?

Dr. Jo-Ann (36:44):

Kindergarten is happening.

Dr. Sarah (36:46):

Oh yeah. I’m thinking of all the ways that a child navigating kindergarten for the first time might get some of these messages. Do you find that it’s coming mostly from the teachers? Is it coming from the literature? What is it that they’re exposed to in kindergarten that’s kind of setting that tone?

Dr. Jo-Ann (37:09):

I think maybe it’s just being more out in the world and having more exposure to all of the unspoken messages that are coming at them. But there is data on teachers calling more on boys than on girls allowing boys to interrupt. But when the girls interrupt, they say, raise your hand please. And so they’re really focused on girls being good and they’re really focused on the boys being smart.

Dr. Sarah (37:39):

Okay. How do we combat some of these messages? I mean, I know we talked about a little bit how do we combat some of the messages coming in the media, but that’s a little bit not always easier, but it’s in our living room. If watching a show with our kid, we’re there, we’re not at school with them. What do we do to help combat some of the messages that they might be getting there?

Dr. Jo-Ann (38:04):

Well, I mean, I would say read my book because I really lay them all out. And I think that the more parents are aware of what the roles that they’re playing they can and just what’s out there in the world. So the book is about helping parents understand their own implicit biases and the messages they’re giving their kids, but it’s also to teach their kids what they’re going to encounter in the real world. And so you’re talking directly, again, I know it’s hard for parents, but there are ways to do it to prepare them without scaring them. So there are ways to draw on these teachable moments where we say, it’s weird that on this show the boys are smarter than the girls. Or you could be in the doctor’s office and you could say, this is maybe when they’re a little bit older, but did you notice that the doctor interrupted me a lot, but he didn’t interrupt daddy? That could be because there’s gender bias and we know that girls and women get interrupted more than boys and men, and it’s not because what you’re saying isn’t important, but it’s a bias that lots of women are fighting back against now.

(39:32):

So you’re just slowly over time introducing them to this exists and we want you to know it because we don’t want your self-esteem to drop. We don’t want who you believe you can be when you grow up to be impacted.

Dr. Sarah (39:51):

Which I think what I’m hearing there too, in terms of what’s the formula here, it’s like meaning making. If we can help a child in a relatively neutral way make meaning of a situation that’s ambiguous, and by ambiguous I mean ambiguous to them, they might not notice or they might not be able to understand why something’s happening. They might just notice. They might not even notice that it’s happening and they just kind of take it in a sponge. But one, if we draw attention to something that is happening and then help them make sense of it in a way that is about, again, not like, oh my God, everybody’s out to get us and it’s this unfair world, but to say, oh, this thing that just happened, there’s an explanation for that, or there’s one possible explanation for that that helps you understand if you see this happen again, it could be because of that.

(40:44):

It helps kids tell a story about something that’s happening to them where the locus of control or the reason why it’s happening isn’t because of something they’re doing or who they are, but from something outside of them in this case, which I think is really important because I think when kids do get shut down or feel like something feels a little unfair, they might then, or if they feel embarrassed about something, they didn’t get called on or they did and they got interrupted or whatever, they got sort shut down, then they might internalize the story I just didn’t was wrong, or I don’t get it, or I’m not smart, or people don’t really care what I have to say. That story. We can prevent that story from being the story they tell themselves by allowing them to make the meaning with a different context.

Dr. Jo-Ann (41:31):

I think that is such important point and something that I think that really is part of the imposter syndrome too. If you are interrupted and talked over enough or not listened to, you don’t feel like you can command attention because you’re not even in your own family. You grow up feeling like you have nothing to say. Right? There’s a story in my book of this woman who gets interrupted at work. She feels really inarticulate even though she’s hyper smart. And so one of the things that she says is, my parents had eyes for me and ears for my brother. So her parents were always focused on how she looked nitpicking or complimenting her, but they really sort of paid attention to her brothers. And so if this is happening in our home and if we have boys and girls in a home, statistically speaking, it’s happening. So in my own home over the dinner table, I would notice when my kids were younger that my son would dominate conversations. He would interrupt my daughter. And so I would very gently say, Hey, Gabby speaking, it’s really important that we listen when someone else is speaking. And I would say, Gabby, girls do get interrupted a lot, but it’s okay to be assertive. It’s okay to say, please don’t interrupt me or I’m speaking.

(43:05):

And then the difficulty is that girls and I did eventually explain this to my daughter, that when girls stick up for themselves when they say I’m speaking or when they insist that they be heard, they can be seen as abrasive or aggressive in a way that a boy just never would be unless they’re actually being aggressive. And so that’s a dynamic I want her to know, and yet I really still want you to speak up because you have such good things to say, or if we want her to know when she’s trying to say something and it’s not coming out that that’s the beginning of a thought that you want to hear because she has such a good mind and that you’re going to be patient and you’re going to listen. And so making sure that you’re putting more emphasis on their character and their mind and just kind of keeping body neutral.

Dr. Sarah (44:09):

Yeah. Yeah. I noticed too, and we could talk about, you had mentioned we see our kids more likely to Google as my daughter overweight. Our pediatricians are more likely to talk to us about our daughter’s size than our son’s size. And then of course, as a mother, I know I’ve internalized my own body stuff, and I’m very mindful, we did a whole episode about this, but the messages and the stories we’ve internalized about our own bodies and how do we make sure that we’re not letting that sort of pass down to our kids through the way, not just the way we talk about them, but the way we talk about ourselves in front of them.

Dr. Jo-Ann (44:56):

And I mean, I think this generation has gotten so much better at not doing that as much. But here’s the thing. Even if we feel badly about our bodies or we worry about our daughter’s bodies, but we don’t express any of that, girls still pick up on it girls whose parents are worried about their bodies have worse body image issues and girls parents. But that’s not to say, oh, what the hell am I going to do about it? There are ways to counter this. First of one is really working on your own body image and really understanding that your daughter is going to grow into the body that she was meant to have. And so we have to be really mindful of not fat shaming anybody and sort of working on our own fat phobia because we have no idea what our girls’ bodies are going to grow into.

Dr. Sarah (46:05):

And it’s interesting as a mom of, again, I am sort of a use case, got both, and I’ve definitely noticed, and I’m really mindful of this, I really am try very hard to keep this in the forefront of my attention, scared of it, frankly, of my daughter internalizing negative feelings about her body. But I will even notice that when I cut up when I’m making lunches, I’ll be like, oh, Ollie needs a little bit more. He’s going to need more than her. Or I don’t sometimes give him more food than her. And I have to check that and be like, what is that about? They’re different ages, but they’re really not very different in size. They really both need, at this point in their development, same amount of food.

Dr. Jo-Ann (46:52):

You’re reminding me of a time where my daughter was looking at a picture of herself and she said, Ew, or she said something, or I started to notice that she was being more critical of herself. And I asked her, I was like, Hey, what’s that about? You never used to be like that? And she looked at me and she said, well, you hate yourself in pictures. And I was like, oh. And I had spent a lifetime with her talking about how good it felt, how strong I felt, and how lucky I was to have legs that could chase our dog, who loved to be chased strong legs. But in recent years aging, I had sort of bought into all of this aging stuff without really realizing it. And I would look at pictures of myself and be like, who is that? Whose gray hair? Who’s grays are those? Or whose wrinkles are those? And so I really took in what she said, and I started to change how I talked about pictures and just either I would say just cute shot or I would say, oh, I love how I’m looking at you in that picture.

(48:05):

And it didn’t take long for me to overhear her with a friend. The friend said, Ew. Because now at that time, they were these young teenagers getting self-conscious, and they were like, Ew, we look so dumb in that photo. And I overheard my daughter say, nah, we just look like we’re having fun. Yes, mom win. And so it’s like we can recognize and replace, I like to call it RR parenting because we all need r and r, so recognize our biases and replace. And so we do have so much more impact on these things with our kids, and again, we might not see it right away, but we’re playing the long game and eventually they are going to start to be able to become these critical thinkers themselves.

Dr. Sarah (49:02):

Yes. That is so empowering, and it’s good to remember too. Nothing’s broken. If you catch, let’s say you’re listening to the episode and you’re like, oh, man, I’ve been doing that. I’ve been doing that. I shouldn’t. It’s like, great, reflect and replace, what was it?

Dr. Jo-Ann (49:19):

Recognize and replace.

Dr. Sarah (49:20):

Yeah, good. Recognize and replace.

Dr. Jo-Ann (49:24):

Reflect and replace works too though.

Dr. Sarah (49:27):

You just shift it. Just shift it. And it is powerful to your story. It’s powerful because you had noticed one, the negative impact of something you weren’t aware of doing because your daughter just is a mirror and she’s showing it. They just show us everything we do.

Dr. Jo-Ann (49:44):

Yes, they do.

Dr. Sarah (49:45):

But in observing that frankly, with sort of without judgment and being like, oh, yep, I’ve been doing that. All right, well, okay, well, I could do this instead. It doesn’t sound like it took very long before the train got back on the tracks. Our kids are really open and adapt, just like they are sensitive to taking in these negative stories, they’re also very able to take in the positive ones. We can correct internal stories that aren’t serving our kids relatively easily.

Dr. Jo-Ann (50:14):

Yes, we can, especially when they’re younger. I got an email from somebody who had read my book and she said, I’ve realized that I was shutting down my daughter’s strong opinions in a way that I wasn’t. My son’s and my son is the more critical and more opinionated one. And so she went to her daughter and she said, I think this is what’s happening. And her daughter immediately started to cry from the recognition because the daughter had known something was wrong. She would complain that the mom didn’t listen, but that wasn’t really it. And the mom was like, I’m a feminist. I want my daughter to have opinions. And yet I’m so ingrained in a what happens when women have strong opinions and I’m just having this natural reaction to having, to women having strong opinions, what I’ve grown up with my whole life. And she’s like, I just wasn’t seeing it.

Dr. Sarah (51:23):

We all have blind spots, we all have blind spots, and our kids are really good at helping us recognize them. And then to add an R to your list is like the repair you repair. Our kids love a good repair.

Dr. Jo-Ann (51:36):

And that’s what that mother was doing, right?

Dr. Sarah (51:39):

Oh, your book is going to be so valuable. I am so happy that you wrote this book, and I imagine that anybody who interacts with women, whether you are a mom of boys or a mom of girls, even if you’re just a mom of boys, you are going to want to teach your boys to have these same awarenesses. If you have, I could just see my sister’s got two boys, so I feel like this is a book that I would want her to read anyway. Like how do you help point these things out to our sons too? Because just as important to help them become aware of these biases so that they can notice them and be critical of them as well. If we sort of continue this sort of siloing of like, well, these feminist messages are the things we have to make sure we’re teaching our girls and these sort of positive masculinity, antitoxin masculinity messages are things we have to teach our boys. It’s like we’re actually perpetuating the problem a little. We need to teach both to both.

Dr. Jo-Ann (52:50):

Yes, we do. Yes, we do. And I have a whole section in the book on boys because I couldn’t just not this sort of patriarchal culture that they’re growing up in, like I was saying earlier, isn’t good for either of them. I see lots of men and teenage boys in my private practice, and they struggle with so many of the same things as girls do, right? Low self-esteem, friendship, and relationship problems. And yet when they get into my office, I am very often the very first person that they’ve ever told what they’re going through. Whereas the girls, they have such close friends that they’ve been talking to. And so it’s like the boys aren’t benefiting from this system either.

(53:44):

And in terms of the feminist stuff and helping them understand what girls aren’t getting and how boys have more power, it’s really delicate because we don’t want to shame them for their masculinity. They are not the ones who are perpetuating this system yet, and they don’t feel powerful, especially as a teenage boy. They might be making fun of the girls and making fun of their sexuality and all of that, but they also understand pretty privilege and they feel really beholden to pretty girls. So I talk about all of that in the book too. And so I think helping them understand the sort of historical why we’re saying girls have less power when it doesn’t seem that way to them is really, really important.

Dr. Sarah (54:39):

Amazing.

Dr. Jo-Ann (54:39):

And I will say it, all of the reviews say this book is not just for parents of daughters, it’s also for parents of sons, of kids of any gender or whoever cares about kids.

Dr. Sarah (54:50):

I a hundred percent agree. We need to be teaching these ideas to everybody. Thank you for writing this book. If people want to find out more about your work, if they want to get this book, if they want to follow you, how do they do that? Where can we send them?

Dr. Jo-Ann (55:07):

Well, you can find out more about me and the book at joannefinkelstein.com, and the book is sold wherever books are sold. And I have a very frequent newsletter that comes out on Substack. So that’s joannefinkelstein.substack.com. And then on Instagram and TikTok, I am @joannefinkelstein.phd.

Dr. Sarah (55:33):

Amazing. All right, we’ll put links to that so everyone can find you easily and go get this book. If you are a parent of anybody, you should probably read this book. Thank you so much.

Dr. Jo-Ann (55:46):

Thank you.

Dr. Sarah (55:53):

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