Teaching Fearlessness to Moms and Daughters

"I am not going to ask you again to get off this computer."

"Two more minutes, Mom, I swear." Thirteen-year-old Nora pleaded without looking up from the screen.

"No! No more minutes. You haven't even started your homework!" Carol's voice hardened as she approached the screen to see what her daughter was typing.

"Leave me alone!" Nora roared. Then she giggled. "Scene!"

Thirty mothers and daughters applauded. Nora and Carol were acting out a typical fight at one of the Mother-Daughter workshops I run around the country. A few minutes later, they were practicing new ways to deal with their conflicts.

I started working with moms and daughters as an outgrowth of my popular summer program for middle and high school girls, the Girls Leadership Institute (GLI). When the moms picked up their daughters, they kept asking for "GLI for Moms."

My workshops address the pressure girls face to be "Good Girls:" flawless, hardworking saints who never rock the boat and always put others before themselves. When you're nice all the time, you don't learn skills to manage uncomfortable emotions like anger, hurt, or jealousy. That curbs girls' leadership potential and threatens the health of their relationships, leading to explosive conflicts like Carol and Nora's or underground aggression like gossip and rumors.

Around fifth or sixth grade, girls' self-esteem begins to plummet, with even physical consequences: girls fold their arms, hunch their shoulders, cross their legs, keep hands close to their hair or mouths. Their statements begin sounding like questions; their voices lose volume and trail off at the end of their sentences. Diminishing words are sprinkled over their sentences: "I'm not sure if this is right, like, maybe, just, kinda, you know?"

Working with moms made sense: Many often aren't aware of how they model Good Girl behavior. Learning how to model fearlessness - physical, verbal, and spiritual -- would help girls form healthy habits in their friendships, intimate relationships, and professional lives. When the mothers and daughters arrive for the workshop the anxiety is palpable. Eyeballs of a certain age begin rolling. Then I really freak them out by telling them we'll be using theater games to play and learn.

Educational theater is a powerful tool for women and girls. It breaks us out of our Good Girl restraints. We get louder as we play. We take more risks, physically and emotionally. You have to react to each other without thinking, editing yourself, or trying to be perfect. Theater brings us closer to that playful, vocal girl inside all of us, which is where we truly tap into our fearlessness. Performance helps us practice and live inside the skills we're trying to learn, rather than holding them at arm's length.

Watching their mothers laugh, play games, and role-play, daughters see a side of their mothers they never realized was there. More importantly, in a culture inexorably pushing its girls to grow up too fast, mothers see a playful, silly side of their daughters they feared was lost for good.

 

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