How to parent girls: my guide to health and happiness

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/08/parent-girls-guide

Version 0 of 1.

Females. Can't live with 'em, can't sustain the human race without 'em. But! You can write books about them, so they're not entirely without merit. Just a week into the new year and two well-publicised books – Leslie C Bell's Hard to Get and Steve Biddulph's Raising Girls – are about to be published, telling us what to do about these young female-type people who are, they say, deeply, deeply troubled, beset on all sides by confused cultural messages, promiscuity and eating disorders ("Lions and tigers and bears – oh my!").

Not long ago it was anxieties about boys' falling grades at school and the alleged general crisis of masculinity that grabbed the attention of the media. But males are now passe; girls and young women are the focus (again) of the media's anxiety, "assaulted" as they are, Biddulph writes in a voice of near rising hysteria, by everything from "diet ads, alcohol marketing and fashion pressures, to the inroads of hard pornography into teenage bedrooms". Girls, he writes, "are filling up mental-health clinics, the police stations and emergency rooms, and the drug and alcohol programmes in numbers never seen before".

I'm always wary when I read about the "unprecedented" rising rates of mental illness, self-harming and eating disorders among young girls and women due to exterior factors such as cultural messages. First, it seems likely that such rising figures are at least partly down to parents and GPs getting better at spotting the signs of a problem rather than a mushrooming of the problem itself. Second, it seems pretty pat to ascribe mental illness to such a simple, shallow cause. Moreover, I distinctly remember alcohol and diet product adverts, not to mention sexually provocative cultural figures, back in the Mesozoic era of the 1980s when I grew up.

But all that aside, girls and young women are complicated and live in a complicated world, and 'twas ever thus. Without wishing to upset the parenting publishing industry too much, there is no guaranteed method for raising a happy child because – surprise! – not all children react in the same ways to the same external factors, and ditto young women. One child's sense of security is another's stifling over-parenting.

But there can be general guidelines. So speaking from my expert position of being a former girl and young woman, here is my programme for raising happy and healthy females.

If your daughter wants to be a vegetarian, urge her to wait until she is 16

When Lena Dunham announced that "a lot of times when you are a vegetarian it is a just not very effective eating disorder" she was duly pilloried. But speaking as someone who has been a vegetarian for 30 years and has a certain amount of knowledge about eating disorders, I'm going to defend Dunham here, even though she slightly missed the real point. Vegetarianism is not an ineffective eating disorder – it is a potential gateway to eating disorders.

Obviously not all vegetarians become anorexic and not all anorexics are vegetarian (although in my experience, in regards to the latter part of that sentence, there is a heavy overlap). But vegetarianism encourages people to divide foods between the good and the bad, and it then becomes a legitimate means of limiting one's diet. Your daughter has a whole lifetime ahead of her to think of food as something other than a pleasurable physical necessity. Why let her start early?

Be movie-aware

Ration your daughter's diet of romcoms and musicals or she will have unrealistic expectations of human relations (some of us live with a constant ache about having failed to find a man who can run up walls like Donald O'Connor in Singin' in the Rain). Find films for her to watch that suggest there are happy endings for women other than getting married. Seek out movies that pass the Bechdel test ("Does this film have more than one female character? Do they talk to one another? About something other than men?") and limit films that fall victim to the Smurfette Principle ("a group of male buddies will be accented by a lone female, stereotypically defined"). A girl who grows up knowing that there is more to life than male validation is a woman on the right path.

"What do YOU want?"

The closest I have to a medical or psychiatric degree is a B in Biology GCSE. So I have no idea if this is down to nature or nurture but in my lifelong experience of being female and hanging out with females, my gender is, all too often, terrible at saying what they want, think and like, trying instead to anticipate what others want them to say. So start your daughters early, regularly asking them questions similar to the following:

"Do you like that dress or are you only wearing it because other girls at school are wearing something similar?"

"I'm sorry Violet is being weird with you at school, but do you even care, seeing as you never liked her anyway?"

"That's great that Robert asked you on a date, but do you actually like him, or did you say yes only because he asked?"