This episode of the Oprah podcast is presented by our partner Geico. Today we're talking about the specific difficulties in raising daughters in today's world.
Parents are in a new era now.
It's not the same. We have to become humble and begin listening to what our children are telling us. And they are in pain. They're feeling the pressure of knowing too much too soon, of being too overexposed and too oversexualized. Your daughter now is on a platform where it's a global curation of overperfection being presented to her as an ideal. Right now with the filters, now with the like button, she's living disconnected, disembodied, dislocated. And that girl is easy prey for predation.
Instead of wanting your daughters to be good, you want your daughters to be heard. We want to train them to use their voice and not just be good.
Yes. So their voice that speaks to them first. We must allow our daughters to lead the way for their own self-direction, for their own destiny.
Hello. It is just my pleasure to welcome you once again to the Oprah podcast. I'm so glad to be back on my front porch with one of my favorite parenting experts, spiritual leader, teacher, world-renowned clinical psychologist, and New York Times best-selling author, Dr. Shefali. On a prior episode, we talked about the new challenges that so many of you as parents are facing raising children in this modern era. And we focused on Dr. Shefali's book called Raising Conscious Sons: Cultivating Purpose, Connection, and Inner Power in a Chaotic World. We can all feel how necessary that book is. Check out that episode if you have not already. And now, today we're talking about the specific difficulties in raising daughters in today's world. Dr. Shefali's book is called Raising Conscious Daughters: Building Confidence, Courage, and Inner Power in an Anxious World. I think we can feel how much this book is needed also for our girls in the world. You had to do two. Why?
I had to write two books because we are in a very unique, unprecedented cultural turning point. And our children are being raised in a world that is increasingly misaligned to provide them the nourishment for their neurological, developmental, psychological, spiritual needs. And I felt I had to write two books because boys and girls—and this is not about gender dichotomy, this is not about a binary, of course, you can read one book and see more of your son in the daughters and vice versa—but I wrote two books because boys and girls go through very specific, precise, and different developmental trajectories, hormonal landscapes, and culture exploits them very differently.
Wow. I asked you this on the other episode before, or give us a quick refresher for those who are not familiar with what it means to be a conscious parent because when we first became friends, I was introduced to your book Conscious Parenting and I was so struck by that because I'd done so much work with Eckhart Tolle and you to me seemed like the Eckhart Tolle for parenting, and turns out that's what you'd said to your publisher.
When you presented that book.
Yes, Eckhart talks about presence, attunement, stillness, and recognizing the projections from our own wounds. Well, who does that more than parents? We constantly project onto our children our unmet needs, our unfulfilled expectations, our fantasies, and we cast our children into our movie as if they were our object because they are ours. And so conscious parenting is a movement that is my answer to the toxicity of the traditional parenting model which treats children as our objects.
Yeah. And parents are doing it and sometimes you know you hear those words, it feels like I'm sure a lot of parents didn't take it well at first when they were reading this about themselves in The Conscious Parent.
And they don't see themselves as creating a problem because they're doing it out of love.
I who've never had my own children did this. I remember one of my girls from South Africa came to the United States. I remember the night—I might have shared this with you before—I remember the night that she got into Wellesley. And I always wanted to go to Wellesley. She didn't want to go to Wellesley, but I wanted to go to Wellesley and I talked her into going to Wellesley. And she ended up having a miserable time, feeling isolated and disconnected, and never felt like she belonged. And that was a huge turning point lesson for me in projecting what I wanted onto her. And I learned because I've now put over 800 girls through college is to let them live their lives and have their own will about whatever it is they choose. And I have literally released it. I have surrendered whatever anyone becomes. I try to provide, you know, an opportunity, an open door. And I learned that from you. I learned that from conscious parenting.
Parents get so afraid to release trust and autonomy onto their children.
Because they were not raised with autonomy, trust, and sovereignty. They were raised with control. And most of us are. So our love language is control. It's possession.
Because we think we are supposed to.
Because we think we're supposed to. We don't know any other way. And we've never been tuned in to listen to our own sovereign spirit, so we don't know how to gift that to our children.
Yes. And it's so interesting. I was talking to one of your friends recently who said that even though you were her best friend and you all were very close, that she didn't realize until you wrote the book Conscious Parenting that she was doing that in her own relationship with her son—forcing her son, many of you may recognize this, forcing her son to have piano lessons, right? And he hated it.
Right. From the most benign, "Go kiss grandma," and the child is like, "I don't want to kiss grandma. She smells." Right? From pushing of the child from that to play an instrument because "I want you to play an instrument," or excel in school, or wear your hair like this and go into a beauty pageant because "You look so cute," get married to this person, follow my God, all the way to sexual exploitation and trafficking. It's all the same throughline of objectifying our children, commodifying them, and using them to fulfill our ego, our unbridled ego. So, these books are my interruption to the pipeline of raising insecure girls to become self-abandoning women, raising lost boys to become predating men. These books are my interruption of that pipeline.
In the beginning of Raising Conscious Daughters, you write a wake-up call letter to parents. You say, "As both a psychologist and a mother, let me say this plainly. I am deeply troubled by what I see unfolding in girlhood across the industrialized world. For one simple reason: this is not the way we should be raising our daughters." What are you seeing?
Oprah, I could cry because I'm a girl inside me and I'm raising a daughter. And our daughter's ecosystem, their neurochemistry is so finely tuned to relational nuance, so sensitive to cues from each other. They build their identity. Girls, more than boys—and I'm not saying boys can't do this, but more so than boys—girls are primed to develop an identity based within the container of a face-to-face, eye-to-eye relationship. That's how they discover who they are. Now you're putting these very sensitive, fine-tuned forks into the tornado and hurricane and tsunami of constant the algorithm, the feed, comparison, perfectionism, feeling bullied, feeling objectified, oversexualized, early sexualization. You're taking that butterfly and she's lost in that tsunami. And that's why, Oprah, I'll tell you the stats. I'll just rattle them off because they're alarming.
One in three girls are anxious—anxiety disorder. Depression has doubled in the last decade. Anxiety has doubled in the last decade. It's in the last decade since the advent of technology, which is hijacking their attention and consuming their sense of self.
One in five girls by the age of 18 has self-harmed. Self-harm has risen 188% since 2010.
Wow. That means girls cutting.
Cutting, self-harm, eating disorders, suicidal ideation up 60% in the last decade. One in four girls by the age of 18—and this won't come as a surprise, I've been dealing with this—has had sexual violence or sexual abuse. One in two has been cyberbullied. So now you take a girl whose intricate brain that has amazing neural bridges between the left and right hemisphere. She can talk about her feelings. She feels more deeply and can access her feelings more deeply because of her neurochemistry. You know, estrogen finely tunes her oxytocin and turns it on. So her bonding hormone is right there, and estrogen does that. She's primed for becoming a victim and prey to these forces that are constantly telling her she's not good enough, she needs to be more, she is not perfect—the filters.
I don't know how y'all are doing it out there raising young girls because I think with the social media and the pressure... I mean, I look at my feed and I never end up feeling better about myself.
How can you? And women, I'm sorry to say, need to take some responsibility because we are perpetuating the same climate of perfectionism that besieges us, that entraps us.
Yeah. Well, that's why one of the things I so appreciated and felt so compelling in Raising Conscious Daughters is this letter. You created a hypothetical letter from a 16-year-old girl to her parent that really is a compilation of hundreds of conversations that you've had with your clients, with your patients of all ages over the years. So, I want you all to listen to this. Maybe this will resonate with you. This could be your daughter.
"You tell me to trust you, but I don't feel safe to. You tell me to love my body, but I've never heard you say one kind word about yours. You tell me to find love, but I see how many of you stay in relationships that seem loveless and dull. You tell me to speak my truth, but then you tell me to calm down when I do. You want me to find purpose and joy, but I watch you burning out. You want me to accept myself just as I am, but then I never see you okay with yourself, like ever. You always look stressed and like you are in a bad mood. It's all so confusing, Mom. You want to know the truth about why I act the way I do? I'm really scared most of the time. I don't really know how to believe in myself. Everything feels warped and shaky. I know that what I see is based on what I saw last in my feed and not the truth. And this freaks me out. I want to know the truth, but I cannot find it anywhere. When you were growing up, you could just trust the news at least. But now, none of us can rely on anything to be real. Most things are not, and that is an awful feeling."
So you wrote that letter as a composite because this is what the girls are sharing with you for themselves.
Yeah. They're trying to tell the moms and dads, "Hey, just because you are an adult now and you went through teenagehood, what I'm going through is something that you don't know. So do not tell me, 'Oh, when I was your age, when I was 21, this is what I did,' because I'm growing up in a world that you don't recognize. So at least have the humility to know that you don't know." That's where we all need to start. That's why I wrote these books, my seventh and eighth book, because parents are in a new era now. So whatever we knew before...
It's not the same. We have to become humble and begin listening to what our children are telling us. And they are in pain. They're feeling the pressure of knowing too much too soon, of being overexposed...
Too overexposed and too oversexualized. And this is robbing them of their rightful childhood. She knows that her feed is curated to her desires and insecurities. It's complete manipulation. So, she believes...
These girls know that what they're seeing isn't even real anymore.
It's just for them to exploit them, their insecurity. "Oh, you want to travel to the mountains now?" Your feed will be full of that beguiling you, seducing you to go travel. You only have to say it in your phone. And then now you're going to be shown mountains and trips and all the things, right? And the same is for cult ideology. The same is for toxic masculinity, misogyny. Misogynistic messages are coming through her phone and into her brain. And she's not ready to process it. She has no language for it.
Yeah. But she's being told she's an object way before she even realizes that she's a body that she can own.
Yeah. She's been objectified.
Yeah. And our daughters will look to the women around them because their mirror neurons are so activated that they will identify with the modeling that we provide as women. And that's why I teach mothers more than anyone. If you want to raise sovereign daughters, you have to learn to self-love. And if you continue in your self-loathing, and if you're at war with your body, and if you are always in the land of more, more and never enough, your daughters are absorbing that. So you owe it to your daughter to heal and enter wholeness.
But don't you also say in Raising Conscious Daughters that that's where we are with girls now, that we are in the land of more, more, more?
Yes. And you know, it's one thing to put pressure on our children—we've always done that. But it's another thing when your daughter now is on a platform where it's a global curation of overperfection being presented to her as an ideal, right now with the filters, now with the like button. So now it's become a constant audition there. She's always auditing. She's never herself. She's always the persona and never the essence. And she's living disconnected, disembodied, dislocated. And that girl is easy prey for predation. She's easily manipulated because she's being told who to be before she ever spent her whole life manipulating herself.
You're spending all your time manipulating.
Right. I call it the perception prison. She's in this perception prison where she herself is the prisoner and the warden to her own essence.
That's why I think this is such an important book, and Raising Sons, because whether you are raising daughters or sons or not, you will see yourself in these stories.
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And we have parents of daughters joining us. Christina is zooming in from Michigan. Hi, Christina.
Dr. Shefali, hi, Oprah. I'm so grateful for your focus and attention on this topic. I have three daughters. They're 15-year-old twins and a 12-year-old daughter. And I feel like what I once knew to be true about parenting no longer applies at all. Honestly, I feel really lost. I feel like I'm constantly rerouting and recalculating my approach. These girls are growing up in a world of individualism, capitalism, social division, materialism. It's nonstop pressure, like you've said, Dr. Shefali, and comparison and always striving for the unattainable. The dopamine addiction from their social scrolling just continues to fuel that materialism. And every week there's a new brand or object or thing that they need to have. And not to mention all the scary news in the world and events that are currently taking place. So, it's all just too much. And I've watched my little girls grow from these happy young girls into really anxious, overwhelmed, anxiety-medicated, attending therapy just to get out of bed in the morning and go to school. And it doesn't feel right. They've been raised in a really loving and supportive household with two parents and they're smart girls. They have friends. They're athletic. But it doesn't seem like that's enough anymore because of all the external pressure. And so with all that pressure, I feel like I am constantly bailing them out, rescuing them, making accommodations for them with no consequences—things my mother would never have done. And I'm finding myself...
Give us an example. Give us an example.
Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So, I think we all have the instance where a child forgot something at school and you're going to bring it to them, right? Once in a while that happens. I feel like any ask they make—they forgot their homework, they forgot their lunch, they are cold—I am picking up these things and rushing off to school. I'm disrupting my day. I'm disrupting my week because I see at a baseline just how anxious they are at all times that I'm trying to like hold them together and scaffold around them and keep them going throughout their day. And you know, I'm almost embarrassed to admit some of the things like that I'll continue to buy for them or experiences I'll give to them, like having a personal trainer because guess what? Their friends do and they're afraid they're going to fall behind in their sports team because they're not running as fast as the other girls. And I am embarrassed. Like it truly feels like I have to do this from a deep maternal instinct. And my question for you really is: how do I start to let go at this age? Natural consequences are very important, right? But this anxiety...
Right. So you have so much anxiety also that they're falling apart, right? And I do not blame you. I just had a 15-year-old. My daughter is now 23. So, I totally understand the pressures that you feel as a mother because they're feeling all this pressure to keep up, to be perfect, to be something. So, we buy, we borrow, we do anything to buttress a flailing sense of self. But here's where we are part of the pattern, right? And you know this. It doesn't feel good to you because you know you're being pulled against your will. But that's what our daughters are. They're being pulled against their will. We are being swept by the undertow of a materialistic, consumeristic culture that we all are feeling helpless with. So what do we do?
Yeah. And what is she really teaching her daughters by giving in to every single thing that they ask? What is she really teaching?
Well, she's really teaching them that, yes, your personal trainer matters for your identity; yes, getting into that team matters for your self-worth, right? We're actually doing the very thing that is actually going to keep taking from them. It's a never-ending cycle because that's how they've got us hooked and they've got us parents anxious because our girls are in a panic attack over—I do not blame her. They come to her and they're screaming, crying, they're having a meltdown. She's afraid they're going to self-harm if she doesn't give them the car or the gift or the jewelry because all the friends are being bathed in this ocean, this current of anxiety, panic, perfectionism, hyperexposure. Girls are at a different level because their attunement to culture is even more. So, we have to scaffold them. Now you think you're scaffolding them by buying them that purse, by buying them that vacation or whatever, that bauble. But here's the thing: you're actually feeding the monster because you are teaching them that, yes, their worth means that they should look beautiful and fit in. So what do we do as parents? Very hard. Not saying it's easy. And I talk about the pillar of antifragility in the book. It is so important for us as parents to make them antifragile. What does that mean? We have to teach them that they will be okay even if they fall apart. But see, I know what this mother is experiencing. She's like, "No, they won't be okay. They won't be okay. So let me pump them with the drug, whatever the drug of the day is." And this is where she's codependent and she's enabling. And I don't blame her. I've done this myself because we're so worried. So we're anxious, they're anxious. So we keep feeding and giving the drug.
How do you break the cycle?
How do you break it? It is to realize that the teaching of resilience and antifragility comes from the falling apart, comes from the rock-bottom moment. Even with my clients, I wait for rock bottom, not because I'm sadistic, because I know that it is only when you see yourself at rock bottom and see yourself able to handle it that you build the antifragility and the resilience. So what we're doing is protecting the rock bottom from getting to rock bottom. So we never believe we're strong enough. So we keep feeding. We're stuck in this loop. You're in a loop. They're in a loop. You'll be millions of dollars poorer, and nothing will change until you cut the loop and stop feeding the monster.
She has a talk with them, comes to a coach like me, and I'm often the bad guy who says, "We cannot feed the monster anymore. We are now drug addicted to the thing on the outside, and we all have to detox. The whole system has to detox." And it is painful and scary, especially with anxious girls, because you think they're going to self-harm, they're going to cut themselves, they're going to harm themselves. But we cannot feed that beast because we're all afraid. They're afraid of their own pain. We have to teach them that we cannot be afraid of pain. Pain is something that teaches us. It is our gift and our invitation.
It's one of the things you also said about boys, so it applies to raising children period. I see that you have to let them know that if you fall apart, you will still be okay and I'm here and that we all have fallen apart.
And we are together, yeah.
And the relationship is strong enough.
See, you're not believing, Mom, that your presence is more important than the purse and the shoes. The shoes and the purse are transitory and they're just momentary gratification. You can hold them through the falling apart, and you are going to be the one who will pull them through. So if you believe in yourself, they will fall apart, you're right, but that is how we detox the beast.
It's really interesting because I thought we were at rock bottom when they wouldn't go to school and wouldn't get out of bed and we were going to therapy and taking these anti-anxiety meds. So that felt like my rock bottom, right? But I realize obviously that's...
But because you're in this loop, it means that it wasn't bottom enough. It's coming again. Now you're just buttressing it with things, and things are never going to teach them connection to the self. They have to face themselves at rock bottom.
I saw you have a moment of recognition there: things are never going to teach them connection to their self.
Pain does. Our ability to transcend and transform and alchemize pain teaches us connection to us.
I know. But no parent wants their child to have to experience pain.
Right. And what you said about control equaling love, I mean, I think that is where I feel like I'm coming from. I'm trying to manage...
Control their environment and help, and consciously we're materialists, I know that.
I think you're trying to control them falling apart, and yet falling apart is the very thing that will teach them self-control.
Well, I'm grateful for that advice. That is a tough one to swallow. But you are certainly the person we need right now to start being more disruptive and sharing this information because it's hard. It's really tough.
You're going to have so many ahas and seeing yourself in the book and you'll be grateful for because one of the things that she does is offer a path forward. Not just stating what the problem is, but offering a path forward. So, I could see your "woof," that hit you hard. But yeah, feels like the truth to me.
I mean, it does feel like the reason why it hit you, Christina, is because you know inside yourself that what she's saying is true.
And you know, I'll just tie it back together, but just briefly: ultimately, Christina, it's your little girl that wants to be a good mother that is actually unable to watch them fall apart because then you'd have to face that you can't control it all. And you can't keep your kids happy. And that's actually not your job.
Yeah.
Yeah. It's the little girl in us that wants to be the best mom. Dish you over here, because you're starting to get to me with these things. Oh, man.
Wow. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you both.
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Lisa's joining us from Illinois. Hi, Lisa. I hear you have twin girls in college.
I do. Hi, Oprah. Hi, Dr. Shefali. Thank you so much. This is such an important conversation. I do, I have twin girls. They are 20. They are currently juniors in college, and they definitely grew up with anxiety as well from an early age all through high school. And what really has impacted them over the years is the comparison culture or social comparison that happens on Instagram and TikTok. But now in their junior year, there's a whole new pressure. They're all thinking about their careers post-college, and what's really important for most of them is to get an internship right after their junior year. And so in particular for one of my daughters, I've noticed that she's starting to really struggle with LinkedIn because her feed is exactly what you were talking about, Dr. Shefali, where it's every single person that she is connected to on LinkedIn is consistently posting self-promotional posts about all the achievements that they've received academically, leadership positions that they've gotten in clubs, and now they're all in the process of posting all the internships that they've received. And this has put some incredible pressure on my daughter, and I notice comparison, comparison—
Comparison. And she is saying, "Everybody has gotten an internship and I have not gotten one yet." She used to be in high school, I think, a perfectionist, needed to have the straight A's, and now I see this all kind of falling apart and sort of blowing up. And what's happening now is she's actually withdrawing. The question is, how do I help her through this? This is obviously a very critical time in her life,
Proceed in this environment without, you know, hurting her self-worth.
