To celebrate Book Week 2017, I’ve asked bloggers to share a book that one of more of their children adores. Kate from The Online Watercooler shares why Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls is so important to her family.
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The Christmas before my daughters’ 4th birthday I began to notice something. Among the myriad opportunities to see, speak to or sit on a kindly old man in a red suit there was a startling inconsistency in the way on which my children were greeted by strangers. My son always got a
‘high five’ and a ‘hi there buddy!’ and my daughter always got a kindly smile and a ‘wow, aren’t you pretty!’
Well, yes, I wanted to respond. She is beautiful (like every other girl), and her is brother too. But that’s just about the least interesting thing about her, and is that really the first thing we notice in girls? Their looks? Her brother was a champ, a mate, a buddy – and she looked very pretty in her Christmas dress. Is that really the first thing we want girls to hear – that we value their appearance and their brothers’ mateship? These are the messages she gets every single day. Not just at Christmas, but in toy stores, in clothing departments, watching television, seeing billboard ads…If it was one message once in a while, we could shake it off. As it stands, it ubiquitous. Its everything girls are taught to value from every angle – how is a parent to counteract this?
I know how capable my daughter is and so I made it my mission to make sure she knows it; that what she thinks, knows, can accomplish and can contribute is monumentally more interesting and important than anything about her appearance. It is a daily struggle. With every ‘doesn’t your hair
look pretty?’ I need to work that little bit harder to remind her that her wonderfully creative brain and her kind, kind heart are even more significant.
Enter Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls. Journalist Elena Favilli and an artist/actor Francesca Cavalli, noticed the same thing as I had, and they decided to do something concrete about it. On the Rebel Girls website, Francesca explains:
“Our entrepreneurial journey made us understand how important it is for girls to grow up surrounded by female role models. It helps them to be more confident and set bigger goals. We realized that 95% of the books and TV shows we grew up with, lacked girls in prominent positions. We did some research and discovered that this didn’t change much over the past 20 years, so we decided to do something about it.”
Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls is the result and it is one of the small ways that I proactively engage my daughter in discovering what’s most important. From Cleopatra to Jessica Watson, the Mirabal sisters and Hillary Clinton, this book is armed with amazing stories of bravery, brilliance and ingenuity. Teenage inventors, warrior queens, fearless pirates and brilliant scientists are the tales we tell every night before bed – and it just so happens that the heroes in each tale are women. A year and a half later we have read each one more than once. Its’ become a family ritual (right before Harry Potter time) to read a couple of tales of some of the most fascinating people you may never have heard of. In fact, my son loves the stories as much as my daughter.
We’ve since invested in age appropriate biographies of Marie Curie and Frida Kahlo, and this year’s Christmas list already has a request for Amelia Earhart’s life story in print. Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls is beautifully written and illustrated, with a page long story for each heroine. While I
remind my daughter, and my son, each day of the things that make them special, its stories like these that bring the message home. As an added bonus, these women have inspired both my children in ways I did not predict.
There are no easy answers being a parent. There are so many voices, so much opportunity for judgement and so few chances for positive feedback: you really only find out when you’ve gotten it wrong. This is one way I can proactively encourage what really matters in my daughter, before the Kim Kardashians of the world send her an entirely different message of what beauty means.
*Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls is one of our favorite books to give as a birthday present. Click here for this and other suggestions!*
Kate is a writer, science communicator and literary enthusiast who loves exploring different texts. She has vast experience in communicating with children and is passionate about kids’ education. Kate is an accredited ethics teacher, and always encourages animated discussion and debate. She is excited about connecting with children through incredible literature and higher-order thinking.
Kate blogs at The Online Watercooler.
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