What If We Teach Girls To Be Brave, Instead Of Being Perfect?
The girls who occupy parks and desks today are the women of tomorrow. But first they are the girls of today and nothing justifies us wanting to bite into their childhood so that in the future they will be perfect women. Ready to be mothers, ready to run a home, ready to move around the world, ready to be the best in your profession, ready to manage your emotions, ready to chew frustration and not choke … If your head hurts from both “ready”, imagine them.
Childhood is not a shuttle of perfect women
Childhood is not the perfect women’s shuttle. Of course, there is no father who does not want his children to have the best future. For that they leave their skin at work every day, for that they look for the best teacher and make an effort to multiply the hours of the day.
The other day I was reading an article that said that we asked children too much and perhaps it is true, what experience has taught me is that we listen too little to them. That they have millions of social networks in which to express themselves, but few family spaces in which to do so.
Let no one misunderstand me, it is not about them deciding, but rather that we have what they want now, even what they would like in the future if we get the power to make decisions for them: if we assume that right and that obligation, we cannot ignore the responsibility that we acquire with them. It is not about consenting, but about integrating and helping them to discover for themselves where they want to go. I’m talking about something that has nothing to do with parents being more or less strict.
If we want to teach them something, let’s teach them that perfection does not exist. That throughout their lives they will have to face fears, and that the brave are not those who do not have them, but those who put them aside and overcome them. The ones who do it over and over again while watching, out of the corner of their eye, how those fears become small.
Perfect women don’t exist, but brave women do
Let us teach them that perfection does not exist, but that fears multiply when we move forward : in the starting box there is usually much less to lose than in the intermediate boxes. Let’s tell them that there are victories that have prices that are not worth paying, because it is not worth being the most popular if the price is harassment, ridicule or insult.
Show them that before assuming any opinion as their own it is better to put it on trial. Let’s do it even if this means that they do it with our opinions and we have to take time to expose them. Let’s not show them that vulnerability makes us weak, because the armor with the people we love only distances us from them.
Let’s teach them that they have great power. That of breaking up with a partner at the first sign of abuse, of breaking down a door and intervening if they feel someone is in danger, of saying no when they receive an invitation they suspect. Let us teach them that freedom does not imply anarchy and that those who fear it do not do it for our good, no matter how much they are accompanied by many voices with banners and letters written in marker.
Let us teach them that if they combine their power with courage they will become worthwhile people, and that as they become that person they will be precisely a worthwhile person. Because while it counts, it counts so much that if you stop to think about it, everything happens while we die, while we live … and in that while rich in perspectives, one thing happens and that is that happiness has a strange sympathy for people who are worthwhile.
