Daughters Are Struggling. Here's What They Need From Us with Psychologist Dr. Shefali

0:00This 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. 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 over-sexualized. Your daughter now is on a platform where it's a global curation of over-perfection, being presented to her as an ideal, right? Now with the filters, now with the like button.

0:42She'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. Yes, yes. 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.

1:11Hello. 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 bestselling 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.

1:53And 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.

2:40And 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 and 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. Give us a quick refresher for those who are not familiar with what it means to be a conscious parent, because 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, seem like the Eckhart Tolle for parenting.

3:36And 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 and the conscious parent.

4:30And they don't see themselves as creating a problem because they're doing it out of love. I, who never had my own children, did this with, I remember one of my girls from South Africa came to the United States. I remember the night, I might've 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. Wow. 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.

5:19And 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 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. Yes. Because they were not raised with autonomy, trust, and sovereignty. They were raised with control. And most of us are. So we, our love language is control, is possession.

6:00Because 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, Pilar, recently, who said that even though you were her best friend, and you are 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.

6:32And 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 the 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 through line 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.

7:19These 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? Ofra, 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.

8:04They 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, over-sexualized, 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, okay?

8:48I'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. It's in the last decade since the advent of technology, which is hijacking their attention and consuming their sense of self. Depression has doubled. One in five girls by the age of 18 has self-harmed. Self-harm has risen 188 % since 2010. Wow. That means girls cutting themselves. 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.

9:38One in two has been cyber-bullied. 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 finally tunes her oxytocin and turns it on. So her bonding hormone is right there. And estrogen does that. She's primed for, you know, 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. You know, 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.

10:29I 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.

11:15Maybe 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.

11:51It'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.

12:29Yes. 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.

13:06And they are in pain. They're feeling the pressure of knowing too much too soon, of being overexposed. Yes. 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 that's reality. So 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 now you're going to be shown mountains and trips and all the things.

13:48Right. 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 been told she's an object way before she even realizes that she's a body that she can own. Yeah, she's been objectified. Yes. 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.

14:28And 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 have to 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, 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 over perfection being presented to her as an ideal right now with the filters now with the like button.

15:11So now it's become a constant audition. 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 discovers. Because she spent her whole life manipulating herself. Yes. You're spending all your time manipulating yourself. 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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17:32And we have parents of daughters joining us. Christina is zooming in from Michigan. Hi, Christina. Hi. Hi there. Hi. Dr. Schuster, say 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 non-set pressure like you've said Dr.

18:15Shefali in comparison and always striving for the unattainable the dopamine addiction from their social scrolling just continues to fuel that you know, 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.

19:04But 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're cold.

19:43I 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, you know, 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 girls.

20:24And I am embarrassed. Like it truly feels like I have to do this from a deep like 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's 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.

21:04But 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?

21:41We're 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. 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, hyper exposure. I mean, it's girls are at a different level because their attunement to culture is even more.

22:18So we have to scaffold them. So now you think you're scaffolding them by buying them that purse, by buying them that vacation or whatever, that bottle. 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 anti-fragility in the book. It is so important for us as parents to make them anti-fragile. 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 is to realize that we have the teaching of resilience and anti-fragility comes from the falling apart, comes from the rock bottom moment.

23:32Even 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 anti-fragility 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, you know, poorer, and nothing will change until you cut the loop and stop feeding the monster. So how does she do that? 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.

24:15We 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.

24:53And I'm here for you. 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 we wouldn't get out of bed and we were going to therapy and, you know, taking these anti-anxiety meds.

25:38So I think rock bottom, like that felt like my rock bottom, right? Yeah. I realized 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. Yeah. Yeah. And pain does. And pain does. Pain does. Our ability to transcend and transform and alchemize pain teaches us connection to ourselves.

26:20No 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, you know, 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.

26:57It's really tough. It's very hard. You're going to have so many ahas in seeing yourself in the book, and you'll be grateful for it. 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 hoof. That hit you hard. But yeah, it feels like the truth to me. It does. I feel a little like... The reason why it hit you, Christina, is because you know inside yourself that what she's saying is true. A hundred percent. 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.

27:42And that's actually not your job. Yeah. who? 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. Alright, thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you both. Thank you.