Toolbox for Our Daughters: Building Strength, Confidence, and Integrity Book

The complex issues girls face as they enter their teens can often undercut their self-image. This book is designed as a hands-on tool for mothers, fathers, and daughters confronting this period of transition. Chapters discuss building security with love and boundaries; decision making; overcoming the inner critic; pragmatic optimism, attitude, and vision; expanding beyond society's limits; humor; and care of body and soul.

VOYA

The title of this book is well chosen, for it is quite literally a toolbox for educating girls from preadolescence through young adulthood. It is written to help girls discover, cherish, and act upon a sense of personal responsibility, and to empower them in making ethical choices. The authors identify an "inner support system called the Connected Inner Guide" and present practical tools and sensible approaches for helping girls learn and grow. Naturally, the authors advocate family structure, unconditional love, and reasonable boundary setting, but what makes this book especially effective are the specific strategies for recognizing and addressing problems that inevitably arise. Several useful paradigms of the emerging adult personality are identified and used to describe the maturing process. Competing inner voices, for example, ranging from the "Toxic Inner Critic" to the "Comforter" affect girls' decision making, and the authors use these models to describe productive and positive ways in which adults can influence girls toward affirmative, deliberate choices. Several popular and proven authors, including Stephen Covey and Mary Pipher, are quoted. The book has many sidebars, checklists, generous paragraph headings, a detailed index, and an extensive bibliography, making it appropriate for close reading, browsing, or reference. Useful to parents, teachers, and the daughters themselves, Toolbox will guide readers to more productive and effective relationships with the young women in their lives. Index. Biblio. Source Notes. Further Reading. 2000, New World Library, 224p, pb. Ages Adult. Reviewer: Christopher Finer SOURCE: VOYA, June 2001 (Vol. 24, No. 2)