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

The Oprah Podcast

In this episode of The Oprah Podcast, host Oprah Winfrey continues her conversation with renowned clinical psychologist Dr. Shefali Tsabary about her book Raising Conscious Daughters: Building Confidence,

Key takeaways

• Girls are experiencing unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and cyberbullying due to digital overexposure and societal pressures.
• The modern world's algorithm-driven culture hijacks girls' attention and undermines their sense of self-worth.

Main topics

• The mental health crisis among teenage girls
• Digital overexposure and social media's impact on identity

Notable quotes

Your daughter now is on a platform where it's a global curation of over-perfection being presented to her as an ideal.

Instead of wanting your daughters to be good, you want your daughters to be heard.

Conclusion

Dr. Shefali urges parents to shift from control to reverence, recognizing their daughters' innate power

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) 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. 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 over-perfection 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. Speaker 1 (0:50) Instead of wanting your daughters to be good, you want your daughters to be heard. Yes, yes. You 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. Speaker 1 (1:11) 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 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. 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. Speaker 1 (2:08) 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 and the daughters and vice versa. But I wrote two books because boys and girls go through very specific, precise, Speaker 1 (3:01) 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. 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 Speaker 1 (3:54) 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. And 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 have shared this with you before, I remember the night that she got into Wellesley. Speaker 1 (4:52) 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. 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 tried 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. Speaker 1 (5:46) 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. Because we think we are supposed to. Because we think we're supposed, 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 Speaker 1 (6:15) 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. 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 the pushing of the child from that. Speaker 1 (6:43) 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. 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. Speaker 1 (7:38) 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. Speaker 1 (8:36) you know, 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? I'll just rattle them off. Okay. Because they're alarming, okay? 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. Depression has doubled. One in five girls by the age of 18 has self-harmed. Self-harm has risen 188% since 2010. Wow. Speaker 1 (9:20) 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. One in two has been cyberbullied. So now you take a girl who's... 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, you know, becoming a victim and prey. Speaker 1 (10:11) 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. 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. Speaker 1 (11:15) 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. Speaker 1 (11:48) 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. Speaker 1 (12:14) 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. Yes. 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. Speaker 1 (12:42) 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. Speaker 1 (13:10) 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? Speaker 1 (13:38) 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. You only have to say it. 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. 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