We are living in world where we want to have equality for ourselves and our daughters. Your daughters and their daughters or sisters will also need the role models they can look up to, sadly we don’t have enough. This is your chance to give the world the wonder women its desperately needed.
1. Critical Thinking
When your boys are playing with their car toys and something happened or they broke it down — wouldn’t their be unlikely try to fix it by just assembling the parts together? What if it was our girls? We have been teaching our girls to always get someone’s help — unknowingly limiting their ability to think to their way out of a critical situation. When your daughters are faced with difficulties, the best way you can start teaching them about critical thinking is involving them and teaching what to do if something like that happens again. If they broke their toy, get them to help fixing the broken part. This small act will help them later on in their future life when they are faced with critical situations in their relationship, workplace or business.
2. Stand for yourself, always
Nowadays, your news feed must have been filled with the news of various types of abuses women around the world are going through. Some are brave enough to voice it out while many others are still holding themselves from speaking up the truth for many reasons — mostly because they don’t how to stand up for themselves when their rights have been violated. Can you imagine the mental and emotional torture these women have had to face every single day? When we teach our girls to stand up for herself, for her beliefs and for truth — we are giving them freedom to speak not only for themselves but for many other. Our society is turning to cruel place and it all takes one voice to make the difference ; and it can theirs.
3. Understanding
Our world has the misconception that women have to feminine. Women is also associated with their caring, understanding and ability to love everything and everyone. They are not wrong, we always have that ‘motherly nature’ inside of you. What they don’t understand is that we can gentle and strong, we can be humble yet firm at the same time. Understanding is important because it will teach other girls to see it from other’s point of view or other’s shoes. Understanding will help our girls to make some major decisions in their life not without knowing the consequences of it later on.
I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass — Maya Angelou
4. Self-respect
Respect others, but not at the cost of yourself respect. Teaching your girls self — respect is giving the ability to say no or walk away from any situation that can threaten their honor and dignity. It’s also teaching them on how to love and value themselves. As much as it’s important for us to teach our girls to respect everyone, how can they respect others when they don’t know how to respect themselves? Teach your girls on how to respect their bodies by getting proper exercise or well-balanced diet and healthy food. Their self-respect is so important that it will affect the life choice they will be making.
5. Brave
Just like any other little girls, I, too, was obsessed with fairy tales, princess stories and pink aisle toys. What I didn’t understand then was my parents always taught me to be the perfect little girl — to sit pretty or dress pretty. There was nothing wrong with it, however I realized that growing up, I was afraid to do certain things which boys would not even a second thought in doing. Unfortunately, we don’t teach our girls the same way we teach our boys. We teach our girls to be perfect and our boys to be brave. While we always told them to hold on to our teachings, how will they be able to go in the world if we have never taught them to be brave.
Being brave simply means that it’s okay to be afraid. We teach them it’s okay to take risk and embrace failure. Teaching our girls to be brave can start from the simplest things in your house, give them a voice in your home. We give them a chance to talk. Not only it’s going to boost confidence in the future, its also sending a message that they should never be afraid to voice their opinion. You can start from the basic like asking and discussing the menu for dinner and involve them in the process.
6. Patience
With patience they can reach for the stars — it won’t be easy or quick but it’s possible. Patience turns talent into achievement. Hard work and patience always brings forth result. Patience can transform relationship, be it in their workplace or marriage. In life we are always quick to hasty decisions in the moment full or rush or anger and often regret it later on. While, there are much too much things that can be changed if we have the patience and think past the situation. All things will come past, be it good or bad. Time will heal everything.
7. Independent
Unfortunately we need to teach our girls that our world is not the Disney world and instead of a Cinderella waiting for her prince charming to come, we need to teach our girls to be a wonder woman ; who doesn’t need anyone to rescue but able to save and stand for herself. Being independent doesn’t always mean you have to do all the physical fighting. We need to teach our girls to be strong enough to walk away from any abusive relationship or situation. Being independent doesn’t mean to be alone all time — it means the ability to stand alone even at the hardest times.
A woman is like a tea bag — you never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water.– Eleanor Roosevelt
8. Forgiveness
Teaching your girls forgiveness is the best gift you can give to your daughters. Forgiveness will free their mind from any past bondage. Forgiveness is not something we do for others but ourselves and forgiveness is not something we give when the other parties apology. Forgiveness is something we do for ourselves whether the other parties sorry for what they did or not. Mostly important teach them the importance to forgive themselves for any mistakes they did in the past. Forgiveness will also allow them to walk freely and with confident to their future
9. Equality
Equality doesn’t men and women are the same. We are not. Women can bring a new life to this world, which no man can. Equality means that our girls are no less than boys. Equality means not limiting themselves only to the princess dolls or toys that are only for girls. Equality means we are giving out girls the same opportunities to explore their talents and their hobbies just as our boys. If our girls is interested in engineering type of toys or something like car toys — we give it to them. We do not limit them just because “it’s not girls toys.”
10. Adaptable
When we respect the land we walk upon, all it’s habitats will respect us. It’s simply means wherever we are or wherever we go we need to teach our girls to be adapt. As your daughters grow up they won’t be able to stay with you, they will be going to school or college, going to work and eventually get and start her own family. Each phase will be different, she will introduced to different of types of people and places and in every situation she has to be able to have self-control and behave according to the situation and the custom of the place.
Sares is founder and writer at Next Generation Digital Magazine, a social action & education platform that wants to solve the world’s biggest challenges.On our platform you can learn about issues, take action on what matters most and join a community committed to social change. To learn about our work, subscribe now