Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers' Schemes

Winner of the Books for a Better Life Award 
Every parent who cares about empowering her daughter should own a copy." - Rachel Simmons, author of Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls
"...a must-read for parents and teachers who want to steer girls away from marketing schemes that distort female power and authority and toward true self-acceptance and authentic empowerment." -- Polly Young Eisendrath, author of Women and Desire and The Resilient Spirit
The image of girls and girlhood that is being packaged and sold to your daughter isn't pretty in pink. It is stereotypical, demeaning, limiting, and alarming. Girls are besieged by images in the media that encourage accessorizing over academics; sex appeal over sports; fashion over friendship. Packaging Girlhood exposes these stereotypes and gives you guidance on how to talk with your daughters about these negative images and provides you with tools and information on how to help your girls make more positive choices.
"A tour de force of excellent scholarship put in a very readable context and chockfull of practical suggestions for parents for change!" -- William S. Pollack, Ph.D., author of Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood "Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown have that rare gift of translating cutting-edge research and analysis into strategies and information that every parent (and every girl) can use in daily life." -- Joe Kelly, president of Dads and Daughters (DADs)
"With compassion, insight, and humor [Lamb and Brown] unravel and demystify the messages girls confront throughout their development, and they offer adults useful tools to help girls resist their powerful pull." -- Lynn M. Phillips, Ph.D., Department of Communications, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
"Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown's sharp analysis and patiently pragmatic advice is just what we need to sustain our daughter's quests for healthy identities." -Michael Kimmel, author Manhood in America, Professor, SUNY Stony Brook
Sharon Lamb, author of The Secret Lives of Girls, is professor of Psychology at Saint Michael's College in Vermont. Her research on girls' and teens' development is widely cited. Additionally, she listens to their struggles and strengths in her private practice.
Lyn Mikel Brown, professor of Education at Colby College in Maine, is the author of three books on girls' development, including Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development (with Carol Gilligan). She creates programs for girls at her nonprofit Hardy Girls Healthy Women (www.hghw.org).

Lamb Ed.D., Sharon

Brown Ed.D., Lyn Mikel

Health, Fitness & Dieting

St. Martin's: Griffin

A responsible, realistic, and sex-positive approach to sexuality in youth. In Sex, Therapy, and Kids, Lamb demonstrates how to be sex-positive in a way that’s responsive to the developmental stage of the child or teen and thus promotes honest conversations and successful therapy. Over the course of the book, she guides therapists through such core issues as recognizing and responding to the sexual play of children who have not been abused, distinguishing sexual abuse from normal play, understanding common worries of adolescent boys and girls, and helping gay and lesbian youth who are grappling with their sexual identity. There are also chapters on working with youth who have been abused, helping developmentally delayed teens, and collaborating with parents and families around the themes of sexuality and sexual behavior. From Sex, Therapy, and Kids Because I have been trained in humanistic, existential, psychoanalytic, family systems, and cognitive-behavioral strategies, my work represents a combination of these modalities. But an underlying focus of mine when working with children and adolescents is attending to the affect and affective sense surrounding a topic or play activity. This is particularly useful when working with sexual material in that sexual material in therapy can be overstimulating. . . . It is good to train oneself to observe this affective sense underlying talk or play, because if such overstimulating play is happening in the therapy session, you can bet it’s happening outside the room. Therapy is the place in which these emotions, even bodily feelings, can be experienced in the safe presence of another who will protect and allow the time and space to process them and get some reflective distance. But how do therapists make stimulating material unstimulating to the child without simply pushing the child to leave the material alone and move on to more pleasant things, more manageable topics and emotions? This is crucial to my approach. Therapists can model a neutral, distanced reflective process with their clients that allows them to stay with the material. And therapists can help clients to distance themselves from it in order to talk about it and continue playing in a way that is productive. . . . [O]ver time it is good to develop a sense of what question will bring teens or children to a place where they can recover a therapeutic attitude toward these events and acts I’ve called approach displacement, but it means very literally displacing one’s feelings from one’s mind and body into the play.

Sex, Therapy, and Kids: Addressing Their Concerns Through Talk and Play

Mental Health

W.W.Norton&Company

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Books by Lamb Ed.D., Sharon