Leading Women co-author, Dr. Janet Rose Wojtalik strongly believes that parents must wake up to how their messages affect their children. Her work as a teacher and special education administrator,along with her own childhood experiences, have shown her how we actually program our children with what we say to them. Her new workbook, Raising Successful Daughters from Childhood to Womanhood, gives parents and grandparents an easy-to-use tool to start conversations with their children and lay the groundwork for them to embark on successful lives.
Busy Parents and Grandparents Need Help
When you’re trying to maintain a career, a loving and healthy home environment and all the other activities that go into a full and rewarding life, it’s next to impossible to catch the impact communication has on your children. In fact, they may be picking up their signals from media, peers and other adults without your knowledge. Janet’s new workbook addresses what to look for and how to broach delicate subjects with your children to lay a foundation for strong, resilient self-reliance. Set up in a week-by-week format, it is broken down into manageable segments for parents to use.
To show how surprising messages can be, Janet told a story about a parent who was horrified by the message he had been giving his three year-old daughter. He was an avid reader of Janet’s books and followed her approach to parenting, so he was astounded when his daughter said she didn’t have a good day because no one had told her how pretty she was. Unwittingly, he and the other adults in her life had been equating her self-worth with being pretty.
Arming Girls Against Media Programming Messages
Both Dr. Janet and Dr. Nancy discussed how harmful the current media messages are to young women. Even though women are running for office, running companies and working their way into upper management, the media focuses on a woman’s appearance and her relationships with men as a standard for her self-worth. Many women continue to hold back with regard to managing their finances and too often include a man in their plan for life long financial security. The princess syndrome is still alive and well and Janet says that media messages frighten her because of how this affects middle-school girls, especially. That’s when eating disorders, bullying and other self-destructive behaviors begin to run rampant.
Listen to this interview for more information about the experiences that lead Janet to pursue her passion of raising strong children and check out her website, www.drjanetrose.com for her other work in progress and her free e-book, The Seven Secrets to Parenting Girls, which is still available.