With a teenage daughter about to launch, I am constantly reflecting on our “lasts” with her at home, the world she’s stepping into, and the messages she’s absorbed from our modeling.
We are all imbibing messages from the world around us that we must filter through and decide what’s ours.
But in my lifetime, the messages for girls have changed significantly.
Some no doubt, for the better. But I believe some of the things we’re failing to say to our daughters will do them a great disservice down the road.
Here are three truths no one wants to say to today’s girls…
In an effort to prove how equal we are, we’ve spent the last few decades competing with men—for jobs, for leadership roles, for head of household and more.
But men are built differently than women. They have 15 times the testosterone that women do. So it’s no wonder we see today’s women suffering from staggering rates of burnout. McKinsey's 2025 Women in the Workplace report found that among senior-level women specifically, 6 in 10 report frequent burnout, the highest that figure has been in five years. And this is just in the career space.
If you’re in a relationship, and you both wear the pants—playing the traditional masculine role—you can forget about intimacy. Chemistry in a relationship comes from polarity. And it can be hard to snap out of “man-mode” after a long day of living from it, and then come home to reidentify with that feminine softness, playfulness, and calm.
Man-moding your life as a woman, despite what’s fashionable right now, will leave you brittle and bitchy. We’re just not built for it.
We have always overvalued the masculine way of being. And so, women—the great adapters—do what is necessary to become what is needed. Today’s women are accomplishing groundbreaking things, graduating college at rates that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Women now earn 59 percent of bachelor's degrees. Men earn 41.
And society favors these public facing kinds of ambition—leadership roles, titles, credentials, etc.
But ambition has many faces. The quieter skills of maintaining a positive family environment, a loving relationship with a partner, a comfortable home, cooking healthy meals, maintaining a healthy body, volunteering, nurturing plants, animals, neighbors, schools, and the greater community, are often overlooked as “nice to have,” yet not essential.
I believe we're seeing the consequences of the absence of this feminine devotion in our children. The share of high school students reporting persistent sadness or hopelessness rose from 26 percent to 44 percent in just over a decade. One in five American children now has obesity, nearly triple the rate from the 1970s.
Nobody is in the home or in the kitchen anymore, and our kids are feeling it…
For today’s women, we have made career the God, and family takes sloppy seconds. We build our entire lives around professional aspirations and advanced degrees. By the time we pick our head up from that hustle, we’re marching towards 40, hardly having thought about family.
Many women who wanted kids can no longer have them. By 35, live birth rates from embryo transfer drop from 39 percent to 31 percent. By 43, they're down to 4 percent.
While men are biologically impelled to produce results, women are impelled to connect. It's hormonally driven. This is the foundation of Alison Armstrong's work on gender difference, that men and women are wired for fundamentally different purposes.
It’s our connections—our relationships with others—our kids, our parents, our friends, that bring the most meaning in our lives. NOT our accomplishments, as we’ve been led to believe.
For a young woman, planning for family as much as career would pay off over the course of a life.
Here’s to telling our daughters the truth about what matters.
To read see my offerings and read more of my work, please see my website. xxo
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