What Our Teen Daughters Can Learn from Our Teen Sons

Parents, teachers and those in the helping professions frequently talk about what our teen sons can learn from our teen daughters. Are you with me on this? We talk about:

1. The need to teach teen boys about communicating their feelings like our daughters do, right?

2. How boys should pay more attention to both their own emotions and the emotions of others — right again?

3. We sometimes wish that our sons would be more talkative like our daughters; right?

4. Sometimes we wish that our sons would be more attentive to their appearances; correct?

AND

5. We wish, at times, that we knew what made them tick. Even though our daughters are generally more dramatic at least we know what moves them; correct?

Well maybe things would be better for our sons if they were more like our daughters. On the other hand, if they were more emotional and dramatic perhaps this would put them at a higher risk for depression. We know that teen girls are about three times more likely than teen boys to get depressed. #YIKES

So, perhaps we should be thinking along some other lines. Perhaps we should encourage our teen daughters to be more like our teen sons.

Consider:

1. Perhaps our teen daughters should focus less on all things interpersonal and focus more on themselves and on competitive activities like sports.

2. Maybe our daughters should be less interested in gossip like our teen sons generally seem to be.

3. Our teen daughters might have a lower incidence of body image issues if they focused less on appearance and clothes like the boys; right?

4. Our daughters might benefit from a little less emotional intensity; right?

AND

5. Like the boys the girls might benefit from a little less talk and a little more quiet time; right?

I’ve tried to provide some #FOODFORTHOUGHT

Your Opinions, PLEASE!