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A few years ago, I took a seminar called, "Raising Strong and Confident Daughters." My husband laughed at me. "Could our daughters be any stronger or more confident?"
The class was an eye-opener for me, not just in how to raise my girls, but also in understanding my own Chinese-American childhood. I had no memory of dealing with a lot of the issues the instructor talked about as being so important to pre-adolescent girls, such as friendship and physical appearance.
At first I thought that I must have been just so low on the social totem pole—because of race and nerdiness—that I had given up hope of competing in those arenas; I never even tried.
Teenage girl holding skateboard via Shutterstock
Then I came across a Wellesley College study of Boston middle-school girls’ self-esteem along racial and ethnic lines and discovered that girls of different ethnic backgrounds based their sense of self-esteem on different factors. It found that the Caucasian girls were obsessed with dieting and body image, the Puerto Rican girls were very attached to their friendships, and the Chinese girls based their self-esteem on how well they spoke English. I started noticing in the media and in casual conversations that Caucasian women cannot talk for more than five minutes without making some self-deprecating comment about their appearance or weight. The Chinese women I know do not talk weight or appearance, except in the context of health, as in, "You’ve lost a lot of weight, have you been sick?" So it wasn’t me, it was a cultural thing.
Equally terrifying was the study’s conclusion that the Chinese girls had the lowest self-esteem. This shocked me because it is one thing for Chinese-Americans to have had low self-esteem a generation ago, when I was growing up and there were not many Asian-Americans around, but we should have made more progress by now! Interestingly, however, African-American girls had the highest self-esteem, followed by the Caucasian girls, followed by the Puerto Rican girls. So, the goal is not to aspire to be like the Caucasians—they have their problems too.
Although African-American girls see the same media images of emaciated supermodels as all the other girls, because the supermodels are almost all Caucasian, instead of aspiring to be like them and developing all sorts of body-image neuroses, the African-American girls chose their own African-American role models and developed their own fashion sense. Who cares about Britney Spears when you have Beyoncé?
The Program
So what is the program for raising strong and confident Asian Pacific American (APA) daughters? We can start with the plethora of books and experts in the mainstream—after all, our daughters are subject to the all-powerful influence of mainstream media (and problems like anorexia, bulimia and eye surgery are on the rise). However, we should temper those approaches with a sensitivity to our own Asian and Asian-Pacific American cultures, and the unique needs of our APA daughters. At the same time, we cannot use a strictly Chinese or Indian or other "old-world" approach because our daughters still have to live and work and compete in the American mainstream.
So here are some of my best suggestions and practical techniques for raising strong and confident Asian-Pacific American daughters and instilling APA Girl Power. They include rewriting stories, critiquing characters, finding role models, developing alternative beauty standards, learning to speak up, and preparing for sexism from both sides.
Editorial Translation
When our girls are young--preferably before they can read and figure out what you are up to--read them lots of stories about Asian and Asian-American girls. Can’t find any, you say? Change the words in the stories that you do have to make them Asian-American stories! For example, when Little Red Riding Hood goes to see her grandmother, change the word "Grandmother" to "Po Po" or whatever your child calls her grandmother. Instead of bringing a basket of cookies, have her bring a basket of steamed buns or manju or samosas. Instead of "Little Red Riding Hood," use her Chinese name, "Xiao Hong Mao," or whatever it is in your ancestral language. You can even change exclamations like "Oh my goodness," to appropriate exclamations in your own language like, "Aiya!"
This editorial license is especially effective for animal stories when gender and race are not prescribed by the pictures: I change the boy animals to girl animals, and Chinese girl animals at that, because there are many more books with boys as the main character than girls, and many of the girls characters are either passive onlookers
