Helping Girls Navigate Their Teens with Christian Counseling

It’s an accepted understanding in our culture that the teen years can be difficult for both teens and their parents. Whether this is equally true for boys as it is for girls I’m not sure, I would guess that it is, but today’s conversation is focused specifically on teen girls. The following are some thoughts adapted from Mary Pipher’s book “Reviving Ophelia,” which reflect a personal desire to see teen girls and their families navigate these difficult years with wisdom and health.

The World of Teen Girls

For many girls puberty plays a large role in the stress that can come with the teen years. As a girl’s body develops she must adjust to the physical changes of womanhood and to her own questions, curiosities, and fears around sexuality. But the mistake of thinking that all teen problems can be tied back to hormones and physical development is a big one. Our teens live in a complicated, contradictory, and media-saturated world, and the roads they must navigate extend beyond the physical changes they experience. Some of these roads include: discovering a unique identity, taking on more and more aspects of adulthood while leaving aspects of childhood behind, and developing independence while (hopefully) maintaining family bonds.

Teaching Girls to be Wise Consumers

If you saw the recent “Bright Young Things” campaign from Victoria Secret you caught a glimpse of the powerful messages that media sends to teens. If girls don’t learn to challenge the messages that media presents, they are likely to find themselves caught up in the whirlwind of “be sexy but don’t be a slut,” “you’re worth is in your appearance” and “it’s not attractive to be too smart or too ambitious”. Here are some questions that a counselor might explore with a teen girl to help her think critically about these messages and decide for herself what kind of woman she wants to be:

• How does the media portray women? What does the media say makes a woman attractive or valuable? What do you think about these messages?
• Who are some of the women you admire? What about them do you find admirable? Do they match with the media’s portrayal of women, or are they different?
• When you’re an old woman, what do you want people to say about you and how you lived your life?

A Christian counselor can help teen girls sort through the barrage of messages and clarify what’s important to her in terms of who she is, what kind of relationships she wants, and what her hopes and goals are for the future.

Developing Independence

Independence is one of those crux issues that comes up in teen-hood and often produces a lot of tension within families. What parents may interpret as defiance or rebelliousness may be a teen’s attempt at establishing independence and forming an identity separate from the family. At this point in life, the black-and-white rules of childhood often lose their power for girls and are replaced by a need for negotiation and an autonomous voice. Respect often comes up as a central component of parent-daughter relationships in the sense that even as parents feel they may be losing the respect of their teen, their daughter simultaneously expects increased respect in return. Through counseling, teens can learn healthy and effective ways to establish their independence and move into adulthood in a way that will ultimately sustain family relationships.

Helping Girls Discover Their True Self

It’s not uncommon to run into teen girls who have not yet discovered what they’re good at or what’s important to them. Girls often need help recognizing their own skills and strengths, identifying the influences that are shaping them, and learning to make values-guided decisions. Perhaps the most essential question teens face as they move from childhood to adulthood is “Who am I?”. Mary Pipher talks about helping girls navigate toward their “North Star,” by which she means a girl’s core self, her sense of who she truly is (p. 254). Developing that core-self is not an overnight process, it takes time to uncover what makes you unique, what your gifts are, how to respect and learn from your emotions, and what you want to stand for in this world. Counseling offers a protected space for those conversations to take place.

Christian Counseling for Teens

One of the most harmful stigmas surrounding counseling is that it’s for people who “have something wrong with them.” For teens especially, it’s easy to fall into the thinking that if they’re going to counseling it means they’re “broken” or “messed up” or the “only one” whose parents are making them do this. When I sit down with a teen these are the first lies I hope to dispel. Counseling is for people who want to take some time to sort through things, to pursue health and vitality, and to talk about things that can’t be talked about elsewhere. For teens especially, simply having someone other than their parents and peers to talk to can be a relief. Plus, as Christian counselors, parents can trust that we are grounded in the set same values and core beliefs. So if you are a teen or the parent of a teen, you might consider giving this “counseling thing” a try. Our first session is risk-free, so what do you have to lose?

Source
Pipher, M. (1994). Reviving Ophelia: Saving the selves of adolescent girls. New York, NY: Ballantine Books.

Images
freedigitalphotos.net – “Compass” by nirots and “Woman Reading Magazines” by Ambro