Counseling Adolescent Girls (Creative Pastoral Care and Counseling)

Rating:
Summary: Recognizing the Unique Needs of Girls
Review: Patricia H. Davis does a masterful job of presenting the unique problems and needs of adolescent girls. Especially at this age, girls are trying to find their place in the world as women, and discovering that society's expectations for them are very different from expectations for their brothers.

Davis shows that the crises of adolescence are very different for most girls than for most boys, and that the basic adolescent task of separation and differentiation from the parents can often be difficult, because the daughter identifies more closely with the mother than does a son with the father. Adolescent girls need to be heard, need to have permission to see themselves as powerful and competent, need to feel loved for themselves. They especially need this support from fathers and male role models.

This book will be extraordinarily helpful to anyone who deals with this age group in the church, especially male pastors and youth group leaders. Without being strident, Davis makes the case that growing up female is very different from growing up male, and that we cannot simply generalize knowledge from boys to girls, especially in this age group. Girls combat low self-esteem differently than boys, more often turning to self-destructive behaviors than acting out aggressively, for example.

This book is a great read, and a must for the pastor's library.