What Girls Need

How to Raise Bold, Courageous, and Resilient Women

De: Marisa Porges PhD

Narrado por: Thérèse Plummer

"A powerful book about how we can raise girls to become bold, ambitious women." (Adam Grant)

What do girls really need to succeed?

Children today face an uncertain future, and parents and teachers can't fully predict what's in store for their daughter and sons. But one thing is clear: Our kids need a new set of skills to succeed. Girls, in particular, must nurture essential traits to fully flourish. Students hit the ground running today, entering a school system that carries high expectations on their way to a college application process that is more demanding than ever. After school, young women enter a competitive job market, still complicated by sexism and the possibility of harassment. But the ways we define leadership are also changing, and the women stepping into those roles are mapping new paths to inhabiting traits like grit, resilience, audacity, and self-confidence. What Girls Need shows how parents and educators can foster these critical 21st-century skills in our girls and help them to recognize and nurture their inherent strengths - to not just thrive but also find joy and purpose as they come of age in our ever-evolving world.

As a student at the all-girls Baldwin School outside of Philadelphia, Marisa Porges grew up in a community designed to produce strong, independent women. After graduating from Harvard, she fulfilled her childhood dream of flying jets off aircraft carriers for the US Navy and served as a counterterrorism expert in Afghanistan and a cybersecurity advisor in the Obama White House. Then in 2016, in an unexpected move for someone whose ambitions had taken her so far from home, Porges returned to head the Baldwin School. In doing so, she saw how small moments in her early education gave her the tools she needed to excel in a "man's world". Combining compelling research, personal stories, and practical advice on timely questions, Porges delves into hot-button subjects like how to harness girls' voices and boost girls' self-esteem, and shows how little things have a big impact when nurturing vital skills like competitiveness, collaboration, empathy, and adaptability. What Girls Need empowers us to support the next generation of women so they can confidently hold their own no matter what the future has in store.

©2020 Marisa Porges (P)2020 Penguin Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

"This is destined to be a powerful book about how we can raise girls to become bold, ambitious women. The ideas are captivating, the stories are gripping, and Marisa Porges is the perfect person to write it." (Adam Grant, New York Times best-selling author of Originals, Give and Take, and Option B with Sheryl Sandberg)

"What Girls Need shows us all how to prepare the next generation of women to confidently hold their own later in life, and to celebrate and own certain traits that will be more critical than ever in the new world of world." (Forbes)

"An insightful guidebook for parents, teachers, and all young women." (Booklist)

Not what I was hoping for

Personally, I did not get much from this book. Maybe I just missed the underlying messages. When I downloaded this book, I was hoping for more examples of thing we may deal with and options on how to cope or work with such a problem.. instead I feel as though this book was mostly about the author and her military career and a few things she encountered.. but even with her hindsight 20/20, I still didn’t get ideas or options on how she could have responded or resolved the issue or what she will do in the future if she encountered it again or how she would teach girls to respond to such situations. I think this book would be better suited as a book about treatment and biases towards women in the military & less about raising a child to be bold, courageous and resilient.

Great insights

Great insights! The author's transitions are rough at times, and you have to do a double take to figure out where she is at because she bounces back and forth between examples in her life. Otherwise it would have been a 5 star review.

Too much fluff, filler, and victim mentality

I really had high hopes for this book. I really wanted this book to teach me to make strong young women. I build up young ladies who have been sexually abused through positive role modeling, Jiu Jitsu, and consistently reminding them of their high worth.
However this book started off listing a bunch of BS victim narrative statistics such as how women make 25% less then men doing the same job. If you believe this debunked malarkey it’s because you are lazy in your research or a college student.
This has been debunked numerous times when the hours worked have been accounted for- it’s a fact women as a whole work less hours, if someone doesn’t account for that, they just want to manipulate the data to claim they are a victim. Even the liberal New York Times ran an article on how women actually make slightly more per hour… Victim mentality is not the way to empowerment for anyone- anyway..moving on…
I have many hundreds of books and they certainly don’t all have the same point of view so I continued listening.
After trudging through the victim mentality I was REALLY hoping for some substance to build up young women…

Instead there was overly descriptive story about meeting the president and descriptions of the setting and the president’s tea cup…

People that get things done don’t have time for fluff and filler. My friend, it’s not a romance novel, please get to the point of what you are teaching.

I’m now listening to “No More Mean Girls” it’s much better, and tells stories but still gets to the point.
I’m sorry… but an instructional book should be just that… If the author is reading this- please make a summary of about 10-20% of the current book and people like me would probably be very happy to listen to actual lessons and teaching points.
Time is valuable friend we need to guard it carefully :)