Welcome to #TweenTalks, a franchise by Grazia’s parenting community, The Juggle (@TheJuggleUK on Instagram) where we speak to experts about tackling touchy subject with your tween-age kids. This week, Emma Gage, a brand and business strategist for female entrepreneurs and founder of The Wild Ones, explains how to broach gender equality and acts of feminist in the home.
With most of our tweens and teens hitting the streets bedecked in feminist merch and slogan t-shirts, it might feel like our job here is done. It’s cool to be a girl and to support the sisterhood, right? We all went to see the Barbie movie, we have equality-loving Chappell Roan on our Spotify playlist, girl-power en masse at Taylor concerts and the Heartstopper LGBTQI romance trilogy at number one in the Waterstones tween section.
There’s so much in our young Generation Alphas that feels like a fundamental values shift, so what's the job for parents? For me, it's about deepening the message and getting specific about action.
We know that between the ages of 8 and 14, girls confidence levels fall by 30 percent. At 14, when girls are hitting their low, boys’ confidence is still 27 percent higher - and the effects can be long-lasting. I’m a solo parent of an 11-year-old daughter and work with female-entrepreneurs with massive ambitions to build high-value businesses and personal brands. Our whole house is a celebration of female strength, but I still see insidious beliefs and behaviours coming through. The body image woes. The comfort in perfectionism, in diligently staying inside the lines. I also know how that plays out for us into adulthood.
Here are five feminist issues that we talk about a lot, that you can too:
We make sure we know the enemy, and actually it’s not men
The Barbie movie did a great job at showing the patriarchy as a system of power that doesn’t make men happy either. We’re surrounded by news of conflict and of battles for power and supremacy. I used to hide that from my daughter and now I don’t, instead we discuss why it’s happening. We talk about power and why people want it. We talk about how no one really wins. I don’t have the answers, but it’s the mind-opening conversations that feel important.
We normalise being a messy, imperfect human
She may feel happier double-underlining her titles and submitting perfect homework, but that’s not always real life is it? I always make sure to share the times things don’t work out for me or when I totally miss the mark. We talk about the problem with perfectionism and what it steals from you, about what ‘good enough’ might look like with the task she’s doing, because is the perfect grammar really more important than the story she’s trying to write?
We talk about ambition without pressure
Sometimes it’s being a mother or getting married. Sometimes it’s about a career or owning a business. I actively want her to know she doesn’t have to choose a thing and stick to it. When schools are pushing them towards a career choice, we talk about things she might try. About how nothing is off-limits and how the most empowering (and deeply feminist) thing you can probably do is to really listen to what lights you up.
We’re honest about love and relationships
We talk about all kinds of love and how relationships are sometimes wonderful and how they can also be hard. She sees me sometimes struggle as a solo parent and other times smash it. We talk about how things can go wrong, but also what’s great about the feeling of love - about wanting a partner and not needing one.
We celebrate kindness in action not just words
Kids are told to be kind all the time. It’s usually a school value, it’s the reason for a 'house point', but I don’t know if it’s specific enough. We talk about the supportive action you might take if you see prejudice play out, about actively standing-up for people and calling out behaviours in others, as well as her own unconscious biases. We’ll create a more equal feminist future for the next generation, by exploring nuance and the everyday action.
About the Expert: Emma Gage
Emma Gage, 47, is a Brand and Business Strategist for female entrepreneurs and founder ofThe Wild Ones. The Wild Ones helps create disruptive business strategies for women with unicorn ambitions, with a mission to blow to gender-based disruption gap wide open and start a stampede of female unicorns. Emma is a solo mother to her daughter, aged 11.