Nothing since Reviving Ophelia (and the dozens of copycats that came after) has garnered widespread attention or addressed on a large scale the tremendous responsibility and challenges of raising girls. But that was sixteen years ago. When Big Issues Happens to Little Girls provides new help for a whole new generation of parents. It is not another book on "raising girls," or the psychology of girls, or of eating disorders, and body issues. We know those are symptoms and coping mechanisms of greater things, and When Big Issues Happen to Little Girls poses the question Why are our girls not able to cope?
This book answers that question by introducing and explaining the concept that today's young girls are facing adult-sized issues that are not only beyond their own level of emotional, intellectual, and physical capacities but beyond those of their own parents. The problem is not only that are our girls are immersed in adult-sized conflicts, but the adults who love them are ill-equipped to deal with them or help the child deal with them. This is where the main mission of the book comes in and the uniqueness to the market is offered.
When Gen-Xers were growing up their parents were worried about things like kidnappings and how to answer embarrassing questions about oral sex, or about different lifestyles like bisexuality or homosexuality, or helping their child deal with divorce. Now, such questions, issues, and rites of passage would be a parental dream! While they might not have been "ready" to have the sex talk, they were equipped to have it nonetheless. But with issues that have arisen faster than you can say tweet, now grown-up Gen X parents can't keep up with the tutorials that are required to stay current and understand what their girls are faced with. They literally don't know how to handle the new problems or the psychological and emotional repercussions that come with them, how serious they really are, and more important, where to start. We need new guidelines.
Enter Erin A. Munroe, LMHC, who has been counseling adolescents for more than a decade and sees children, adolescents, and families experiencing a range of issues--including trauma, substance abuse, depression, anxiety, attention deficit disorders, adjustment disorders, and more. Because her specialty is trauma and anxiety, Munroe is in a unique position to help parents understand how girls cope and react to stressors and adult-sized problems today, so they can be active and effective participants in their daughters' reality. But what is most valuable is Munroe's identification of common denominators that can shed light on our girls' coping styles in a broad sense. Therefore, she is the perfect person to teach parents what to do when, inevitably, big issues happen to little girls.
