She Deserves Better: Raising Girls to Resist Toxic Teachings on Sex, Self, and Speaking Up

This is their book (Sheila, her daughter Rebecca and friend/statistician Joanna) on how we can raise our daughters to resist toxic teachings on sex and self that have been commonly taught to teenage girls in the evangelical church (of North America) and have had a devastating impact on their future marriages, self-esteem and sex lives.

I had a few niggles with ‘She Deserves Better’, which I’ll get out of the way first. Whilst I’m sure there are pockets of UK evangelicalism that promote these weird teachings (such as ‘girls talk too much’ or ‘if you wear leggings, it’s your fault if a boy abuses you’), I don’t think they are as widely taught as they are in North America. They are not beliefs I’ve grown up with, and I’m not about to start teaching them to my daughter. Phew! But ‘She Deserves Better’ also had a naivety in places which I haven’t found in Sheila’s previous books: unrelatable anecdotes which seemed to be more about showing off Rebecca Lindenbach’s goody-two-shoes adolescence than making any salient point, a lack of nuanced argument in places, and a sometimes-tenuous conclusion drawn from a single statistic.

With those niggles off my chest, I still enjoyed and rate ‘She Deserves Better’. The authors have done proper, academic-level research into the resources Christian teenage girls have consumed over the last three decades, and a survey of over 7,000 women to discover the impact that believing these extra-Biblical teachings as teenagers has had on their adult lives. The teachings range from the bizarre to the believable, but it still makes sober reading for any parent wanting to teach her daughter well when it comes to sex, identity, self-esteem and consent. The ‘mother-daughter’ exercises at the end of each chapter could be useful. Personally, I wouldn’t use them as written, but would take the ideas expressed in order to generate discussion with my daughter, perhaps after watching a movie or consuming another bit of media that raised these issues. A fascinating read.