SpendMore Time With Your Family Through Reading
Book Review of How to Start a Mother Daughter Book Club
Dobson said "our daughters are bombarded with images of thin models, perfect bodies, the perfect male/female relationship, and how to diet to have a shapely figure. What are our daughters suppose to think about themselves and their life’s style?"
Influenced by Reviving OPhelia
She quotes Mary Pipher’s book, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the selves of adolescent girls. “In order to keep their true selves and grow into healthy adults, girls need love from family and friends, meaningful work, respect, challenges, and physical and psychological safety. They need identities based on talents or interests rather than appearance, popularity or sexuality. They need good habits for coping with stress, self-nurturing skills and a sense of purpose and perspective. They need quiet places and times. They need to feel that they are part of something larger than their own lives and that they are emotionally connected to the whole.” (page10)
Dobson goes on to say, “…. Of other formal studies deliver similar conclusions. Despite some differences in cultural attitudes among girls of different races or ethnic groups, one common theme comes through loud and clear: Life circumstances and the messages girls absorb from their world shape their attitudes about themselves and other girls.” (page 10&11)
The Advantages of a Mother-Daughter Book Club
Connie Porter, author, The American Girl Collection, Abby Series, and supporter of the mother~daughter book club says that the club would be a time when mothers could share their own stories about their childhood. She says, “When we share the experience of reading with our children, books create a garden, a special sunlit corner where our relationship can grow alongside but apart from the crowded landscape of everyday life.” (page 14)
I thought Dobson’s idea of beginning a book club where mothers and daughters could come together and talk about books was a marvelous idea. I believe that as mothers whether we think of it or not, our daughters do look up to us. They do learn from us and we must be aware of our actions because they are watching us every day. From us they learn how to be a woman, but if we as mothers don’t take the responsibility to teach our daughters how to be a woman, they will look to someone else as a role model and that person may or may not be a very good substitute. With a book club the door is open for conversation about what being a woman is and the opportunity to tell our daughters exactly what women have gone through and are still going through to achieve their goals.
According to the American Association of University Women, “researchers have described the typical school culture as one that teaches our daughters to silence themselves, discounting their learning styles, curbing their questions, and focusing instead upon striving to please.” (page 15)
Building Strong Characters in Daughters
Girls’ desire for recognition is within her no matter how much she is expected to be silent and competition becomes fierce. As girls grow older and begin to notice boys the girls don’t want to be looked at as intellectuals they believe their appearance is more important. The mother~daughter book club is important as a bonding tool. It’s a positive for the relationship. Mothers learn about daughters and vice-versa. The book club encourages girls to be themselves.
Dobson designed a book club that is geared more to pre adolescent daughters and early adolescent daughters than for older mothers and daughters. But the concept is still good. It is still a bonding time for mothers and daughters. The conversations that can be stirred and the whole learning about each other is a positive and can only enrich the relationship. The club helps girls find a voice.
My purpose for choosing this book was not for me to begin a book club, but to see what benefits such a club would have for the mother and daughter relationship. I found that the main benefit of the club is to enhance the relationship between mothers and daughters, to encourage reading, discussion, and to help build the daughters confidence.
“If we look at a group of eleven, twelve, and thirteen year old girls - - it’s a hoot! They laugh, they’re spontaneous, they’re joyful, they’re loving, they take pleasure in a wide variety of things. Girls go through a critical passage from age eleven to fourteen - - fifth grade through ninth grade. They begin with a tremendous amount of interest and enthusiasm, pleasure in the things around them.” (page 31)
“As they start to make the transaction between girlhood and young womanhood, it’s like walking through a minefield, in terms of the images before them about how they should look, how they should act, what they wear, what they think, what they do. All of that begins to narrow and limit how they perceive themselves. They don’t start out that way. It’s our job to help them keep that spontaneity.” Witney Ransome (page 31)
After reading this book I agreed with much of what Dobson said about young girls and their first impressions. I also felt a degree of sadness about how as a society “we” expect girls to be. I can definitely see how the mother and daughter book club would enhance the relationship between the two and at the same time build character and self – confidence within the girls.
Dobson, Shireen. The Mother ~ Daughter Book Club. New York, HarperCollins, 1997.
What do you think about this article?
More in Reading & Literature
Latest Articles