Our Daughters Are Navigating Something We Never Had To — And They Need Us to See It

Published in honor of International Women’s Day

I have two daughters. One is 16, deep in adolescence, figuring out who she is and what she wants from the world. The other is 8, still in the wide-eyed, unselfconscious territory of third grade, blissfully unaware of most of what I’m about to write.

I have spent years thinking carefully about how to raise strong, grounded, capable girls — and I still find myself, on some days, quietly terrified about what they are walking into.

I’m also a former prosecutor. I have sat across from women whose pain had a beginning — a moment, or a relationship, or a slow cultural drip that told the men in their lives that women were less than, that their feelings didn’t count, that their bodies and choices were negotiable. I’ve watched what that ideology, left unchecked, actually produces.

So when I tell you that I think we are in a genuinely dangerous moment for our daughters, I am not being dramatic. I am being honest, in the way that I believe parents deserve.

This article is the companion to one I wrote about our sons — what’s happening to them, why, and how to stay connected to them through it. I’d encourage you to read that one too, because understanding what our boys are absorbing is part of understanding what our girls are navigating. You can find it here: Something Is Happening With Our Boys — And We Need to Talk About It

But this one is for our daughters. And for you, their parents.

They Are Living With the Fallout — Every Single Day

Let’s start with what the research actually shows, because it’s important to know that what you may be seeing in your daughter is not in her head, and it is not a phase.

Research has found that the more boys in a school engage with online misogynistic content, the more girls in that same school report experiencing sexist discrimination. This isn’t a global trend playing out somewhere abstract — it’s playing out in your daughter’s classroom, her hallways, her friend group texts, her lunch table. It is the ambient air she is breathing.

What does that look like in practice? Girls in studies describe hearing boys discuss what girls’ bodies should look like. They hear comments framed as jokes that don’t feel like jokes. They are told they’re being too sensitive when they say something hurts. One research study found girls describing the manosphere content they encountered at school as “unsettling” and “scary” — and then describing being told, by the boys saying it, that it was just banter. Just messing around. Just a laugh.

Being told your pain isn’t real is its own particular wound. And our daughters are experiencing it regularly.

The Mental Health Numbers Are Not a Coincidence

We cannot talk about what girls are facing right now without talking about the mental health data, because it is staggering.

Over the past decade, depression among teenage girls in the US has increased rapidly and disproportionately. In a CDC survey, 57% of teen girls said they experience persistent sadness or hopelessness — up from 36% in 2011. Thirty percent of teen girls said they had seriously considered suicide — up from 19% in 2011.

Boys are struggling too, and that matters. But the increase for girls is steeper, the rates are higher, and the timing is not random.

There is genuine scientific debate about the precise causes — how much is social media, how much is other factors, how much the two interact. I’m not here to settle that debate. What I am here to say is this: our daughters are telling us, in the most painful way possible, that something about the world they are living in is crushing them. We owe it to them to take that seriously.

The Signals They’re Getting Are Designed to Confuse Them

Here’s something that keeps me up at night, and that I want every parent of a daughter to understand.

The same survey (discussed last week)  that found nearly a third of Gen Z men believe a wife should always obey her husband also found that Gen Z men are the generation most likely to say that women with successful careers are attractive. Both things, in the same data set, about the same young men.

What that means for your daughter is that the boy who seems supportive, who says all the right things, who cheers for her ambitions — may also hold beliefs about women that he hasn’t fully surfaced yet. Not because he’s lying, necessarily. But because he has absorbed two completely contradictory sets of messages and hasn’t been asked to reconcile them.

For girls navigating dating and friendship and their own sense of worth, this inconsistency is genuinely disorienting. They can’t always name what feels off. They just know something does.

Part of raising a daughter right now is helping her trust that feeling.

This Is Happening in Plain Sight — and It’s Still Being Dismissed

In case you need a recent, concrete example of exactly what our daughters are up against, consider what happened just weeks ago at the Milan Winter Olympics.

Both the US men’s and women’s hockey teams won gold. Both beat Canada in overtime. Both were extraordinary.

When President Trump called the men’s team in their locker room to congratulate them, he invited them to the State of the Union — then joked that he’d “have to” invite the women’s team too, or he’d be impeached. The locker room erupted in laughter. The video went viral.

The women’s team — who had just set a record by holding their opponents scoreless for over 331 consecutive minutes, whose captain Hilary Knight became the most decorated American hockey player in history — were framed, in a moment of national celebration, as an obligation. A punchline. An afterthought that the men’s team laughed at.

Some people genuinely didn’t understand why women were upset. It was just a joke, they said.

But that’s exactly the point.

“Women aren’t less than, and our achievements shouldn’t be overshadowed by anything else other than how great they are.”

— Hilary Knight, US women’s hockey captain, two-time Olympic gold medalist

What your daughter is navigating at school — the comments dismissed as banter, the moments that feel off but are hard to name, the sense that her accomplishments are received differently than her male peers’ — is the same dynamic. Just on a smaller stage. It is not her imagination. It is not her being too sensitive. It is something real, and it has a name, and it happens to gold medalists too.

What We Can Actually Do

I want to be honest here: there is no perfect script, no foolproof approach. But there are things that help, and things that backfire, and the difference matters.

Talk about what she’s seeing — before she has to ask. Girls who are experiencing sexism in real time often don’t bring it to parents, for several reasons: they don’t want to make a big deal of it, they’ve been told it’s not a big deal, or they’re worried about the response. If you open the door first — “I’ve been reading about some things happening with kids your age and I want to know what you’re actually seeing” — you change the equation. You become a safe landing place before a crisis, not just during one.

Name what she might be feeling without telling her how to feel. If your daughter tells you something uncomfortable happened — a comment, a moment, something a boy said — resist the urge to immediately problem-solve, minimize, or catastrophize. “That sounds like it felt really belittling. What was that like for you?” goes much farther than “Just ignore it” or “I’m calling the school.”

Help her develop her internal compass, not just rules. Rules have an expiration date. A strong internal sense of her own worth — what she will and won’t accept, what she values in relationships, what her gut is telling her — lasts. Positive Discipline calls this the “long view”: we’re not raising girls who comply with our guidelines. We’re raising women who know who they are.

Talk explicitly about the mixed signals. Not in a way that terrifies her, but in a way that equips her. You can say directly: “Sometimes people, even people who seem great, hold beliefs about women that don’t match their surface behavior. It’s okay to notice when something doesn’t add up. That instinct is worth listening to.” Giving her the language for cognitive dissonance is a gift.

Don’t raise her to be endlessly accommodating. This one is quieter, but it matters. Many of us — especially those who were raised in the 70s, 80s, and 90s — were parented in ways that prioritized girls being likeable, easy, not too much. We’re still unlearning some of that ourselves. Raising a daughter who can say no, hold a boundary, take up space, and be inconvenient to others is one of the most protective things you can do for her right now.

Make sure she knows her worth isn’t tied to male approval. In a culture that is increasingly telling her, through a thousand small signals, that she should be palatable to men — her appearance, her personality, her ambitions — she needs to hear the counter-message from you. Loudly, consistently, and starting now if you haven’t already.

Take her seriously when she reports harm. This is perhaps the most important one. When girls say something feels wrong, they are too often told they’re overreacting. When they report harassment, they are often not believed, or not fully supported. Your daughter needs to know that you are a person who will believe her, advocate for her, and stand with her — even when it’s inconvenient.

A Note for Dads

If you are a father reading this, I want to speak to you directly for a moment.

You may be the most important person in your daughter’s life right now — not in spite of what’s happening culturally, but because of it. Research consistently shows that a girl’s relationship with her father has profound effects on how she comes to see her own worth and what she expects from the men in her life.

The way you talk about women — all women, not just your daughter — shapes her. The way you respond when she sets a boundary. The way you model respect in your relationships. The way you respond when someone is dismissive of her. She is watching all of it, even when you think she isn’t.

This is not a burden. It’s an invitation.

What I Want for My Daughters — and Yours

On International Women’s Day, I found myself sitting with the weight of this moment. The world my daughters are inheriting is, in some measurable ways, moving backwards. The data on Gen Z men’s attitudes, the mental health numbers for girls, the research on what’s happening in schools — none of it is reassuring.

And yet.

I also know that every generation of girls has been told, in one way or another, that the world was not quite made for them. And they have built it anyway. They have insisted on being seen anyway. They have loved and created and led and refused, in the end, to be diminished.

My daughters are going to be okay. I believe that in my bones. Not because I’ve kept them from hard things, but because I have tried — imperfectly, every single day — to make sure they know who they are.

That is the work. It is slow and quiet and invisible and it is the most important thing we will ever do.

Happy (Belated) International Women’s Day. Do the work.