The Triple Bind
Saving Our Teenage Girls from Today's Pressures
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- 11,99 €
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- 11,99 €
Publisher Description
The Triple Bind that girls face today:
• Act sweet and nice
• Be a star athlete and get straight A's
• Seem sexy and hot even if you're not
In many ways, today is the best time in history to be a girl: Opportunities for a girl's success are as unlimited as her dreams. Yet societal expectations, cultural trends, and conflicting messages are creating what psychologist and researcher Stephen Hinshaw calls "the Triple Bind." Girls are now expected to excel at "girl skills," achieve "boy goals," and be models of female perfection, 100 percent of the time. Here, Dr. Hinshaw reveals key aspects of the Triple Bind, including
• genes, hormones, and the role of biology in confronting the Triple Bind
• overscheduled lives and how the high pressure to excel at everything sets girls up for crisis
• how traditionally feminine qualities (such as empathy and self-awareness) can put girls at risk for anxiety, depression, and other disorders
• the oversexualization of little girls, preteens, and teenagers
• the reasons girls are channeling pressure into violence
Combining moving personal stories with extensive research, Dr. Hinshaw provides tools for parents who want to empower their daughters to deal in healthy ways with today's pressures.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hinshaw, chair of UC-Berkeley's psychology department and an authority on childhood ADHD, enters a cultural minefield: why do today's teenage girls, despite enormous opportunities, seem crippled by increased rates of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, violence and suicide? Hinshaw's sweeping diagnosis is "the triple bind," or society's expectation that young women possess traditionally feminine attributes such as empathy and selflessness, but also succeed in typically masculine arenas such as competitive sports and cutthroat career paths, and finally, generally "conform to a narrow, unrealistic set of standards that allows for no alternative." Hinshaw identifies academic pressures, sexed-up pop culture, Internet voyeurism and girl-on-girl bullying as sources of overwhelming stress and conflicting ideals for girls. Yet his study suffers from an identity crisis of its own: while Hinshaw shines in conversations with troubled young girls, he plays the role of cultural critic rather than psychologist in offering elaborate analyses of TV shows such as Ugly Betty and Grey's Anatomy while providing little hard evidence or testimonies from girls themselves on how these shows affect girls. Hinshaw neglects his strengths and, in turn, offers little in the way of solutions.