TruthBook Religious News Blog

March 7, 2009

New Study Reveals Sources of Resilience and Strength for Black Girls in New York City

Black Girls Face Hardships and Challenges

A new and unique report, Black Girls in New York City: Untold Strength and Resilience, was released by the Black Women for Black Girls Giving Circle (BWBG), a funding initiative of The Twenty-First Century Foundation, and the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR). A key finding in the report is that the impact of poverty is especially acute in the lives of Black girls. Approximately three-quarters of the girls in the study live in low-income communities and households. Importantly, the report also explores the positive influences in Black girls' lives. It finds that girls who highly valued spirituality also tended to have an excellent relationship with their primary caretaker. Likewise, those who possessed a strong sense of racial identity were more likely than other girls to be happy on typical day, to receive better grades, to want a college education and believe in their ability to reach their goals.

New York, NY (PRWEB) March 7, 2009 -- A new and unique report, Black Girls in New York City: Untold Strength and Resilience, was released by the Black Women for Black Girls Giving Circle (BWBG), a funding initiative of The Twenty-First Century Foundation, and the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR). The report, commissioned by BWBG from IWPR pairs analysis of original data collected through written surveys and focus groups with a review of existing literature to provide an in-depth examination into the lives of Black girls living within the city of New York.

The report finds that the impact of poverty is especially acute in the lives of Black girls. Approximately three-quarters of the girls in the study live in low-income communities and households.

"Like all Black children, Black girls are at increased risk of living a life of poverty. But poverty plays out in the lives of Black girls in very distinct ways," remarked report author, Dr. Avis Jones-DeWeever, affiliate scholar of IWPR and Director of the Research, Public Policy and Information Center for African American Women at the National Council of Negro Women.

"Our surveys and conversations with adolescent Black girls in New York City show that many of the girls are at an increased risk of violence because of the economic situation of their families and economic conditions of their communities," emphasized Dr. Jones-DeWeever. "For far too many of the girls in our study, poverty truncates their childhood experience."

Most survey respondents indicated that they worry about their personal safety. Among those who feel unsafe at home, most attribute their uneasiness to drug activity in their community as well as the prevalence of violent crime, fights, and gang activity. Black girls most often indicated that they felt unsafe due to frequent fights at school.

The study also examines issues of self-esteem for Black girls, a group often considered immune to the impacts of mainstream culture on body image and self-confidence. While most of the Black girls in this study seemed largely satisfied with themselves, one-fifth indicated, that if given the opportunity, they would change their bodies in some way. A few expressed keen sensitivity to issues of skin tone. Some were teased harshly for being "too Black." Others even expressed a desire for skin bleaching; and in at least one instance, that ultimate desire was not just to become lighter, but instead, to become white.

Importantly, the report also explores the positive influences in Black girls' lives. It finds that girls who highly valued spirituality also tended to have an excellent relationship with their primary caretaker. Likewise, those who possessed a strong sense of racial identity were more likely than other girls to be happy on typical day, to receive better grades, to want a college education and believe in their ability to reach their goals, and when involved in intimate relationships, to engage in self-protective behavior by insisting upon condom usage.

Please click on "external source" to access the entire article, and the study.

Labels: African-Americans, BWBG, girls, IWPR, poverty, religion, spirituality

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Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Girls Need a Dad and Boys Need a Mom

January 03, 2009
By Janice Shaw Crouse

The latest issue of The Journal of Communication and Religion (November 2008, Volume 31, Number 2) contains an excellent analysis of the importance of opposite-sex parent relationships. The common sense conclusion is backed up with social science data and affirmed by a peer-reviewed scholarly article: girls need a dad, and boys need a mom.

The authors, G.L. Forward, Alison Sansom-Livolsi, and Jordanna McGovern, stress the fact that a family is more than merely a group of individuals who live under the same roof. They cite numerous studies indicating that parents play a crucial role in a child's personal and social development. In fact, a child's relationship with his or her parents is the single most important factor in predicting that child's long-term happiness, adjustment, development, educational attainment, and success. Beyond that general information, studies indicate that girls get better support from the family than do boys. Girls feel closer to their parents, perhaps because parents converse with and express emotion more readily with daughters than with sons. In general, mothers spend far more time with daughters than with sons. Likewise, fathers spend more time with sons than with their daughters. Yet, father-daughter and mother-son relationships tend to have greater impact on a child's future intimate relationships than their relationship with the same-sex parent.

The survey, given to students at two private, church-related universities in Southern California, asked students to evaluate their family's relationship satisfaction, religiosity, and communication behaviors with the opposite-sex parent. Specifically, the study looked at the openness, assurance, dependency, and religiosity between the student and his or her mother or father.

Dependency - The authors define dependency as the attachment and emotional bonding that provides security that continues throughout a child's lifetime. Healthy dependence is essential for autonomy. Ironically, parent-child dependency provides the foundation that enables the child to separate from the parents as he or she matures and becomes an adult. Social and emotional growth stems from a secure attachment - having a safe haven with parents enables a child to move away from their secure base to explore autonomy and independence as an adolescent and emerging adult. In other words, the more secure the base, the easier it is for a child to leave the nest; they know that the parents are there and feel secure enough to transition into a confident adulthood.

Openness - When parents and children openly and comfortably share their thoughts and emotions, the transition into healthy adulthood is easier. Further, such openness assists the child in decision-making. Greater interaction leads to fewer family problems. Parents who express love, offer frequent praise, and encourage give-and-take produce adolescents who are less likely to engage in dangerous behaviors when alone or with friends.

Assurance - A child's self-esteem is strongly linked to parental assurance of worth. A vote of confidence from parents is particularly significant to adolescents. In fact, the ability to communicate assurance to a child is identified as a key to parental success. Successful parents give a child a sense of worth and lovability; coercive parents imply untrustworthiness and incompetence. These communication patterns especially affect girls; a father's open encouragement and supportive attitude makes a daughter feel confident and creates a greater sense of personal worth.

Religiosity - The authors cited numerous studies that link religious beliefs and practices to a strong family unit and noted the fact that the most noticeable impact of religiosity is during adolescence. The majority of studies found an inverse relationship between religiosity and high-risk adolescent behaviors (drinking, drug use, sexual activity, depression, etc.). Other studies indicate a strong relationship between the family's religious belief and practice and a teen's emotional health and family well-being. This is especially true of teenage boys.

Labels: boys, fathers, girls, identity, Janice Shaw Crouse, mothers, parents, The Journal of Communication and Religion

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Tuesday, April 24, 2007

COURTNEY E. MARTIN: For girls who hate their bodies - a spiritual crisis

The Christian Science Monitor
Brooklyn, N.Y. --

Worried talk about the next generation of high-achieving, health-neglecting "perfect girls" is everywhere.

Girls Inc. just published the results of its depressing, nationwide survey called "The Supergirl Dilemma," which reveals that girls' obsession with thinness has gotten significantly worse in the past six years. Despite the efforts of the Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty - well-intentioned, though undeniably market-driven - and Love Your Body Day events sweeping every school from San Francisco to Syracuse, 90 percent of teenage girls think they are overweight today, compared with 24 percent in 1995, according to a recent ELLEgirl survey.

So what gives? Is it our celebrity-obsessed, extreme makeover culture? Is it the newest version of the age-old story of dysfunctional family relationships? Is it peer pressure - mean girls critiquing one another's every lunchtime indiscretion? Is it the $30 billion a year diet industry?
It is, in truth, all of the above. But there is also another profoundly important - yet little noticed - dynamic at work in the anxious, achievement-oriented lives of America's perfect girls: They have a sometimes deadly, often destructive, lack of faith.

So many perfect girls were raised entirely without organized religion, and the majority of the rest of us - I reluctantly admit to my own membership in the perfect girl club - experienced "spirituality" only in the form of mandatory holiday services with a big-haired grandmother or unconscionably elaborate and expensive bat mitvah parties, where everything but the Torah is emphasized.

Overlay our dearth of spiritual exploration with our excess of training in ambition - never mind SAT prep courses; today, even community service is linked to college application brownie points - and you have a generation of godless girls. We were raised largely without a fundamental sense of divinity. In fact, our worth in the world has always been tied to our looks, grades, and gifts - not the amazing miracle of mere existence.

In this climate, we feel perpetually called to perfect our own "body projects" - the term used by historian Joan Jacob Brumberg. Thinness and achievement stand in for the qualities of kindness and humility. We think that our perfect bodies - not God's grace or good works - will get us into heaven. We have no deeply held sense of our own divinity, so we chase after some unattainable ideal. Perfect girls, as a result, feel they are never enough. Never disciplined enough. Never accomplished enough. Never thin enough.

The worst of this can be seen in the frightening Web sites that purport to be support groups for girls with anorexia and bulimia. Such sites claim that these two disorders are a religion, not a disease, and pray to false gods named after them: Ana and Mia. Though highly deluded and dangerously ill, girls who frequent these sites have taken the black hole at their centers and filled it with an obsessive faith in the power and purity of thinness. In essence, they are crying out to our godless culture, showing us just how damaged a child can be who is thrown to the wolves of advertising and amoral media without any spiritual armor.

I'm not calling for a return to conservative religion or restricting dogma. I'm envisioning an inspired movement toward community where girls are nourished with dinner-table conversations about the values of kindness and charity; where girls undergoing puberty are encouraged to embrace the miraculous, complex, and perfectly imperfect bodies they possess; and where girls can find inspiration - not condemnation - in religious texts.

For starters, the Bible has something to teach the perfect girl who calculates beauty in terms of pounds and dress sizes: "Your beauty should not come from outward adornment. Instead, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God's sight" (I Peter 3:3,4). (New International Version)

And Buddha, the man often portrayed as blissful with his belly, has a paradigm-shifting message for the average American woman accustomed to self-hate: "You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection."

A supermom of an elite college hopeful told New York Times reporter Sara Rimer, "You just hope your child doesn't have anorexia of the soul." While she is spot on in her fears, she seems woefully shortsighted about her responsibilities. It is we, all of us, who have the power to resurrect a society that values spirit above skinniness. We have to start doing it - one prayer, one family hike, one heart-to-heart discussion about what really matters - at a time.

Courtney E. Martin is the author of "Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body."

Labels: anorexia, Bible, body image, Buddha, bulimia, Courtney E. Martin, girls, Joan Jacob Brumberg, teenagers