Each week, at some point of the day I remind my daughter Paris, who is ten, how fortunate she is to be a girl born in the United States of America. I’ve been telling her this since she was old enough to communicate. It is so important to me that she not squander her life, but use it for good in, in honor of those women who are repressed and simply don’t have the freedoms she enjoys. Look, I don’t care if she chooses to be a stay at home mom or an astronaut but what I do care about is her deep understanding of this gift of freedom that she has been given.
Most girls in the USA have no idea what is going on in the rest of the world. As parents, it’s our duty to educate them and help them grasp how rare it is to have food on the table, the ability to go to school, the right to vote, and all the other privileges we have that our sisters don’t. I fret for young girls, whose role models are celebrities that have no purpose other than having a camera in their home that airs their dirty laundry on television, who strive to have legs so thin that they don’t touch, and are unable to go five minutes without looking at their cell phones.
We must work tirelessly to give our daughters a sense of purpose, passion, and cause for living. This comes from a sense of gratitude for the gifts in one’s life. Friday, we will learn if Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani girl, living under Taliban rule, and who was shot in the head simply for going to school, will win the Nobel Peace Prize. Imagine her courage! Don’t we want our daughters reading about people like Malala rather than Kim Kardashian? The girls we raise today have the ability to use their voice to change the world tomorrow.
I often think about women who were born in Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, (what I refer to as hell on earth), or Sudan- Why is it they were born into such dire circumstances and why was I born here, in the land of freedom? It’s so unfair. Yet every day I choose to use my voice, to pay tribute to those who can’t. The goal of my movement, Get Your Girl Back, is to help women put focus on what have versus what they don’t and to find their purpose and passion for living. While most women in the world don’t have the chance to do so, we do!
So I implore you to use your voice. Whether Malala wins or not, we can learn from her story and pass its valuable lessons on to our daughters, nieces, sisters and friends. Want more inspiration? Sign up for Notes from Your Girl and I’ll keep these types of lessons in front of you regularly to empower you to use your life and make it grand. Visit http://gygb.com/#notes and let me help you Get Your Girl Back.
Written by Traci Bild, Author and Founder of the Get Your Girl Back Movement www.gygb.com