When I was engaged, I once joked that I wanted to have four daughters. As luck would have it, I beat the odds, and my husband and I do indeed have four daughters who are currently 11, 10, 8, and 6 years old. We’ve found that having four girls and no boys does have some major advantages: for one, we get to specialize. Having a household of girls has made my husband and me hyperaware of the messages they absorb. But this has not always been the case. Despite our awareness of the negative messages bombarding girls from a variety of sources, we did not realize how proactive we would have to be to combat all the permutations of these limiting messages, some of which are super sneaky and slide under our radar.
