Every year,we celebrate the girl child. We make posts about her brilliance,her resilience,her limitless potential. We tell her that the world is hers to conquer,that she's capable of anything she puts her mind to,that her dreams are valid and her voice deserves to be heard.
And then Monday comes and we return to being the same society that makes some of those things difficult for her.
It's a really interesting contradiction. We seem to have mastered the art of celebrating girls in theory while struggling to accommodate them in practice. Yes we want intelligent girls,but not always the ones who question us. We want confident girls,but not the ones whose confidence makes us uncomfortable. We want ambitious girls provided their ambitions do not interfere with the expectations we have already mapped out for them.
And somehow,we do not always see the contradiction.
The girl child is intelligent. She is observant,resourceful,curious and capable of remarkable things. She can solve problems,develop ideas,invent and think critically. She can be interested in science,enthusiastic about politics,drawn to literature or determined to build something that has never existed before. Her mind is not an accessory to her existence. It simply is one of the many things that make her who she is.
Yet,how often do we take her ideas seriously before someone older or more socially acceptable repeats them? How often do we mistake her curiosity for stubbornness,her confidence for arrogance or her disagreement for disrespect? How often do we encourage a girl to speak up only to become uncomfortable when she actually does?
Of course,not every girl experiences these things and not every family or community imposes the same restrictions. But these contradictions are worth examining,particularly in societies where expectations about gender can shape the opportunities available to children.
What makes the situation more complicated is that society is not some distant institution made up of strangers. Society is us. It is our homes,our schools,our conversations, our silly jokes and everything in between. It is the things we excuse because they are traditional,the double standards we reproduce without questioning,and the assumptions we pass down so casually that they actually begin to sound like common sense.
And this is not about assigning blame to one gender. Women can reinforce these expectations,just as men can challenge them. We can all participate in a culture that limits girls, sometimes without even recognising that we are doing so.
That is why celebrating the girl child should involve more than telling her she is capable. It should also involve examining the conditions under which she is expected to demonstrate that capability.
We cannot keep telling girls that their voices matter while teaching them that being agreeable is more important than being heard. We cannot praise their intelligence while treating their questions as challenges to our authority. And we cannot insist that they dream boldly while making certain dreams seem inappropriate simply because they belong to girls.
Perhaps the most meaningful thing we can do for the girl child is to become more honest about the world we are asking her to grow up in.
Not every girl needs to become a scientist,lawyer, a politician, or a renowned entrepreneur to prove that she is capable. She does not have to be exceptional to deserve opportunity and she should not think she needs to outperform everyone around her to earn the respect that ought to be freely given.
Sometimes,the point is not to show the world that girls can do everything boys can do. The point is to build a society where a girl's possibilities are not unnecessarily narrowed before she has had the chance to explore them.
So,this International Day of the Girl Child, let us celebrate her intelligence,her creativity,her curiosity and her capacity to shape the world around her. Let us also examine ourselves. We should consider the beliefs we have inherited,the expectations we continue to enforce and the ways we might be contributing to the very problems we claim to oppose.
Because it is easy to celebrate a girl for what she might become. It is much harder, sometimes, to respect who she is while she is becoming it.
And perhaps that is where our work begins.
Thank you so much for iterating this! We live in a world that speaks about how women needs to step into rooms and speak with eloquence and confidence and this same world feels intimidated when the woman actually does.
Exactly! Intimidated is the perfect word. They tell a woman to love herself and be confident but hate on her when she actually does.