Daughters Are Struggling. Here's What They Need From Us with Psychologist Dr. Shefali

BUY THE BOOKS! Raising Conscious Daughters https://amzn.to/4ydGaEU Raising Conscious Sons https://amzn.to/4qHNVAk Oprah continues her two-part conversation with New York Times bestselling author and world-renowned clinical psychologist Dr. Shefali about her new books, Raising Conscious Sons: Cultivating Purpose, Connection, and Inner Power in a Chaotic World and Raising Conscious Daughters: Building Confidence, Courage, and Inner Power in an Anxious World. In part two, Oprah and Dr. Shefali focus on the unique challenges facing girls today and the hidden struggles behind the achievement and confidence the world often sees on the surface. Dr. Shefali explores the rise of anxiety, depression, self-harm, cyberbullying, perfectionism and self-doubt among young women. Dr. Shefali also explains how the pressures of the digital age, constant comparison, unrealistic expectations and what she calls the perception prison are shaping girls' mental health. She unpacks the 'psychology of more' describing it as one of the most corrosive forces affecting young women today and shares practical guidance for helping daughters trust their inner voice and stay connected to their authentic selves. Oprah and Dr. Shefali are also joined by four mothers who share their questions about raising daughters. 00:00:00 Welcome Dr. Shefali, author of “Raising Conscious Daughters” 00:04:00 - Conscious parenting 00:07:30 - Parents wakeup call 00:08:30 - Stats about girls 00:16:00 - Pressures of teen girls 00:21:00 - Teaching anti-fragility 00:23:00 - Pain as a teacher 00:26:00 - It's not your job to keep your kids happy 00:27:00 - Comparison culture 00:29:00 - Stop chasing worth 00:32:20 - How the patriarchy has affected girls 00:33:40 - The culture of never good enough 00:36:00 - Algorithms exploit our children 00:40:33 - Bullying and cyberbullying 00:45:00 - The dangers of obedience 00:47:50 - Three sacred pillars 00:49:50 - Message for parents GEICO is proud to be the exclusive insurance sponsor of The Oprah Podcast. Every journey comes with unexpected turns. And when those happen, GEICO is there to help keep you moving forward with confidence. Learn more about how they can support you along the way at GEICO.com. Follow Oprah Winfrey on Social: https://www.instagram.com/oprahpodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/oprahwinfrey/ Listen to the full podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/0tEVrfNp92a7lbjDe6GMLI https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-oprah-podcast/id1782960381

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Oprah Winfrey?

  This episode of the Oprah Podcast is presented by our partner, Geico. Today, we're talking about the specific difficulties in raising daughters in today's world.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Parents are in a new era now.

• 0:13Oprah Winfrey?

  It's not the same.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  It's not the same.

• 0:15Oprah Winfrey?

  It's not the same.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  We have to become humble and begin listening to what our children are telling us. And they are in pain. They're feeling the pressure of knowing too much too soon, of being too overexposed and too over-sexualized. Your daughter now is on a platform where it's a global curation of over-perfection, being presented to her as an ideal, right? Now with the filters, now with the like button. She's living disconnected, disembodied, dislocated. And that girl is easy prey for predation.

• 0:50Oprah Winfrey?

  Instead of wanting your daughters to be good, you want your daughters to be heard.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 0:55Oprah Winfrey?

  You want to train them to use their voice and not just be good.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Yes, so their voice that speaks to them first. We must allow our daughters to lead the way for their own self-direction, for their own destiny.

• 1:11Oprah Winfrey?

  Hello. It is just my pleasure to welcome you once again to the Oprah Podcast. I'm so glad to be back on my front porch with one of my favorite parenting experts, a spiritual leader, teacher, world-renowned clinical psychologist, and New York Times bestselling author, Dr. Shefali. On a prior episode, we talked about the new challenges that so many of you as parents are facing raising children in this modern era. And we focused on Dr. Shefali's book called Raising Conscious Sons: Cultivating Purpose, Connection, and Inner Power in a Chaotic World. We can all feel how necessary that book is. Check out that episode if you have not already.

• 1:53Oprah Winfrey?

  And now, today, we're talking about the specific difficulties in raising daughters in today's world. Dr. Shefali's book is called Raising Conscious Daughters: Building Confidence, Courage, and Inner Power in an Anxious World. I think we can feel how much this book is needed also for our girls in the world. You had to do two, why?

• 2:18Speaker 01

  I had to write two books because we are in a very unique, unprecedented cultural turning point. And our children are being raised in a world that is increasingly misaligned to provide them the nourishment for their neurological, developmental, psychological, spiritual needs. And I felt I had to write two books because, boys and girls, and this is not about gender dichotomy, this is not about a binary. Of course, you can read one book and see more of your son in the daughters and vice versa. But I wrote two books because boys and girls go through very specific, precise,

• 3:01Speaker 01

  and different developmental trajectories, hormonal landscapes, and culture exploits them very differently.

• 3:09Oprah Winfrey?

  Wow. I asked you this on the other episode before. Give us a quick refresher for those who are not familiar with what it means to be a conscious parent. Because we first became friends. I was introduced to your book, Conscious Parenting, and I was so struck by that because I'd done so much work with Eckhart Tolle. And you, to me, seem like the Eckhart Tolle for parenting. And turns out, that's what you'd said to your publisher.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:40Oprah Winfrey?

  When you presented that book.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Yes. Eckhart talks about presence, attunement, stillness, and recognizing the projections from our own wounds. Well, who does that more than parents? We constantly project onto our children our unmet needs, our unfulfilled expectations, our fantasies, and we cast our children into our movie as if they were our object because they are ours. And so conscious parenting is a movement that is my answer to the toxicity of the traditional parenting model, which treats children as our objects.

• 4:18Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah, and parents are doing it. And sometimes, you know, you hear those words. It feels like, I'm sure a lot of parents didn't take it well at first when they were reading this about themselves in the conscious parent. And they don't see themselves as creating a problem because they're doing it out of love. I, who've never had my own children, did this with, I remember one of my girls from South Africa came to the United States. I remember the night, I might have shared this with you before. I remember the night that she got into Wellesley. And I always wanted to go to Wellesley. She didn't want to go to Wellesley.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:56Oprah Winfrey?

  But I wanted to go to Wellesley. And I talked her into going to Wellesley. And she ended up having a miserable time.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 5:05Oprah Winfrey?

  Feeling isolated and disconnected and never felt like she belonged. And that was a huge turning point lesson for me in projecting what I wanted onto her. And I learned, because I've now put over 800 girls through college, is to let them live their lives and have their own will.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:27Oprah Winfrey?

  About whatever it is they choose.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:29Oprah Winfrey?

  And I have literally released it. I have surrendered whatever anyone becomes. I tried to provide, you know, an opportunity, an open door.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:38Oprah Winfrey?

  And so, and I learned that from you. I learned that from conscious parenting.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Parents get so afraid to release trust and autonomy onto their children.

• 5:49Oprah Winfrey?

  Yes.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Because they were not raised with autonomy, trust, and sovereignty. They were raised with control. And most of us are. So we, our love language is control, is possession.

• 6:00Oprah Winfrey?

  Because we think we are supposed to.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Because we think we're supposed, we don't know any other way. And we've never been tuned in to listen to our own sovereign spirit. So we don't know how to gift that to our children.

• 6:10Oprah Winfrey?

  Yes. And it's so interesting, I was talking to one of your friends, Pilar, recently, who said that even though you were her best friend and you are very close, that she didn't realize until you wrote the book, Conscious Parenting, that she was doing that in her own relationship with her son.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:26Oprah Winfrey?

  Forcing her son.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:28Oprah Winfrey?

  Many of you may recognize this. Forcing her son to have piano lessons.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:32Oprah Winfrey?

  And he hated it.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Right. From the most benign, go kiss grandma. And the child is like, I don't want to kiss grandma, she smells. Right? From the pushing of the child from that to play an instrument because I want you to play an instrument or excel in school or wear your hair like this and go into a beauty pageant because you look so cute, get married to this person, follow my god, all the way to sexual exploitation and trafficking. It's all the same through line of objectifying our children, commodifying them and using them to fulfill our ego, our unbridled ego. So these books are my interruption to the pipeline of raising insecure girls to become self-abandoning women,

• 7:16Speaker 01

  raising lost boys to become predating men. These books are my interruption of that pipeline.

• 7:23Oprah Winfrey?

  In the beginning of Raising Conscious Daughters, you write a wake-up call letter to parents. You say, as both a psychologist and a mother, let me say this plainly. I am deeply troubled by what I see unfolding in girlhood across the industrialized world for one simple reason. This is not the way we should be raising our daughters. What are you seeing?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Oprah, I could cry because I'm a girl inside me and I'm raising a daughter. And our daughter's ecosystem, their neurochemistry, is so finely tuned to relational nuance, so sensitive to cues from each other. They build their identity, girls more than boys. And I'm not saying boys can't do this, but more so than boys. Girls are primed.

• 8:12Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  To develop an identity based within the container of a face-to-face, eye-to-eye relationship. That's how they discover who they are. Now, you're putting these very sensitive, fine-tuned forks into the tornado and hurricane and tsunami of constant, the algorithm, the feed, comparison, perfectionism, you know, feeling bullied, feeling objectified, over-sexualized, early sexualization. You're taking that butterfly and she's lost in that tsunami. And that's why, Oprah, I'll tell you the stats, okay? I'll just rattle them off.

• 8:50Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Because they're alarming, okay? One in three girls are anxious, anxiety disorder. Depression has doubled in the last decade. Anxiety has doubled in the last decade. It's in the last decade since the advent of technology, which is hijacking their attention and consuming their sense of self.

• 9:08Oprah Winfrey?

  Depression has doubled.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  One in five girls by the age of 18 has self-harmed. Self-harm has risen 188% since 2010, okay?

• 9:20Oprah Winfrey?

  Wow. That means girls cutting themselves.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Cutting, self-harm, eating disorders. Suicidal ideation up 60% in the last decade. One in four girls by the age of 18, and this won't come as a surprise, I've been dealing with this, has had sexual violence or sexual abuse. One in two has been cyberbullied. So now, you take a girl whose intricate brain that has amazing neural bridges between the left and right hemisphere. She can talk about her feelings. She feels more deeply and can access her feelings more deeply because of her neurochemistry. You know, estrogen finely tunes her oxytocin and turns it on. So her bonding hormone is right there. Estrogen does that.

• 10:05Oprah Winfrey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  She's primed for, you know, becoming a victim and prey to these forces that are constantly telling her, she's not good enough, she needs to be more, she is not perfect, you know, the filters.

• 10:20Oprah Winfrey?

  I don't know how y'all are doing it out there, raising young girls, because I think with the social media and the pressure.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  I mean, I look at my feed and I never end up feeling better about myself.

• 10:34Oprah Winfrey?

  How can you?

• 10:35Speaker 01

  And women, I'm sorry to say, need to take some responsibility because we are perpetuating the same climate of perfectionism that...

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Besieges us, that entraps us.

• 10:49Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah, well, that's why one of the things I so appreciated and felt so compelling in raising conscious daughters is this letter. You created a hypothetical letter from a 16-year-old girl to her parent that really is a compilation of hundreds of conversations that you've had

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:08Oprah Winfrey?

  with your clients, with your patients of all ages over the years. So I want you all to listen to this. Maybe this will resonate with you. This could be your daughter.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  You tell me to trust you, but I don't feel safe to. You tell me to love my body, but I've never heard you say one kind word about yours. You tell me to find love, but I see how many of you stay in relationships that seem loveless and dull. You tell me to speak my truth, but then you tell me to calm down when I do. You want me to find purpose and joy, but I watch you burning out. You want me to accept myself just as I am, but then I never see you okay with yourself, like ever. You always look stressed and like you are in a bad mood. It's all so confusing, Mom. You want to know the truth about why I act the way I do? I'm really scared most of the time. I don't really know how to believe in myself. Everything feels warped and shaky.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  I know that what I see is based on what I saw last in my feed and not the truth. And this freaks me out. I want to know the truth, but I cannot find it anywhere. When you were growing up, you could just trust the news at least. But now, none of us can rely on anything to be real. Most things are not, and that is an awful feeling.

• 12:25Oprah Winfrey?

  So you wrote that letter as a composite because this is what the girls are sharing with you

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:30Oprah Winfrey?

  for themselves.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're trying to tell the moms and dads, hey, just because you are an adult now and you went through teenagehood, what I'm going through is something that you don't know. So do not tell me, oh, when I was your age, when I was 21, this is what I did. Because I'm growing up in a world that you don't recognize. So at least have the humility to know that you don't know. That's where we all need to start. That's why I wrote these books, my seventh and eighth book, because parents are in a new era now. So whatever we knew before

• 12:59Oprah Winfrey?

  It's not the same.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  It's not the same.

• 13:01Oprah Winfrey?

  It's not the same.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  We have to become humble and begin listening to what our children are telling us. And they are in pain. They're feeling the pressure of knowing too much too soon, of being overexposed.

• 13:13Oprah Winfrey?

  Yes.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Too overexposed and too oversexualized. And this is robbing them of their rightful childhood. She knows that her feed is curated to her desires and insecurities. It's complete manipulation, so she believes that's reality.

• 13:30Oprah Winfrey?

  These girls know that what they're seeing isn't even real anymore.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  It's not real. It's just for them to exploit them, their insecurity. Oh, you want to travel to the mountains? Now your feed will be full of that, beguiling you,

• 13:42Oprah Winfrey?

  That's right.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  seducing you to go travel.

• 13:44Oprah Winfrey?

  You only have to say it in your phone and then

• 13:46Speaker 01

  You only have to say it.

• 13:46Oprah Winfrey?

  Now you're going to be shown mountains and trips and all the things.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Right. And the same is for cult ideology. The same is for toxic masculinity, misogyny. Misogynistic messages are coming through her phone and into her brain, and she's not ready to process it. She has no language for it.

• 14:01Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  But she's being told she's an object way before she even realizes that she's a body that she can own.

• 14:08Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah, she's been objectified.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:10Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  And our daughters will look to the women around them because their mirror neurons are so activated that they will identify with the modeling that we provide as women. And that's why I teach mothers more than anyone, if you want to raise sovereign daughters, you have to learn to self-love. And if you continue in your self-loathing, and if you're at war with your body, and if you are always in the land of more, more, and never enough, your daughters are absorbing that. So you have to, you owe it to your daughter to heal and enter wholeness.

• 14:42Oprah Winfrey?

  But don't you, you also saying, raising conscious daughters, that that's where we are with girls now, that we are in the land of more, more, more, more?

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Yes. And, you know, it's one thing to put pressure on our children. We've always done that. But it's another thing when your daughter now is on a platform where it's a global curation of over-perfection, being presented to her as an ideal, right? Now with the filters, now with the like button. So now it's become a constant audition. She's always auditing. She's never herself. She's always the persona and never the essence. And she's living disconnected, disembodied, dislocated. And that girl is easy prey for predation. She's easily manipulated because she's being told who to be before she ever discovers.

• 15:34Oprah Winfrey?

  Because she's spent her whole life manipulating herself.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:36Oprah Winfrey?

  You're spending all your time manipulating herself.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Right, I call it the perception prison. She's in this perception prison where she herself is the prisoner and the warden to her own essence.

• 15:45Oprah Winfrey?

  That's why I think this is such an important book and raising sons, because whether you are raising daughters or sons or not, you will see yourself in these stories.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:55Oprah Winfrey?

  Our listeners tell us that the podcast is resonating with you and is serving as a bright spot in your day. That means a lot to me. So here's the thing, I would really appreciate it if you like and subscribe to the Oprah Podcast on YouTube or wherever you podcast. It's just a quick tap of the subscribe button, and that way you won't miss an episode in your queue. You don't have to pay anything. I know subscribe usually means you're paying something, but this time it means you just are notified when there's something new. There are many more to come that we're excited about. So thank you for watching and listening. Those of you who watch the Oprah Podcast or listen to us, you know, every story we share, every guest we welcome is chosen with purpose.

• 16:40Oprah Winfrey?

  And when people share their stories, we're reminded that we're not alone in this journey called life. As the official insurance partner of the podcast, the folks at Geico understand that the way we move through life and who we move through it with matters. And I know that life starts to move even faster as a new school year begins. Fall routines get underway, the calendar fills up. Whether you're waiting in the school pickup line, loading up the car for a weekend getaway, taking a quiet drive home after a hard day, or cheering on your son or daughter from the sidelines, these moments remind us the road is not always a straight line. Geico is there with insurance design to help keep you covered along the way.

• 17:22Oprah Winfrey?

  Because life happens, and with the right support, we all just keep driving forward. And that, dear listener, is everything.

• 17:33Oprah Winfrey?

  And we have parents of daughters joining us. Christina is zooming in from Michigan. Hi, Christina.

• 17:38Speaker 03

  Hi, hi there.

• 17:39Oprah Winfrey?

  Hi.

• 17:40Speaker 03

  Dr. Shefali, hi Oprah. I'm so grateful for your focus and attention on this topic. I have three daughters. They're 15-year-old twins and a 12-year-old daughter. And I feel like what I once knew to be true about parenting no longer applies at all. Honestly, I feel really lost. I feel like I'm constantly rerouting and recalculating my approach. These girls are growing up in a world of individualism, capitalism, social division, materialism. It's nonstop pressure, like you've said, Dr. Shefali, and comparison and always striving for the unattainable. The dopamine addiction from their social scrolling just continues to fuel that, you

• 18:25Speaker 03

  know, materialism. And every week, there's a new brand or object or thing that they need to have. And not to mention all the scary news in the world and events that are, you know, currently taking place. So it's all just too much. And I've watched my little girls grow from these happy young girls into really anxious, overwhelmed, anxiety-medicated, attending therapy, just to get out of bed in the morning and go to school. And it doesn't feel right. It's, they've been raised in a really loving and supportive household with two parents, and they're smart girls, they have friends, they're athletic. But it doesn't seem like that's enough anymore because of all the external pressure.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  And so with all that pressure, I feel like I am constantly bailing them out, rescuing them, making accommodations for them with no consequences, things my mother would never have done. And I'm finding myself

• 19:25Oprah Winfrey?

  Give us an example. Give us an example.

• 19:27Speaker 03

  Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So I think we all have the instance where a child forgot something at school, and you're going to bring it to them, right? Once in a while, that happens. I feel like any ask they make, they forgot their homework, they forgot their lunch, they're cold. I am picking up these things and rushing off to school. I'm disrupting my day, I'm disrupting my week because I see at a baseline just how anxious they are at all times, that I'm trying to like hold them together and scaffold around them and keep them going throughout their day. And, you know, I'm almost embarrassed to admit some of the things like that I'll continue

• 20:09Speaker 03

  to buy for them or, you know, experiences I'll give to them, like having a personal trainer, because guess what? Their friends do, and they're afraid they're going to fall behind in their sports team because they're not running as fast as the girls. And I am embarrassed. Like, it truly feels like I have to do this from a deep, like maternal instinct. And my question for you really is, how do I start to let go at this age? Natural consequences are very important, right? But this anxiety.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Right, so you have so much anxiety also that they're falling apart, right? And I do not blame you. I just had a 15 year old. My daughter is now 23. So I totally understand the pressures that you feel as a mother, because they're feeling all this pressure to keep up, to be perfect, to be something. So we buy, we borrow, we do anything to buttress a flailing sense of self. But here's where we are part of the pattern, right? And you know this, it doesn't feel good to you because you're, you know you're being pulled against your will. But that's what our daughters are. They're being pulled against their will. We are being swept by the undertow of a materialistic, consumeristic culture that we all are feeling helpless with. So what do we do?

• 21:24Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah. And what is she really teaching her daughters by giving in to every single thing that they ask? What is she really teaching?

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Well, she's really teaching them that, yes, your personal trainer matters for your identity. Yes, getting into that team matters for your self-worth, right? We're actually, we're doing the very thing that is actually going to keep taking from them. It's a never-ending cycle because that's how they've got us hooked. And they've got us parents anxious because our girls are in a panic attack over it. Do not blame her. They come to her and they're screaming, crying, they're having a meltdown. She's afraid they're going to self-harm if she doesn't give them the car or the gift or the jewelry. Because all the friends are being bathed in this ocean, this current of anxiety, panic, perfectionism, hyperexposure.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, girls are at a different level because their attunement to culture is even more. So we have to scaffold them. So now you think you're scaffolding them by buying them that purse, by buying them that vacation or whatever, that marble. But here's the thing, you're actually feeding the monster. Because you are teaching them that, yes, their worth means that they should look beautiful and fit in. So what do we do as parents? Very hard, not saying it's easy. And I talk about the pillar of anti-fragility in the book. It is so important for us as parents to make them anti-fragile. What does that mean? We have to teach them that they will be okay even if they fall apart.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  But see, I know what this mother is experiencing. She's like, no, they won't be okay. They won't be okay, so let me pump them with the drug, whatever the drug of the day is. And this is where she's codependent and she's enabling, and I don't blame her. I've done this myself because we're so worried. So we're anxious, they're anxious, so we keep feeding and giving the drug.

• 23:19Oprah Winfrey?

  How do you break the cycle?

• 23:20Speaker 01

  How do you break it is to realize that we are, the teaching of resilience and anti-fragility comes from the falling apart, comes from the rock bottom moment. Even with my clients, I wait for rock bottom, not because I'm sadistic, because I know that it is only when you see yourself at rock bottom and see yourself able to handle it that you build the anti-fragility and the resilience. So what we're doing is protecting the rock bottom from getting to rock bottom. So we never believe we're strong enough, so we keep feeding. We're stuck in this loop. You're in a loop, they're in a loop, you'll be millions of dollars, you know, poorer,

• 24:02Speaker 01

  and nothing will change until you cut the loop and stop feeding the monster.

• 24:06Oprah Winfrey?

  So how does she do that?

• 24:07Speaker 01

  She has a talk with them, comes to a coach like me, and I'm often the bad guy who says I'm not, we cannot feed the monster anymore. We are now drug addicted to the thing on the outside and we all have to detox. The whole system has to detox and it is painful and scary, especially with anxious girls. Because you think they're going to self-harm, they're going to cut themselves, they're going to harm themselves. But we cannot feed that beast because we're all afraid. They're afraid of their own pain. We have to teach them that we cannot be afraid of pain. Pain is something that teaches us. It is our gift and our invitation.

• 24:42Oprah Winfrey?

  It's one of the things you also said about boys, so it applies to raising children, period, I see, that you have to let them know that if you fall apart, you will still be okay.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  And I'm here for you.

• 24:54Oprah Winfrey?

  And that we all have fallen apart.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  And we are together.

• 24:57Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  And the relationship is strong enough. See, you're not believing, mom, that your presence is more important than the purse and the shoes. The shoes and the purse are transitory and they're just momentary gratification. You can hold them through the falling apart. And you are going to be the one who will pull them through. So if you believe in yourself, they will fall apart, you're right. But that is how we detox the beast.

• 25:27Speaker 03

  It's really interesting because I thought we were at rock bottom when they wouldn't go to school and we wouldn't get out of bed and we were going to therapy and, you know, taking these anti-anxiety meds. So I think rock bottom, like, that felt like my rock bottom, right? But I realize, obviously, that's.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  But because you're in this loop, it means that it wasn't bottom enough. It's coming again. Now you're just buttressing it with things. And things are never going to teach them connection to the self. They have to face themselves at rock bottom.

• 26:00Oprah Winfrey?

  I saw you have a moment of recognition there. Things are never going to teach them connection to their self.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:10Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  And pain, and pain does.

• 26:12Oprah Winfrey?

  And pain does.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Pain does.

• 26:14Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Our ability to transcend and transform and alchemize pain teaches us connection to ourselves.

• 26:20Oprah Winfrey?

  I know, but no parent wants their child to have to experience pain. Yeah.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  Right. And what you said about control equaling love, I mean, I think that's, that is where I feel like I'm coming from. I'm trying to

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Manage.

• 26:32Speaker 03

  control their environment and help. And consciously, I, we're, you know, materialists, I know that.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  I think you're trying to control them falling apart. And yet, falling apart is a very thing that will teach them self-control.

• 26:45Speaker 03

  Ooh, well, I'm grateful for that advice. That is a tough one to swallow. But you are certainly the person we need right now to start being more disruptive and sharing this information because it's, it's hard. It's really tough.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Very hard, very hard.

• 26:59Oprah Winfrey?

  You're going to have so many ah-hahs in seeing yourself in the book and be, and you'll be grateful for, because one of the things that she does is offer a path forward, not just stating what the problem is, but offering a path forward. So I could see your, oof, that hit you hard, but yeah, feels like the truth to me.

• 27:17Speaker 03

  It does. I feel a little like.

• 27:19Oprah Winfrey?

  The reason why it hit you, Christina, is because you know inside yourself that what she's saying is true.

• 27:25Speaker 03

  A hundred percent.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  And you know, I'll just tie it back together, but just briefly. Ultimately, Christina, it's your little girl that wants to be a good mother that is actually unable to watch them fall apart because then you'd have to face that you can't control it all and you can't keep your kids happy. And that's actually not your job.

• 27:45Speaker 03

  Yep. Ooh.

• 27:47Oprah Winfrey?

  Woo.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  It's the little girl in us that wants to be the best mom.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  I'm a tissue over here because you're getting, you're starting to get to me with these things. Oh, man.

• 27:58Oprah Winfrey?

  All right. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  Thank you both.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 28:02Oprah Winfrey?

  Hello, dear listener. Head over to the Oprah Podcast Instagram to check out the takeaway presented by GEICO.

• 28:10Oprah Winfrey?

  I'm really happy to tell you about my latest conversation with. It's that quiet time I take after an interview where I can reflect on what sparked and what stuck with me. I love to share those takeaways with y'all. Unbelievable. And GEICO is proud to support these moments and the journeys they inspire with insurance designed to keep you covered and make life's road a little more manageable. So go to the Oprah Podcast Instagram where you can check it out.

• 28:39Oprah Winfrey?

  Lisa's joining us from Illinois. Hi, Lisa, I hear you have twin girls in college.

• 28:44Speaker 04

  I do. Hi, Oprah. Hi, Dr. Shefali. Thank you so much. This is such an important conversation. I do. I have twin girls. They are 20. They are currently juniors in college. And they definitely grew up with anxiety as well from an early age all through high school. And what really has impacted them over the years is the comparison culture or social comparison that happens on Instagram and TikTok. But now in their junior year, there's a whole new pressure. They're all thinking about their careers post-college. And what's really important for most of them is to get an internship

• 29:29Speaker 04

  right after their junior year. And so in particular, for one of my daughters, I've noticed that she's starting to really struggle with LinkedIn because her feed is exactly what you were talking about, Dr. Shefali, where it's every single person that she is connected to on LinkedIn is consistently posting self-promotional posts about all the achievements that they've received academically, leadership positions that they've gotten in clubs. And now they're all in the process of posting all the internships that they've received. And this has put some incredible pressure on my daughter and I notice.

• 30:14Oprah Winfrey?

  Comparison, comparison, comparison, yeah.

• 30:16Speaker 04

  Comparison. And she is saying, everybody has gotten an internship and I have not gotten one yet. She used to be in high school, I think, a perfectionist, needed to have the straight A's. And now I see this all kind of falling apart and sort of blowing up. And what's happening now is she's actually withdrawing. The question is, how do I help her through this? This is obviously a very critical time in her life. And how do I help her

• 30:46Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 30:47Speaker 04

  proceed in this environment without, you know, hurting her self-worth?

• 30:52Speaker 01

  You see, when she was a perfectionist in high school and was getting the good grades and the trophies, it was fine and she got a lot of external validation and we were all happy with that. But now, you see, these things mutate on themselves. We just don't see it coming. Too much perfectionism breeds over anxiety and the desperate desire to fit in. And your daughter basically is saying, if I'm not in the high school yearbook, right? LinkedIn has now become like a high school yearbook, the most popular, the one with the most, best job, the best raise, the best salary, the best title. And these are children we're talking about. They've not even formed. They are still in identity formation. But they believe they have to foreclose their identity.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  That's the pressure the world puts on them, that you better decide who you are. Identify who you're going to be in high school. Right? Because that way, they can prey on girls wanting to find. And because then if they want to find, they'll go get training earlier. They'll join classes earlier. They'll spend more money to train themselves earlier than they should. So your daughter has been misguided by culture. And it's our job as parents to align them back to reality. Even if everybody's crazy on LinkedIn and everybody's saying that they need to be earning a hundred thousand by the time they're 18 years old. And money matters so much and status matters. We are here to teach our daughters differently. And that's where you step in.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  And you teach her that when she was winning the trophies and the medals and the good grades in high school, actually, that was a tragedy. Because she was actually doing it to chase worth, not out of worth. And most of us are chasing worth. We're not expressing worth.

• 32:37Oprah Winfrey?

  Wow.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  So she's doing all this just to fit in. So it is empty and it's just not hitting her yet. She thinks that if she gets the fancy job and the diamonds and the cute boyfriend is going to give her worth. She is so lucky she's not fitting in because now she has to find her worth without all of this. But you see, she's falling apart. That's what happens to us. The husband leaves us, we get a divorce, we put on 10 pounds, we fall apart. Because who we are has been so connected and mired with how we show up in the world or how we look. So this is your golden opportunity as a parent. To teach her to move away from the toxic cultural messages and learn to discover her worth, which is right there waiting for her within herself.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  So that means you can't buy into this either. You can't have a panic attack either. In fact, she shouldn't do an internship right now at all. And instead, go to her own self school. Like go to school and learn about herself. Discover who she is. That's the school she needs to go to. The self discovery school.

• 33:43Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah, yeah. And so what if she doesn't get the job and she doesn't get the, whatever the opportunity is? It's happened to every one of us in life.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:52Oprah Winfrey?

  And you don't get that one. You recover, you move on, you find strength from that. And when the next thing shows itself, it usually is an even better opportunity.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Right. And nothing against-

• 34:05Oprah Winfrey?

  As you know, you know, that's how life works.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Right. So for-

• 34:08Speaker 04

  That's so true.

• 34:09Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  And for a girl like that, a platform is toxic. Not for everybody, but for a girl like that. She's very sensitive. So parenting needs to trump the platform.

• 34:22Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Right? The adult needs to trump the algorithm.

• 34:25Speaker 04

  That makes so much sense. So much sense.

• 34:28Oprah Winfrey?

  Thanks, Lisa. I hope it gives you some guidance.

• 34:31Speaker 04

  It does. Definitely. So helpful. Thank you so much.

• 34:34Oprah Winfrey?

  Thank you so much. You say in Raising Conscious Daughters, "Girls have been socialized by the toxic patriarchy to compete with each other," just as we're hearing here. "Each one has been socialized to be prettier and smarter than the others, to get the attention of the males around them. Patriarchy has always thrived by turning women against one another. Mothers especially must model something radically different." That's what you're saying.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Yes. The greatest power the patriarchy has is in dividing us against each other. And in us competing with each other, which we are doing. And it is in our sorority and in our sisterhood that we will stand up to the toxic patriarchy. But if we're too busy fighting and competing with each other, with our sisters, then patriarchy wins. We cannot blame the toxic male on the outside when we're being toxic with each other.

• 35:30Oprah Winfrey?

  And this is the thing. I mean, as you turn the pages of this book, Raising Conscious Daughters, every sentence is a gem. I really appreciate this and I know this is going to resonate with our mothers. If I had to identify the single most corrosive condition shaping the mental health of our daughters today, it would be what I call the psychology of more. Will you break that down for us?

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Yes. We are in a pervasive oceanic turmoil of this culture of never good enough. It's never enough. So we have to always optimize. And the wellness industry is the leader of this. Like, make your bed, have your manta, do this, you know, do your Pilates, have your protein, you know, go out in the sun, do your sun salutations. I mean, it's a sneaky way to keep us never accepting who we are. This idea, this toxic positive idea of keep improving. It's a hollow way of keeping us stuck in thinking there's a next self that's going to be happier.

• 36:32Oprah Winfrey?

  Because there's never enough.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  It's never enough. So we want more and more. But how about look in the mirror, accept that this is it, wrinkles, cellulite, all of it, and this is enough? That's radical.

• 36:45Oprah Winfrey?

  India, a mom of two, joins us. Welcome, India. What's going on?

• 36:48Speaker 05

  Hi. Hi. Thank you, guys, so much for having me. So I do have an 11-year-old daughter and I allowed her to get on TikTok. Only because of like the dance trains, because her school friends were doing it, her track friends were doing it. So I allowed her to get on there. And so I do monitor it. I make sure, you know, who she's following and her followers are people that I know. But recently, I noticed that her algorithm changed to more about makeup and skincare and beauty enhancement. Just things that an 11-year-old should not be worrying about.

• 37:28Speaker 05

  I want her to be like confident and comfortable in her skin and her natural beauty. But I guess, you know, social media brings so much comparison. And so my question is basically, how can I guide her in like a healthy way? Especially since we didn't grow up with social media at all. So I have nothing to go off of.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  So just very gently, I'm going to tell you and encourage you and challenge you to reconsider her being on TikTok altogether. Because no matter how you can maneuver and monitor, the algorithm will outpace you. It is way smarter than you. It is watching your daughter's every move. It is noticing when she-

• 38:10Oprah Winfrey?

  Literally, her every move.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  Every move. They're listening to her, they're watching her take a selfie and take it down because she's insecure about it. And they will pump her with beauty products because this is the new marketplace for commodities.

• 38:23Oprah Winfrey?

  That's why she's getting all the ads for beauty.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, beauty products, yes.

• 38:27Oprah Winfrey?

  Because any picture she's taken or taken down, it's like having Big Brother watching you all the time. You're there. That's where we are.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:35Oprah Winfrey?

  We're there.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  And you and I cannot fathom the influence it is having on your daughter's brain. It is beyond you. So I'm not saying-

• 38:45Oprah Winfrey?

  Can I just interrupt to say that one of the things you expressed in the Raising Conscious Sons book is we've gone from the algorithms wanting your attention to now wanting your complete attachment. That is what is happening.

• 39:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 39:00Oprah Winfrey?

  And your daughter being on TikTok at this age is her attaching to a form of parenting that you are not going to be able to control.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  Yes. There is no consciousness in the computer code.

• 39:13Oprah Winfrey?

  There's no consciousness.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  There's no consciousness there. It is only exploitation for the purpose of profit. You would not do this in regular life. Do not do this. She is developing her identity at 11. You know, 11 is the turning point for most girls, where they go from self-celebrating, self-honoring, to a shroud of who they are within moments, without a TikTok, without the comparison. So the best gift you can give her is to tell her that, you know, you as a family, your values have changed. And you can bring her to a therapist to be the bad, quote unquote, bad guy, but you have to detox her from this, even if all her friends are on it.

• 39:55Speaker 05

  Yeah. Okay.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  You can make them all watch this.

• 39:59Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 40:01Oprah Winfrey?

  I see you're not there yet. I see you're not there. I see you're like, well, yeah. I know what you're thinking, India. You're thinking, it's going to be really hard now to get her off of TikTok because she's been on TikTok. But you're the parent. You're the mother.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Don't outsource your power to the platform.

• 40:18Speaker 05

  Yes, yes. Agreed. And I will say, it was such a drastic change with her Christmas list this year, from the toys to literally just skincare and makeup.

• 40:29Oprah Winfrey?

  Mm-hmm. At 11.

• 40:31Speaker 05

  At 11. Yeah.

• 40:33Oprah Winfrey?

  So you already see it?

• 40:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 40:36Oprah Winfrey?

  This is what's so interesting. This is what's so interesting. And I think you do a lot of this forewarning in both of the books, is that things that seem mild now at 11, by the time she's 14, if you don't assert yourself in the parenting role and continue to let the computer and the algorithm do it, you will not be able to have any voice.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  Any influence. The greatest influence we have as parents comes from our attention and our attachment.

• 41:06Oprah Winfrey?

  Because it's about to get real out here.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  And it's going to get worse. If you're seeing it now.

• 41:11Oprah Winfrey?

  It's about to get very real with AI being the companion to your child in ways that you have no idea. Yeah.

• 41:17Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  And the psychological impact of a girl who sees herself with a filter and sees, wow, my nose looks this way and my cheekbones look, I look better if only I can just go buy all the products now to match that filtered image. And you know, the filter will just keep outdoing her and-

• 41:37Speaker 05

  Right.

• 41:38Oprah Winfrey?

  And 11 is just too young to process that.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  She doesn't have the language. She doesn't have the prefrontal cortex to tell her what is fake and what is real. So you're throwing her into the tsunami without the guidance and the guide rails. And so she's going to fall off the cliff.

• 41:54Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, I, yeah. I do think I am going to get her off of it. It's literally started with the dance trains and now it's just no more.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  It starts in a very benign way.

• 42:05Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You were doing what you thought was best at the time, but Maya Angelou always said, when you know better, you do better. And you just heard it. You just heard it. You can't say, we all are witness to you hearing it, India. So you can't say you didn't hear it. Yeah, yeah.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  She's holding you accountable.

• 42:23Oprah Winfrey?

  Yes.

• 42:24Speaker 05

  Yes, yes.

• 42:25Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah. Thank you, India. Thank you.

• 42:27Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 42:28Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay, we have one more Zoom. Kiara is zooming in from New Jersey. Hi, Kiara.

• 42:33Speaker 06

  Hi, how are you?

• 42:34Oprah Winfrey?

  Hi.

• 42:35Speaker 06

  Thanks so much for meeting me.

• 42:36Oprah Winfrey?

  Thank you for being here.

• 42:37Speaker 06

  This has been wonderful.

• 42:38Oprah Winfrey?

  Yeah.

• 42:38Speaker 06

  Wonderful. I've taken a whole page full of notes and I can't wait for the book to come out and buy it for myself and my sister and all my mom friends. I know there's going to be a lot of really great wisdom in there. So this is a very difficult job of parenting. I'm a teacher. I've been a teacher for almost 20 years, middle school children, and nothing that I've ever experienced in the classroom ever could prepare me for how difficult parenting is. So just want to say that right off the bat. My husband and I both full-time. We're really busy, but very hands-on. We've got two teenage girls. Our oldest is a junior. She's 16 years old. And then our youngest is just about 14 years old.

• 43:20Speaker 06

  This past year, we've had more challenges than ever before with academics and with social pressures and with the older one is entering romantic relationships and just everything that teenage years bring. And we realize that we're really venturing into behaviors that can have real consequences if they're not handled appropriately right now. This past year has been really difficult, especially for my older daughter. She's had lots of incidents aimed, targeted at her with a boy in school related to bullying.

• 43:57Oprah Winfrey?

  How old are they again? Remind us, refresh, how old?

• 44:00Speaker 06

  So my oldest is a junior. She's 16. And then my youngest is 14.

• 44:04Oprah Winfrey?

  Okay.

• 44:05Speaker 06

  The oldest, they've both actually been aimed at incidences of bullying, so much so that the state of New Jersey has actually had to kind of get involved and intervene. Thankfully, that's kind of in the rearview mirror. But we're just trying to navigate the teenage years with all of the pressures that come with raising teenage daughters. I want to give my girls, we trust them and we want to give them the autonomy to make their own decisions and learn from their own mistakes. But at what point should we step in? So what is controlling versus guiding my teenagers' decisions and behaviors look like?

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Well, just as a general rule of thumb, anything that is self or other harming, so if it's eating disorders, cutting, suicidal ideation, bullying another person, that is impinging on the emotional and physical well-being of the self or the other, you need to step in with your authority and influence and take them to a coach, take them to a therapist, take them to someone so you get the support. But do not be in denial that that is a passing phase because these things very quickly catapult. As you saw with bullying, they became the victims of bullying. So cyberbullying is a real trauma now that our girls especially are experiencing.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  There's sex exploitation, there's extortion, there's cyberbullying. So I'm not surprised, and I'm really sorry though, that this happened because the bully is no longer left in the schoolyard or the playground. You see, the bully follows you home now. And the minute you open your phone and the WhatsApp chat and your Snapchats, the bully's right there in these groups that the kids form and leave you out. So it's very, very, you know, the part of the brain that lights up when a girl is rejected is the same as the part of the brain as she's experiencing physical pain. That's how painful it is to her to be excluded from the social milieu, from the group. So it is, what your daughters have gone through is traumatic.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  And so now you're talking about the fallout of that. And that is, you're going to see that. It is interrelated. It is not separate. And the thing with bullying, we need to understand as parents, is that the girl begins to doubt herself. She begins to think, it must be me, you know, it must be my fault. So let me fit in more. Let me wear this or let me become skinnier or let me become cleverer. So whatever you're seeing now is the fallout. And it could be rebellious behavior is because she's, they are now trying to fit in because that sorority, that community was taken from her. So now she'll do anything to be part of the group. So we have to understand the underlying need here and not just focus on the surface behavior.

• 46:53Speaker 06

  That makes sense.

• 46:54Oprah Winfrey?

  That makes sense.

• 46:56Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're seeing the oscillation of the devastation of her selfhood being ostracized from the group for a girl that is death.

• 47:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 47:07Oprah Winfrey?

  That is death to a girl.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:09Oprah Winfrey?

  Kiara, thank you so much. Thank you so much.

• 47:11Speaker 06

  Thanks so much for meeting me.

• 47:13Oprah Winfrey?

  Well, you write this about how young girls can become so accommodating, it becomes toxic. What happens to the daughter who's obedient and always helpful? The one who smooths every rough edge, who adapts, accommodates, and rarely asks for much? The one who's never a burden on her parents? I know a lot of you are listening and you're hearing yourself in this. Never too much, never in the way. She's every parent's dream child. The answer is this, she slowly disappears.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  Yes, she gets erased.

• 47:42Oprah Winfrey?

  I was so struck by that because for years, as you know, I've talked to women on the Oprah Show all those years and even now, who tried to be the perfect daughter, the perfect girl, the always good. This is a kind of suffering, you say, that hides in plain sight. We don't recognize it as pain because it looks like success because she's the good daughter.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:06Oprah Winfrey?

  We call it good behavior, even ideal womanhood. But inside our daughters and inside so many women, the expectation to be all things for all people siphons away her power.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is the curse of the woman, the modern woman who wants to be the savior, the fixer, the pleaser. She's the parentified daughter. She's the golden girl. And she's often raised by the mother who herself was parentified and expects the daughter to take on the legacy. So it's really the mother who at the kitchen table will train her daughter to be the next caretaker, the emotional janitor for the household and passes on that legacy. And what happens is that that girl begins to identify as that role, as that function. So she herself doesn't know who she is without that role and that function. So she will constantly look for broken pieces and damaged goods to fix. So that gives her her identity of fixing.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  But in all of this, she will burn out because there's not enough people outside she can fix.

• 49:09Oprah Winfrey?

  Wow. I want to read this passage about when we praise our daughters. So to every mother reading this, when you praise your daughter for being good, helpful or mature for her age, pause, ask yourself what that praise may be teaching her and what it might be costing her. Because without realizing it, your applause can train her to abandon herself in order to be love.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:33Oprah Winfrey?

  And over time, the power that once lived so freely inside your daughter will begin to dissipate until one day you find yourself wondering how that bright, spunky girl slowly faded into a quieter, more careful version of herself and more uncomfortably into a version of you.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  Hmm, last part of you. You know, I talk about three pillars that are connected to what you just said. The pillar of voice, it is our sacred responsibility to give our daughters their voice.

• 50:04Oprah Winfrey?

  Yes. One of the things that struck me in the book is that you were saying, you know, instead of wanting your daughters to be good, you want your daughters to be heard.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:12Oprah Winfrey?

  You want to train them to use their voice and not just be good.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  Yes, so their voice that speaks to them first.

• 50:18Oprah Winfrey?

  Yes.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  So that means they have to train themselves to hear that voice. That relationship with the--

• 50:23Oprah Winfrey?

  And to trust that voice.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  To trust that voice. That is the first gift we need to give our daughters. This doesn't mean they're disrespectful, doesn't mean they're loud. It just means they're heard, they are authentic, they're self-knowing. The next pillar I talk about is enoughness. We must train them in the language of this is enough. You've done enough today. Rest is not a dirty word. You are allowed to be ordinary. I talk about this in every book. You are allowed to be unhappy, you're allowed to be imperfect, you're allowed to be ordinary. And the third pillar I talk about in the seven that I outline is the pillar of self-authorship. We must allow our daughters to lead the way for their own self-direction, for their own destiny. And that takes trust.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  So imagine women in our generation who were never trusted by their mothers. How can we bestow and bequeath something we've never been given ourselves? Well, you have to cultivate it. And I teach parents how to cultivate it.

• 51:18Oprah Winfrey?

  Well, that's what the, that's what the young girl read in the letter, in the composite letter.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's like, listen to me.

• 51:23Oprah Winfrey?

  Listen to me.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  I, I know, listen, trust me.

• 51:26Oprah Winfrey?

  Yes.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  I have a voice. Can I allow it to unfold?

• 51:30Oprah Winfrey?

  Well, you write in the end, you say, "My hope is simple and impossible all at once," you say, that somewhere between these pages, your heart is softened, that your chest is loosened, that your shoulders drop just a little bit and something inside you cracked open just enough to let more love in. "For the daughter you are raising and who you now can see not through fear or expectation," you say, "but through reverence for her unmatchable power, her inimitable voice and her untamed light." So what's the message you want to leave with parents?

• 52:11Speaker 01

  That our daughters are not broken, they are not over dramatic or over feeling. It is their capacity to feel. And our daughters have it more than anyone else. That will heal the world. So you have to preserve that as a parent. And in order to preserve that, you have to scaffold her from the toxic misogyny and the messages from this world. She is a gift to the world and she is a force to be reckoned with. And she has wholeness waiting to burgeon, but she will be fragmented because she's also sensitive and fragile. And if you're not going to protect her, she will fragment.

• 52:54Oprah Winfrey?

  Wow. Thank you.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 52:57Oprah Winfrey?

  Thank you, Dr. Shefali, for your paradigm-shifting wisdom, raising conscious daughters, building confidence, courage and inner power in an anxious world. I also highly recommend her podcast. It's called Parenting and You. If you're a parent, you should be listening to Dr. Shefali. You can have access to her wisdom anytime you need it because I know it's hard out there for all of you parents. I speak from having spoken to parents for years and years and years. I don't pretend in any way to even begin to understand what it's like. But what I do know, it's harder now than ever.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  It is.

• 53:32Oprah Winfrey?

  It's harder. Thank you, Christina and Lisa and Kiara and India for your parenting questions. Until next time, everybody, go well. Get this book for yourself, get it for your friends. And thank you to our friends at Geico for presenting today's episode. Dr. Shefali has two new books, Raising Conscious Sons and Raising Conscious Daughters. And yes, as Dr. Shefali says, raising a son versus a daughter are different experiences. Both books are available on September 15th. You can preorder your copies right now by scanning the QR code on your screen. The books are both thoughtful. They're practical guides for raising emotionally secure and resilient boys and girls while also navigating the complexities of today's world. I can't recommend them enough.

• 54:16Oprah Winfrey?

  I know for sure that these books are going to inspire some meaningful conversations with you as a parent and with your friends and families. Our listeners tell us that the podcast is resonating with you and is serving as a bright spot in your day. That means a lot to me. So here's the thing, I would really appreciate it if you like and subscribe to the Oprah Podcast on YouTube or wherever you podcast. It's, it's just a quick tap of the subscribe button and that way you won't miss an episode in your queue. You don't have to pay anything. I know subscribe usually means you're paying something, but this time it means you just are notified when there's something new. There are many more to come that we're excited about. So thank you for watching and listening.