The good girl problem
A working list for raising girls who don't shrink to be liked.
———
There is a version of girlhood that has been the default for a very long time and it will feel very familiar: quiet, accommodating, likeable. Hair tidy, make-up subtle, voice soft, low-maintenance. The good girl doesn’t take up too much space, doesn’t want too much, doesn’t say too much. Don’t make a fuss.
Most of us grew up inside that version, to varying degrees. Some of us didn’t notice until adulthood – until we found ourselves automatically apologising for existing in someone else’s way, or shrinking a salary negotiation because asking felt aggressive, or realising we had spent twenty years being very good at making other people comfortable.
Before my daughter was born, I made a decision: I was going to fight, tooth and nail, the idea that girls should be invisible and quiet. I didn’t know exactly what that would look like yet – I just knew I wasn’t handing her that particular inheritance.
What I’ve figured out since is that the work is the accumulation of small actions, over years, that add up to a different kind of formation.
The problem isn't individual parenting, but it can start there
Before I go into specifics, I need to acknowledge the structural reality first. The patriarchy is not a conspiracy run by villains; it’s a set of deeply embedded arrangements that benefit men at women’s expense and reproduce themselves through ordinary life: Through who does the housework, through whose career gets treated as the more important one, through who gets interrupted in meetings and who gets called abrasive. Through what girls are told they’re good at, what they’re discouraged from attempting, and what gets described as a personality trait when it’s actually a survival strategy.
Girls learn very early that the world rewards them for being easy, for not making a fuss, for caring (a lot) about how they’re perceived. The research is clear: girls receive more praise for compliance than boys do, and more criticism for assertiveness. They’re told they’re bossy when they lead, dramatic when they express emotion, and intimidating when they’re competent. By adolescence, many have learned to manage their own visibility as a matter of social self-preservation.
I had a boss once tell me, in an annual review, that I needed to work on my confidence – and that heels and more make-up might help. It cost me a year of therapy to come back from that comment. A year of unpicking why a sentence about footwear had managed to dismantle something load-bearing in how I saw myself.
A year later I mentioned it back to him, he’d forgotten he’d said it. Genuinely forgotten while I’d spent twelve months rebuilding around it. He told me I’d done a great job that year and we should just put it behind us. A throwaway comment, to him. A landmine, to me.
That asymmetry is the whole mechanism in miniature. He could say it lightly because it cost him nothing. It cost me a year, because somewhere underneath the confidence and the competence I’d built was still a girl who’d been trained that how she looked was the metric that mattered most, and one offhand sentence from someone with power over my career was enough to find that dial and use it.
Girls thinking they need to be invisible is a structural outcome of a patriarchal society. Parenting is one of the places where we can insert friction into that process.
What this looks like
It looks like small consistent signals, sent over time, that build a different set of assumptions.
It looks like not praising girls primarily for how they look. This one is harder than it sounds – because it’s what adults reflexively say to small girls. “You look so pretty.” “What a beautiful dress.” It’s not malicious, it just trains girls to understand that their appearance is the most interesting thing about them. Swap it for “what did you make today” or “I like how far you threw that ball” and you’re building a different kind of self-concept.
It looks like letting girls be bad at things without rescuing them from it. The research on girls and risk aversion is fairly consistent: girls are socialised to avoid failure rather than seek challenge. They tend to interpret difficulty as evidence of incapability, where boys are more likely to interpret it as a problem to solve. The antidote is not pressure but exposure – letting them struggle, make things worse, figure it out, and experience the satisfaction of getting there without being managed through it.
It looks like anger being allowed. Girls who learn that their anger is acceptable – that it’s information, not a malfunction – grow into women who can hold a line. Girls who learn that anger is unattractive or frightening learn to disguise it as something more palatable, usually sadness, and spend years trying to work out why they cry when they’re actually furious.
It looks like money being a normal topic of conversation. Girls who grow up watching women manage finances, discuss them plainly, and take ownership of financial decisions don’t absorb the lesson that money is a male domain and they’d better find someone who knows about it. That lesson is devastating in practice, and entirely preventable.
And it looks like taking their observations about unfairness seriously. Not talking them out of it, not telling them they’re being sensitive, not explaining why the world is the way it is as though the explanation makes it acceptable. When a girl tells you something isn’t fair, she is usually right. She is also practising the cognitive and moral work of recognising injustice.
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What they read and watch matters
Because stories are where children absorb what’s possible and find the characters to identify with. For a long time, the default was stories where girls waited, girls were rescued, girls were beautiful and passive and ultimately rewarded for it. The princess who endures, the girl who sacrifices herself, the one whose goodness is proved by her willingness to suffer quietly.
What you’re looking for are girls who are fully drawn characters. Who want things, who make mistakes and live with them, who have inner lives that aren’t organised around other people.
Some that do this well:
Books:
Rosie Revere, Engineer – a girl who keeps building after her inventions fail, with an aunt who reframes failure as data.
Pippi Longstocking – no adult authority, total competence, zero interest in being liked.
Anne of Green Gables – talks too much, has a temper, refuses to apologise for her imagination. The whole arc is the world adjusting to her rather than the reverse.
Matilda – the fantasy that every overlooked, underestimated girl deserves.
The Girl Who Drank the Moon – a girl raised by a witch, full of unexplained power she has to grow into rather than have explained to her.
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret – still unmatched on the specific anxieties of early adolescence: body, belief, belonging, treated as worth taking seriously rather than cute.
Anne Frank’s Diary – not fiction, but a real girl claiming narrative authority over her own life while hiding from people trying to erase her entirely. Sharp, self-aware, and openly ambitious about wanting to be taken seriously as a writer, not just a child.
The Hunger Games – Katniss is reluctant, tactical, and never performs likeability for the reader or the Capitol.
The Hate U Give – Starr's politicisation across the book is the plot, not a subplot.
Films & TV:
Bluey – Bluey and Bingo aren't framed by gender at all, which is itself the point; both girls get full emotional range, physical confidence, and competence without a single episode treating either as the "girly" one.
Moana (Vaiana in the US) works because her desire to go beyond the reef is treated as legitimate, not corrected by a love interest.
Brave – Merida point blank refuses an arranged marriage and the plot backs her, not the suitors. The mother-daughter repair at the centre is rare too: it’s not a romance plot resolving the story, it’s a relationship between two women.
Encanto – not a single protagonist but does excellent work on the “good girl” trap specifically, through Mirabel and Luisa both.
Coraline – a girl who is bored and dissatisfied and goes looking for more, which is not what girls are generally encouraged to do.
Whale Rider (one close to my heart) – a girl fighting her grandfather's conviction that leadership is only for boys, set against Māori cultural inheritance. One of the clearest "girls are told they're not allowed and do it anyway" films that exists.
A Series of Unfortunate Events (Netflix) – Violet is the inventor and eldest sibling carrying real responsibility, never reduced to a damsel role despite constant peril.
Hidden Figures does something different – it puts women into a story that erased them, and lets them be right.
Derry Girls – female friendship, mess, and ambition played for comedy without anyone needing to be the "good" one.
Lady Bird – mother-daughter conflict without villainising either of them, and a girl whose self-mythologising is treated with real tenderness.
Never Have I Ever – Devi is allowed to be genuinely unlikeable at points; the show doesn't rescue her likeability, it lets her sit in consequence.
Sex Education – Aimee and Maeve between them cover sexual shame, class, and self-worth without either being reduced to a lesson.
We Are Lady Parts – an all-female Muslim punk band where every member is drawn with total specificity. Funny, messy, and refuses respectability politics as a goal entirely.
I’d love to extend this list - please drop your recommendations in the comments.
What we’re actually fighting
The goal isn’t to raise a girl who is confident in the motivational-poster sense – chin up, self-belief, you can do anything. That framing is nice and sells well, but it puts the responsibility for outcomes on the individual child and ignores the structural reality she’s going to enter.
The goal is to raise a girl who knows how to name what she’s experiencing, who doesn’t automatically assume that discomfort means she’s wrong, who has a clear enough sense of her own value that she doesn’t trade it away for approval. Who, when someone tells her to be quiet or smaller or more palatable, registers that as information about them, not her.
Most of us weren’t raised that way. We figured it out later, at varying cost. We read the books in our thirties that would have saved us something in our twenties. We had the conversation with a therapist that untangled what held us back for twenty years.
We can’t hand our daughters a world that has fixed the structural problem but we can hand them a different set of starting assumptions about themselves. ♡
More reading:
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A Guardian investigation published this week introduced us to Tilly Dillehay, a 38-year-old Baptist writer and pastor’s wife who runs Wife School, a video masterclass teaching women how to “become the kind of woman who inspires a godly leader.”
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The Equitable Home
An outstanding essay on the what, the why and what to do about patriarchy when there are girls in your home. Bloody well done!
All of this rings so true.