The Importance of Empowering Young Girls

This is a wonderful and powerful blog post from Alanna - a designer on our FashionPlaytes merchandising team - on the importance and the beauty of empowering young girls. We’re very excited to share this with you.

A friend of mine runs empowerment workshops for 11-13 year old girls. The workshop starts out with one of my friend’s asking the girls present to close their eyes and sit like a teenage boy. Invariably the girls open their eyes to find that they are all sprawled out… arms everywhere, legs splayed in front of them. The girls crack up at their imitations and then the girls are asked to close their eyes once more and sit like a  teenage girl. When they open their eyes, the girls are sitting with their legs closed up and close to their body and arms folded over their chests, essentially taking up almost no space. My friend tells the girls to look around and see what kind of physical space they are taking up. She then encourages them to take up more physical space…that it’s their space to take, just like the boys that they had imitated.

The rest of the workshop focuses around empowering these girls to take up their space and really, truly own it. Whenever I think of these images, I think of my 5 year old daughter who is happy to take up her space (plus her brothers too, to be honest).

When does it happen… this shrinking, this loss of self confidence?

I am unsure, but I’m hopeful that just knowing it is on the horizon for us will keep me vigilant for signs. I am hopeful that together my daughter and I can navigate these waters so she can truly have a voice, take up her space and own her body. What I love about designing for FPGirl is our commitment to positive messaging and empowering our girls. We foster a safe, fun environment and encourage the girls to interact in a positive way.

When a 10 year old Tylie posted on our site last week “How do I show myself? I am really shy and I really want to show who I am. How can I do that?” the girl community was quick to comment and offer beautiful words of encouragement to her.

Some comments that touched my heart were:

“Stand out and don’t be afraid to say what you’re thinking! Hope it helps.”
“Take one step at a time. Don’t rush yourself. Show them you are a beautiful intelligent girl.”

“Each day I set a goal for myself, saying, ‘Today I will talk to the new girl’, or, ‘Today I’ll raise my hand in class’. It helps me to be more outgoing and it makes me feel good when I accomplish my goal.”

These comments, written by girls who have never met 10 year old Tylie, make me proud of who we are and what we are doing every day for these girls.
To help empower our girls, we have developed some beautiful graphics for them to use in their designs, “Be bold, be bright, be YOU”, “Dream & Design in COLOR” and an inspiration grid that includes phrases like “be a friend”, “be original”, “learn everyday”, “dare to dream” and many more.

Our hope is that these graphics will help these girls take up their space and be empowered to be exactly who they want to be.

Our girls are our future, and we love our FPGirls madly.