Customer Reviews

For All Our Daughters: Five Essentials to Help Young Women & Girls Master the Art of Growing Up

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Pegine Echevarria's For all Our Daughters: How Mentoring Helps Young Women and Girls Master the Art of Growing Up, is a clear step-by-step guide for women interested in helping young girls develop through childhood and adolescence. The book highlights 13 crises that virtually all girls must endure in modern times including teenage sex, contraception, pregnancy, smoking, drinking, depression, eating disorders, parental conflict, self-loathing, physical abuse, sexual pressure, and date rape. Echevarria outlines five areas that mentors must be sensitive to when guiding young girls through or around these crises:

1) Physical Development: Engage in some physical activity with your mentee. This will induce conversation about physical development and sexuality, while also fostering healthy body image and goal setting skills.

2) Intellectual development: Engage mentee in discussion of current political issues, art, travel, history, theater, and mathematics. Offer career advice, identify internships and support groups, and promote learning as a lifelong, enjoyable endeavor.

3) Emotional Development: Discuss emotional crises that mentee may experience or be experiencing. Encourage her to reach out for help when needed, identify healthy interchange, model beneficial "venting", and stress anger management.

4) Spiritual Development: Help mentee develop a sense of gratitude for friends, family, talents, gifts, and God. Encourage her to volunteer for worthy causes, take moments of silence, define her religion, establish her beliefs and values, and have faith.

5) Financial Accountability: Stress financial responsibility including: balancing a checkbook, starting a savings plan, opening an IRA, meeting with a financial planner, setting financial goals, making a monthly budget, getting appropriate insurance, knowing credit rating, giving to charity, and learning the art of negotiation.

These five major points are invaluable to any mentor. I especially valued the section on financial accountability, for in addition to its obvious objectives, this advice teaches independence, goal setting, and negotiating strategies. I feel these skills are most important in the maturation process.

The sole problem I had with the book was Echevarria's occasional pollyannishness about being a mentor. From her social work experience, Echevarria relates a story about a 14-year-old girl assigned to her, who came from drug-addled criminal parents that neglected the girl. Encouraging the waif to join her in building a collage of pictures cut from Seventeen magazine, Echevarria wins over the reluctant youth who is soon giggling and glue-covered, and opening herself up to her mentor. There is never a failed mentorship in the book or advice on how to cope with that possibility.

Nonetheless, Echevarria's book is an excellent primer for any mentor for it includes step-by-step lessons on how to counsel young people and creative ideas to build relationships of trust, openness and frank communication.

I'm a mentor in NYC and when I began I focused on helping my girl with academics. We also are active in sports, but there were other essentials I was overlooking like being an emotional or spiritual mentor. The book is an excellent guide to become a whole mentor. Echevarria is also speaking from the gut - she has mentored and recognizes the great mentors that influenced her. She gives us something real to change things with - I recommend this book to ALL of my female friends.

I had the oppourtunity to hear Pegine speak on mentoirng and leadership. WOW! She was amazing. If she comes to your town go to hear her. I wanted to learn more so I brought the book.

I have two nieces. After reading the book found myself thinking about activities I can be doing with them. She writes in a easy to read manner that woke me up. I learned about myself. I am going to do for myself things that I never did. Open myself up to new experiences.

This book is wonderful. I highly recommend it.

A terrific easy to read book that opened my eyes to the challenges girls face. More importantly though I learned skills that I can use with my grandaughters and nieces. A great gift for women.... and men.

I received this book as a gift from my sister in law. It was so powerful!! I have two nieces and didn't realize that simple steps can reap such incredible benefits. I highly reccomend "For All Our Daughters" It is a great gift!! I was glad to receive it!

I loved this book and thought that it provided great insight into the world of struggling young girls. It emphasized a great importance to providing a listening ear to young women who might not have someone special in their lives to talk with.

In this book it was clear that making a connection with the one you are mentoring is both the most challenging and the most rewarding part of being a mentor. Overall I thought that this book was fantastic and I would most definitely recommend it to another mentor.

I have just begun mentoring, and I found this book to be an excellent "primer" on areas to focus on with my mentee, how to approach difficult topics, and an all-around thoughtful, sensitive, and motivating book. I highly recommend it for both mothers and mentors. I will refer to it often.

UNTIL I READ "FOR ALL OUR DAUGHTERS" I NEVER REALIZED HOW IMPORTANT A MENTOR WOULD BE FOR MY DAUGHTER. MY DAUGHTER IS AN A STUDENT, ACCOMPLISHED AND CLEAR-HEADED AND I WOULD NOT HAVE THOUGHT SHE NEEDED A MENTOR. HOWEVER, I REALIZE, FOR HER FUTURE SUCCESS SHE NEEDS TO BE SURROUNDED BY MANY STRONG, KEY WOMEN.

If there's a better guide to making sense of adolescent girls and helping them master the serious challenges they face in today's society, I've never come across it. This book improved my relationship with my daughter by 1000% -- I predict that it's going to become the Bible for mothers and others who care for girls 9-18.