Customer Reviews

The Triple Bind: Saving Our Teenage Girls from Today's Pressures

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I expected this book to be alarmist and possibly patronizing, but was impressed by the quality of the research and the strength of the author's arguments. Hinshaw convincingly shows that modern expectations or perceptions of women have changed since even a decade ago, and demonstrates how dangerous these new expectations and perceptions can be. His central argument is that today's young women are pressured to be good at 'girl stuff' like empathy, relationships, etc. while being good at 'boy stuff' like winning, being aggressive/athletic, etc. AND being thin, pretty, and available. Not only that, but girls are supposed to make all this look effortless. (Boys are supposed to DO. Girls are supposed to BE.)

Whether or not you personally feel this to be the case, Hinshaw's dissection of books, movies, and TV shows (from "Wicked," "Uglies," and "The It Girl" to "Grey's Anatomy," "Enchanted" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer") were particularly interesting and insightful. Teenage girls themselves might find this book helpful, but I would recommend it to any woman interested in the subject, as well as parents.

This is an outstanding work of scholarship as well as an important social commentary and contribution to our understanding of how we live today. I am a child, adolescent and adult psychiatrist and pediatrician and I would recommend this book to anyone who ever was, is, or plans to come into contact with a teenager in any capacity. We are all responsible for these issues regardless of gender or age.

I have worked in high school education for five years, and researched and read almost everything out there on young women. Nothing has even touched this book's eloquence, validity, and solutions. I even read some of it to my class.

The book is very informative. It really shines a light on the stress teen's face. I recommend to any student having to deal with the pressures of extra curricular activities, homework, class work, etc.

This book might be of interest to clueless daddies of troubled girls, everyone else with any awareness and intelligence already knows what this author is presenting. He reads a few studies, talks to a few girls, barely scratches below the surface then writes a book to tell us about this "new" generational phenomenon. Here's the bottom line: a significant percent of girls in society have always been depressed, it's not a new trend, we're only getting better at recognizing it, and a few men are finally taking the time to notice.

The author wants us to believe the problem now is that girls are expected to do too much in too many areas, and while that may be true, the real, underlying problem is girls are expected to be over-achievers in areas that their parents and society have indoctrinated them to believe they want to do, and not necessarily areas of their interest and level of ability--this is not new. Girls have always been expected to be what males want--pretty sex objects--and because girls are now allowed to have careers and other areas of interest they are stressing out trying to be and do everything. That doesn't take a PhD to figure out.

If you are new to thinking about the woman's plight in society then maybe read the book(but don't stop there because the problem is deeper), otherwise I'm sure there are better choices--try one written by a woman, and maybe who has experienced these problems firsthand herself--(same as I wouldn't recommend learning about People of Color by reading what white people have to say about them).