It's Important to Teach Children Bravery, Not Perfection

Reshma Saujani delivered a very inspiring TED talk. It gave light on the important things parents should teach their little girls. She emphasized the importance to teach little girls to be brave rather than to be perfect.

According to Smart Parenting, Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code which is a nonprofit organization that boosts young women to take up computer programming, says that the society has been dictating how girls should grow up. She continued saying that because young girls are always told to strive for perfection, they think of themselves as failure if they don't reach it.

Saujani attended and spoke at the recently concluded TED conference about the importance of teaching young girls to be imperfect and take risks. To make it even more believable, she recalled her own experiences learning to be brave while she ran for Congress in 2010.

She jokingly told the day she decided to run for Congress, "A few years ago I did something really brave," she began. "Or some would say, really stupid. I ran for Congress. For years I had existed safely behind the scenes in politics," she continued. "As a fundraiser, an organizer. But in my heart, I always wanted to run.... In my mind, this was my way to make a difference. To disrupt the status quo."

She recalled how many people told her she was crazy to run for office. That she had no chance of winning, but she ran anyway. Saujani recalled that her pollsters told her that she was crazy to run. That there was no way she could win. But, she ran anyway.

Parent.com reported Saujani saying, "I swore I was going to win," she said. "But on election day the polls were right, and I only got 19 percent of the vote. But this is not a talk about the importance of failure. Nor is it about leaning in. I tell you the story of how I ran for Congress, because I was 33 years old. And it was the first time, in my entire life, that I had done something that was truly brave."

The experience made Saujani realize that there is "bravery deficit" in raising girls. "Most girls are taught to avoid risk and failure," she said. We're taught to smile pretty. Play it safe. Get all A's. Boys, on the other hand, are taught to play rough. Swing high. Crawl to the top of the monkey bars and then just jump off, headfirst. And by the time they're adults, whether they're negotiating a raise or even asking someone out on a date, they're habituated to take risk after risk. They're rewarded for it. Our economy, our society, we're just losing out because we're not raising our girls to be brave. The bravery deficit is why women are underrepresented in STEM, in C-suites, in boardrooms, in Congress, and pretty much everywhere you look," she explained.