1657. Bedroom Ownership: Only Slight Help for Girls

Her Highness Ramona inquired at 1655 about girls and bedroom ‘ownership’. As you’ll see below, care of daughter’s room is simple and easy. However, the developmental process is more complex and difficult with girls. Moms perhaps could use some help, so a supplementary approach follows.

Boys and girls are different in how they care for their possessions. Girls care for things that inflate their importance—make them valuable—to themselves or their world. Boys care for things they can use for play and competition, possessions that can be used to generate self-admiration.

Daughter assumes naturally that wherever she sleeps, it belongs to her. She’s also naturally motivated to tend to its orderliness and cleanliness. Girls learn early and easily to duplicate womanly behavior and adult thinking; consequently, they mature earlier than boys.

In addition to satisfying herself, daughter keeps her room good enough not to attract mom’s interference (unless she purposely seeks to provoke her mother). However, mom with a few changes can more assertively speed up daughter’s development and harmonize family relations. Mom can reinforce daughter’s vital role in life and family, by adopting the following strategy.

Mom doesn’t point out what’s wrong or out of place with daughter or her room. Instead, she highlights those things in daughter’s life that add to her sense of self-importance. The bedroom is daughter’s home base from which she learns life’s lessons before puberty and lives those lessons afterward. Mom integrates and amplifies daughter’s role in the home environment with supervisory comments aimed at inflating a girl’s sense of self-importance, for example:

• Girls are never more valuable than when they set the example of orderliness and cleanliness for others to see and parents to appreciate.
• Girls are never more valuable than when they welcome everyone to their living space and are ready without prior notice.
• Girls are never more valuable than when they enhance their prettiness and more easily charm the family and outside world.
• Girls are never more valuable than when they learn that boys are naturally competitive, girls are naturally cooperative, and using the difference enables girls and women to outwit boys and men.
• Girls are never more valuable than when they manage their mind, room, and school combination with dedication equal to that of a grown woman.
• Girls are never more valuable than when they understand the difference between the wife and mother roles in the home.
• Girls are never more valuable than when they help mom keep the house as well as daughter keeps her room.
• Girls are never more valuable than when they set housekeeping examples that even boys can understand—and be made to live with.
• Girls are never more valuable than when they set a good example, because it influences others the most effectively.
• Girls are never more valuable than when they deal indirectly with boys, so boys will deal directly with girls.
• Girls are never more valuable than when they do housekeeping chores with a smile and every intention of doing well.
• Girls are never more valuable than when the mental comfort that arises in a girl’s room, being pleased with herself, spreads throughout the house.
• Girls are never more valuable than when they accept that boys and men focus on the present while girls and women focus on the future.
• Girls are never more valuable than when they express their feelings privately and in writing, such as with a diary or journal.

Different from appealing to self-admiration in boys, moms appeal to the need for self-importance in girls. It may take a few weeks, but daughter’s spirits should be lifted, her smiles should increase in number and pleasure, and her enthusiasm for family life should deepen.

You notice that the ‘Girls are never…’ bullets describe behaviors far beyond those connected directly to a child’s room. Girls mature earlier. They intuitively know how to care for their room. Yet, it makes a good starting point from which her mind can emerge into a world too complex for boys to understand but to which girls can adjust with minimal guidance.

May your days be bright and all your daughters brighter. Females early in life learning more about both  themselves and males tends to make life go that way.