What is Raising Girls about?

Raising Girls is Steve Biddulph's guide to the specific challenges of raising daughters in the contemporary world. Biddulph, an Australian psychologist who previously wrote the influential Raising Boys, argues that girls face a distinct set of pressures that have intensified over the past two decades — earlier sexualization, social media, peer cruelty, and a shrinking window of protected childhood — and that parents need more specific tools than general parenting advice provides.

The book is organized around five developmental stages: building security in the first two years, developing spark and exploration from ages two through five, building a sense of self from five through ten, navigating the turbulence of ten through fourteen, and finding purpose and direction from fourteen through adulthood. Each stage has its own characteristic challenges, and Biddulph identifies what girls need from parents at each phase — both what kind of closeness and what kind of progressive autonomy. He is particularly focused on the father-daughter relationship, arguing that a girl's relationship with her father has an underappreciated effect on her later sense of self-worth and her choices in relationships.

The sections on early adolescence are the most urgent. Biddulph argues that the age ten to fourteen window is a period of heightened vulnerability — girls are forming identity, are exquisitely sensitive to peer judgment, and are simultaneously being bombarded by sexual imagery, social media pressures, and competitive social dynamics that previous generations didn't face in the same form. His recommendations here are concrete: delay smartphone access, maintain family meals, monitor friendships without surveilling, and ensure girls have at least one relationship with a trusted adult outside the immediate family.

Biddulph is prescriptive in ways some readers will find old-fashioned. He has strong views about the damage done by too much screen time, too-early emphasis on academic performance, and commercial culture's effect on girls' self-image. These views are grounded in clinical observation and research, but they carry values that not all readers will share. The book is most useful read as a clinical perspective informed by decades of work with families, with readers deciding which specific recommendations fit their context.