I feel almost like I’m reacting to a book I’ve already read and digested long ago as I contemplate what to say about Bringing Up Girls by Dr. James Dobson.  It’s Steady Eddie’s book, really.  I ordered it at his request (although I did want to read it, and in fact, due to insomnia, finished long before he ever got out of the starting gate with it).  I don’t know if it’s because I’m already familiar with what Dr. Dobson has to say, or if it’s because I am a girl and have been raising two of them for over five years now so some of the information in the book was intuitive to me, but I didn’t come away feeling like I had any new revelation about anything.  However, that’s not so say I don’t recommend the book, perhaps especially for men who have the task of helping to bring up girls.  In fact, I do recommend it.  This book simply solidified many of the things that I have observed and experienced in this interesting calling called parenting two little girls:

• Fathers are extremely important to them, even if they cling to their mother more.
• The cultural pull (Dobson calls it “the river of culture”) toward immodesty and loose living is very strong, but still, children do respect what their parents have to say.  In fact, they are likely to listen to and heed their parents’ advice,  if their parents actually give it.  (It seems that some parents are actually afraid to tell their daughters what they think about certain issues, for fear of driving them away or toward rebellion.)
• Technology is a new challenge that we parents of this generation have to figure out in ways that no other parents have had to do before.

There’s a lot more to this book than that, of course, including a good bit about physical development and how it affects girls’ behaviors, etc.  Dobson includes a healthy dose of research, so if you find a particular topic in the book that interests you, there are plenty of sources to check out for further reading. 

I don’t think I’d consider this a must-read for moms, but maybe it is for dads.  I don’t know–I feel like I’m almost too close to the situation (being a girl myself ) to give it a very objective review.  However, it does make me eager to read Bringing Up Boys, Dobson’s companion book.  Now that’s one that I think will be news to me.