When I was a kid, in truth I was a bit of a scaredy cat. The ‘adventurer’ in my family has always been my big brother. He’s the one who’s a search and rescue pilot. He’s the one who’s climbed the tallest mountain in the Swiss Alps, in a snowstorm—for fun.⠀
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Still, I’m always trying to shake up the scaredy cat inside me. And I’ve always known how important it is for girls to feel brave as they grow up.
Girls not feeling confident in themselves is common. In the high school years especially, according to Girl Scouts developmental psychologist Dr Andrea Bastiani Archibald, “girls, at large, experience so much hesitancy and a normative drop in confidence.”
One way to counteract that dip in confidence? By encouraging a sense of adventure in girls before they’re teenagers.
Such adventures don’t have to be big. Research from Anglia Ruskin University shows that even just going for a walk outside leaves people feeling more confident and better about their bodies. After all, nature doesn’t care about how we look. It doesn’t care who our friends are or the grades we got. It’s a place where we can really be ourselves.
That’s why I teamed up with the award-winning illustrator Amy Blackwell to create a middle grade book dedicated to real-life women adventurers from around the world, from 2,000 years ago to today.
The Girl Who Rode a Shark: And Other Stories of Daring Women
A USBBY Outstanding International Book 2020 and a CBC kids’ book pick, The Girl Who Rode a Shark: And Other Stories of Daring Women has been receiving star reviews in lots of places. Even more exciting, kids have been dressing as women from the book.
Here’s a young reader called Sophie dressed as her favorite dancer-turned-treetop scientist Nalini Nadkarni.
