Agency Before Goals
Before Goals: Helping Your Daughter Acquire Agency in 2025
Whether you are a January resolution goal-setter or not, this time of year has unavoidable natural endings and new beginnings. The holiday season, winter break, and first semester in school are over. A new calendar year begins, as does a new tax year, so end-of-year statements roll in, totaling up your previous year in dollars and cents. One more trip around the sun marks changes in your body and health; our daughters are another year older. Therefore, we naturally reflect and evaluate the past year intentionally or unintentionally. At the same time, one foot is poised on the edge of a new year where hope for change appears most attainable. This is a liminal time, a place of transition, where you have the power to enact change.
TUNE INTO YOU
Before focusing on our daughters, let’s tune into ourselves first. What thoughts and feelings do you have right now about your 2024? Perhaps you made goal-driven achievements that took a lot of work over time, and it finally came to fruition, like getting a promotion, getting a degree, paying off a hunk of debt, or maintaining a significant lifestyle change. Congratulations! Cue Alicia Keys's “Girl on Fire.” Maybe you were mainly in survival mode, responding as best as you could to circumstances beyond your control, like a significant loss, a health issue, or housing challenges. You made it through! Cue Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger.” Do sadness, regret, and shame slither in as you recall failures, bad choices, and disappointments that you can’t wait for time to fade the sting? Everyone makes mistakes. Cue Adele's "Hello."
Remember to be objective with your daughter by acknowledging and bracketing your own “stuff” first. As a mature adult, you know how to evaluate your choices and behavior critically. You can state realistically what you want to be different in a year. From life experiences, you know that you can make decisions that impact your life trajectory. You have had the opportunity to develop agency, believing you can make decisions independently and act independently of others. We also want our girls to believe that they can make decisions independent of what “others” think, including parents, family, and peers. Hearing your stuff doesn’t help her develop beliefs about herself; it only informs her opinion of you. She has to build agency for her life by thinking about and experiencing her own life. Helping your daughter develop agency will help her gain control over herself over time and internalize the belief that her actions influence her trajectory. Depending on age and interests, let’s examine how agency looks in our daughters’ lives.
SUPPORTING AGENCY AT DIFFERENT AGES
Agency is believing that you can act independently and make choices for yourself. You may demonstrate agency when you reflect on a decision or a situation after the fact or draw upon past experiences to inform a present decision. A “gut check” is also agency, attuning to your intuition that tells you one way or another when you can’t always put words to it. Generating multiple pathways forward is another manifestation of agency, and so is reflecting and evaluating a choice.
Agency is important because it is related to having an internal (versus external) locus of control, which is the belief that your actions can influence your life outcomes. For girls and women, more so than boys and men, researchers suggest that a strong internal locus of control is linked to better mental health. Additionally, girls with internal locus of control adjust better at home, school, and socially when compared to girls with external locus of control. And who doesn’t want these for our girls?!
Let’s explore some ways to help our girls enact agency in their lives. First, consider the areas in your daughter’s life where she has some control and could have more input. Build on the areas where she already has some degree of autonomy and success in manifesting her influence.
Girls aged 8, 9, and 10 are beginning to know their preferences and competencies. They may like and feel good about themselves in specific areas such as science, reading, soccer, or drawing. Supporting your daughter's developing agency could mean encouraging her to experiment with a new interest without your judgment or seeking your approval. Consider providing resources for her to create, further expand, and try things without focusing on the outcome.
Girls in the middle school years are more likely to doubt themselves, which is a normative developmental phase. Instead, you can help support your daughter’s agency by prompting her to pause and listen to her inner voice. Refrain from adding your motherly commentary or minimizing what she says. Provide extra ways she can directly impact something at home, such as picking dinner once a week or choosing to stay up late with a friend sleeping over.
Older girls at 17 or 18 may feel like their future is unknown and out of their hands. They can control what they do in response to circumstances and other people. Therefore, you can help your emerging young adult name and tame their feelings and then generate multiple ways for her to respond. When left out of a social gathering, perhaps she feels lonely, betrayed, confused, powerless, and sad. Naming these feelings helps your daughter have power over them, and they become less intense. In time, her thinking will become more flexible, and you can wonder aloud how many ways she can respond.
DECISION POINTS
As adults, we have a library of life experiences where we can see how our choices played out over time. Our daughters may not have perspective in the same way yet, but you can help your daughter develop agency by helping her recognize where she has independent decision points. At those decision points, she can pause and check her gut, devise a thousand possible next steps, intentionally choose a direction, and then evaluate her choice.
For more on helping your daughter evaluate choices and set goals, listen HERE to the discussion that Vince, Lisa, and I had about goal setting.
