Bang-TINK! Bang-TINK, Bang-TINK! was all I could hear as I watched my neighbors’ 14 year old daughter firing her father’s 9mm Beretta down range at the 8 inch steel target I’d set up for her at my father-in-laws gun range.
For those that don’t know, the loud “TINK!” is the sound that the steel target makes ONLY when a bullet smashes into it… confirming a well-placed shot. They were sounds I did NOT expect to come from a teenage girl!
This was the first time this teenage girl had ever fired a handgun, or any gun for that matter, and we’d already been shooting for 2 hours!
To be honest, I didn’t think she’d want to shoot more than 10 or 20 rounds, but here she was 2 hours later, still begging Daddy to let her shoot more. For me personally, this was the most empowering thing I’d ever witnessed happening to a teenage girl. To be fair, I don’t have a teenage daughter, (yet) so my experience is pretty limited. The smile on her face, as she was consistently hitting an 8 inch steel target, standing 15 yards away, was a heartwarming experience.
Side-note: I’ve seen grown men, who have owned guns all their lives, struggle to hit an 8 inch target with a handgun at 15 yards!
If you’re not a gun loving, 2nd amendment preaching kinda guy like I am, who believes that United States citizens have the right to bear arms to defend themselves against criminals; not just to own guns for sporting purposes. Therefore, you might find it odd to hear me use ‘guns’,’ children’ and ‘heartwarming’ in the same article!
But if you could have stood with me on the gun range and seen the empowering smile that spread across this 14 year old girl’s face, as she started to comprehend that shooting a deadly weapon was something she could master, it would have warmed your heart too.
Why Was Shooting So Empowering For This Girl?
That was the question I’ve spent the last few days pondering. The change in her demeanor was so drastic, that obviously something had changed inside of her mind. The shooting experience had a profound, empowering effect on her. She is now a different person than she was before shooting that gun, and she no longer wants to go back to her old self!
Why?
Maybe the bumper sticker I saw the other day says it best…
“God Made Man & Woman, but Smith & Wesson Made Them Equal!”
There is just something empowering about that quote that tells women that they aren’t powerless in this world… especially when they’ve practiced enough to know that it’s true!
Another part of the reason is because overcoming something you fear is ALWAYS empowering. I think it is also freeing. The human spirit longs to be free, not controlled. Whenever we develop internally, to the point where we can confront our fears and beat them, it quite literally becomes one less thing that has control over us. We become empowered.
But don’t make this common mistake…
Many parents feel like they’ve had a victory when their child overcomes a fear like my neighbor’s daughter did. While I do agree it IS a victory, I think that, isolated by itself, it is a very small victory.
What would be more empowering for this teenage girl, besides just learning to use guns, would be to develop the habit of confronting EVERY fear in her life that controls her. Some of these are easy to spot, like the fear of guns, or heights, or airplanes. Yet others are harder to realize but are just as controlling. Some examples could include a fear of meeting boys, a fear of the water because you don’t know how to swim, or lack of knowledge of how to overcome an obstacle. Other examples might be a fear of a teacher or coach whose philosophy needs to be confronted (respectfully if possible).
These are all examples of many things that could be hanging over a young girl’s head and keeping her from feeling as empowered as possible.
To become fully empowered, each of these constraints on her life must be confronted and beaten, or at least better understood.
This is something I think you can start teaching to young children at very early ages. You can empower a child by consistently putting them into situations where they have to confront a fear and beat it. In fact my program, Imprinting Success Before 5 teaches parents many different exercises for how to teach your children this habit of overcoming fear at VERY young ages.
Your Empowering Assignment:
I have a concept that I like to call “Building Confrontational Bravery”.
“Confrontational Bravery” is that ability to consistently be brave enough to confront the things in your life that scare you.
And there is only one way to build it… by confronting things regularly!
So as you go about your life this week, I want to challenge you to help empower your daughter by building up her “confrontational bravery”, by helping her face 7 new fears this week… and overcome them.
If you want to take me up on that challenge, please leave me a comment with the 7 things you are going to help your daughter overcome this week, and report back to me on how the experience went a week from today.
This challenge is open for daughters of all ages. Whether that’s helping a 14 month old overcome her fear of bouncy houses, or helping your 14 year old overcome her fear of heights, motorcycles, or guns.
If that’s something you’d like to try this week, I invite you to take me up on the challenge.
One Word Of Advice:
I would encourage you to read my recent article on Children and Fear, as there are some common mistakes parents make that can make overcoming fears a harder task than it has to be.
The key to empowering your daughter is to stretch her comfort zone GRADUALLY, not to break her by overwhelming her with paralyzing fear. “Building confrontational bravery” is like building muscles with weight lifting. If you want to be strong enough to lift 100 lbs, and you currently aren’t strong enough to lift 100 pounds, you have to start building up your muscles by lifting maybe 20 pounds first, until it’s so easy you can lift 30lbs. It is only through this gradual strengthening process that you’ll ever grow strong enough to reach your goal of lifting 100 lbs.
“Building Confrontational Bravery” is just like this. Choose things that are fearful enough to stretch you a little bit, but not so fearful that they overwhelm you. Then, over time, you’ll eventually be strong enough to face your BIG fears and overcome them.
If more parents in this world would focus on empowering their daughters like this, we could really help raise a new generation of awesome women!
Until next time. . . . Happy Parenting!
Hi Mac, sorry you kind of lost me with this one…… Don’t get me wrong, I grew up in wild country and as a kid loved nothing more than popping off a few bunnies with the .22, but where I come from (Scottish Highlands) guns are more about hunting animals, and then I always had to gut, cook and eat the quarry we killed. I really struggle to understand the “right to bear arms” thing that Americans tote so fervently, while the rest of us just puzzle over all your college massacres, soaring murder rate and other violent crime only made possible by such easy access to firearms. Surely there are better ways for folks to empower themselves…..??
To try and debate this with you in the comments section just seemed incomplete to me. So I wrote up my argument to your comment here: http://www.betterparenting.com/what-kind-of-child-are-you-raising/
Hi Mac,
Actually I liked the article, and I live in Australia where our gun restrictions for law-abiding honest citizens is very tough. (The laws haven’t stopped the criminals, however. They just got rid of many licensed semi-auto rifles, pump shotguns and the like.)
Having a handgun for self-defense is fine in my book, as long as it is only used responsibly when you know your life is being threatened. (A cop once told me, only shoot someone if you’re prepared to stand before a judge and explain why you had to do it.)
But you can’t have a pistol with you every minute of the day, and an unmoving target isn’t the same as someone who is rushing at you. (If he’s running away, then shooting him isn’t usually self-defense, is it?)
So if she were my daughter, I’d be making sure she did some self-defense course(s) as well, or better still, if she got actively involved in a martial arts club, such as Aikido, Ju-Jitsu or Wing Chun kungfu. (Wing Chun or Ving Tsun was invented by a Chinese nun.)
I am not anti-gun. But it’s good to be able to defend yourself without a gun as well… A handgun can malfunction or run out of ammo. Or an attacker can be so close you cannot draw the weapon. It is always good to have a Plan B or even a Plan C in your arsenal.