FamilyLife Today®

Ann Wilson: Recently Time magazine published an article about the epidemic our teen girls are facing in the United States and even our pre-teen girls. You ready for this?

Dave Wilson: I don't know. I don't think I want to hear it.

Ann Wilson: Welcome to FamilyLife Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson.

Dave Wilson: And I'm Dave Wilson, and you can find us at familylifetoday.com.

Ann Wilson: This is FamilyLife Today. These are the findings that came from the CDC which stated that teen girls are now in crisis. One in three girls considered suicide in 2021. Let that just sink in. One in three girls considered suicide.

Dave Wilson: Are you sure this is accurate? That's so high.

Ann Wilson: This makes me teary reading it, thinking of my granddaughters. And it said that's a 60% increase since 2011. And it also said more girls are feeling so sad and hopeless that they can't even engage in normal activities. I'm not kidding, I'm teary right now because our young women—

Dave Wilson: You're thinking of Olive and Autumn and—

Ann Wilson: Yeah. And I've talked to so many moms of teen girls and pre-teen girls that are at their wit's end, they don't know what to do because their daughters are believing a lot of lies, and our culture is speaking lies and telling them lies. And we as women are like, we want to go to war and battle for our daughters, but we're not always sure how to go about that.

Dave Wilson: So today we have hope.

Ann Wilson: We do have hope. We have Dannah Gresh with us today. Dannah, I'm so glad that you are here.

Dannah Gresh: I am so glad to be here and you are already stirring my heart up. I'm getting on my soapbox.

Ann Wilson: Oh good, you just get right up on it because I want to talk about it. We're going to talk about this and what an appropriate name for your book called "Lies Girls Believe". I think many of our listeners have probably read "Lies Women Believe". Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth wrote that book and I went through that, I bet a lot of women have gone through that.

Dave Wilson: But you do a podcast with her.

Dannah Gresh: I do. Revive Our Hearts. I'm her co-host. We've done stuff together since 2008. I wrote "Lies Young Women Believe" for teen girls, and many of them said, "My lies started when I was a teenager," or, "My lies started when I was 10 years old."

So we've been working to bring that truth to girls in an age-appropriate way because the crisis you're talking about chills me to the bone. I have Addy and Zoey, twin granddaughters, and Stella Bella. Stella, I call her Stella Bella, that's not her real name. I have to make up names.

I just think the world they're growing up in is real scary. That number, I hadn't heard that Time magazine number, but it doesn't surprise me. In the years that I was writing this book, right about that time, we were seeing the number of ER visits for poisoning, burning, and self-harm for 9- to 13-year-old girls rising.

The average girl in the 9- to 17-range scored so high on an anxiety test that in 1957 they would have put that girl in in-patient treatment for mental healthcare. Today it's so common, we're just like, "Oh, that's pretty normal. That's normal for teen and 'tween girls, so just keep going." But normal is not okay when it's that.

Ann Wilson: Yeah, that's not normal. And so "Lies Girls Believe and the Truth that Sets Them Free", this is for the age of 7 to 12.

Dannah Gresh: Seven to 12, 8 to 12, somewhere in that range.

Dave Wilson: What do you think's going on?

Dannah Gresh: Nancy identified that lies always have two evidences. One evidence is sin. The very first sin ever committed we read about in the book of Genesis. Satan lies to Eve in the form of a snake, and she believes the lie. Because she believed the lie, she acts in disobedience against God.

Sin is one evidence of a lie. But the other thing that we don't really notice in there is that there's a lot of insecurity in there. She's like, "Wow, really? God's withholding something good from me?" Because Satan's saying, "Hey, listen, God knows that if you eat from this tree, you're going to be just like Him."

She has emotions that are not written about on the page, but we can read between the lines and know she had to feel some insecurity to believe that lie. "Oh, maybe that's true. I'm doubting God. I'm feeling insecure and inferior myself so I'm going to eat."

The good news about that is that before our daughters sin because they've believed a lie, they're going to give us the tell-tale sign of what I call sticky emotions.

Dave Wilson: I thought this was genius. Now listen up, this is really good.

Dannah Gresh: If you think it's genius, you need to know that it was actually my husband's idea.

Ann Wilson: There we go. We knew we loved Bob.

Dave Wilson: We're going to edit that out. Just own it, it's genius.

Dannah Gresh: I was like, "What do we call this for the 8- to 12-year-old girls when an emotion is unhealthy?" A sticky emotion is an emotion that just sticks to you and it won't go away, or you're not sure why it's there. Emotions are a good gift from God. When He created the world He looked at the world and said, "It is good."

That included our emotions: our joy, our happiness, our hopefulness, even our anger and our sadness can be good when used in the right way. Emotions are a message. They're a message from God. When those emotions are not fun ones, like stress for example, that sends you the signal that your daughter's stressed out.

If she does less, if she's not in before-school activities and after-school activities and travel soccer team on the weekends, and she does less, that emotion will depart because the message was read and responded to and it's not needed anymore.

But all of us have been on vacation eating bon-bons and our feet up and we still feel stressed out. That's probably because something's really out of order in our life. It might be because we're believing a lie about our life, about ourselves, about God, or about our world.

If we can teach girls how to identify those sticky emotions and recognize them as an evidence of a lie, and then trace them to see what that lie is and replace them with truth, we can help them experience freedom in Christ.

Ann Wilson: This is one of my passions for not just young girls, but women. It's amazing how many women are living with lies every day. They've been doing it so long they don't even recognize it as a lie. If you can help your daughter learn how to understand her sticky emotions now, you're not just helping her behave better today and not sin tomorrow, but you're helping her 30 years down the road.

Dave Wilson: To be a healthy woman of God. A healthy mom, a healthy wife, living in freedom. In some ways, you're stopping a legacy. If that girl grows up and is a mom, she's not going to pass it to the next generation. If she doesn't, we pass it.

Ann Wilson: What are some of the warning signs for moms as they're listening, as they think, "My daughter is actually, her stomach's upset before she goes to school"? Are there things that moms and dads should be looking for in our kids that maybe our girls are believing lies?

Dannah Gresh: Anytime there's a chronic negative emotion that either doesn't go away no matter what you do—for example, a girl who's fearful even when she's completely safe—or you don't understand why it's there. Again, she's fearful and doesn't know why.

I was just in Colorado Springs a few weeks ago and heard about a "true girl"—that's the name of my ministry for 'tween girls—who was having trouble with sleeping. She was terrified that someone was going to sneak into her bedroom at night and steal her. This wasn't rational at all.

The funny thing is the mom was a Christian trauma therapist. She was like, "I don't know how to help her." Can you imagine how horrible that must feel as a mom?

Ann Wilson: And I think for other moms like, "Wait, if she can't help her, who can?"

Dannah Gresh: Sometimes the person we're least objective with is our own children. I was able to go to her. I had COVID and since then I've had chronic anxiety at night. It's physiological. The doctors say it's a melatonin problem. I'm almost asleep and then I wake up fearful.

I have had to be like, "Okay, this is a physiological thing. It's not even an emotional thing. It's completely medical," but I've had to go to the Word of God. I've memorized Psalm 91. Whenever I wake up—in the beginning I would wake up and for two hours I would be terrified in my bed at night because I would be like, "Something's really wrong." I don't think I was having panic attacks, but I was having something like that.

Now I'm waking up and quoting Psalm 91.

Ann Wilson: Can you quote some of it to us?

Dannah Gresh: "He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, my rock and my refuge, my God in whom I trust." If you go on it says, "I will not fear the terror of night."

I can do the whole psalm, but I'll just start to recite that in my mind and I fall asleep in five or ten minutes. I went to this girl and I said to her, "I hear you're having a hard time sleeping." I said to the mom when I met her, "Where's your daughter? We're going to pray for her. Take me to her."

Ann Wilson: This is the warrior in women that comes out. "I'm going to protect my girl."

Dannah Gresh: My husband's looking at me because I'm not miss spontaneous, not like he is, and he's like, "We're going where?" I was like, "We're going to go pray for that girl." I just tell her my story. I say, "Listen, there's not truth to my fear. Is there truth to your fear?"

Ann Wilson: What a good question. And you're not saying, "There's not truth to your fear." You're asking.

Dannah Gresh: I'm asking her, "Is there truth to it?" She said, "No." I asked, "Has anybody ever come into your room and stolen you?" "No." "Have you ever known anyone that's come into your room and stolen you?" "No." "Have you read about it in the news?" "Well, not really."

I said, "It could happen. It has happened. But it's probably not going to happen to you. Does your house have locks on it?" "Yeah." "Does your house have an alarm system?" "Yeah, we actually have video cameras." "Okay. So maybe like me, your emotion isn't telling you the truth."

She's like, "Oh." I invited her to learn Psalm 91 with me. This is like a nine-year-old girl. I prayed with her and several weeks later the mom said she's memorized Psalm 91 and she's sleeping like a baby every night. That's just how it works.

That's a simple example of it. Sometimes it's a lot harder because there is a real fear or there is a real hurt. What you described going through with your dad, that's a real trauma, that's a real hurt. But it was interpreted in the wrong way.

Ann Wilson: You're right, Dannah. I have sexual abuse in my background. I can remember one time that it happened, my mind twisted and I thought, "Something must be wrong with me. This must be my fault. This is something that I do."

You don't even realize that just becomes this lie of unworthiness and shame. You carry it into adulthood and now I'm having consequences of these lies that I'm hearing in my head over these years. If we can get our girls to identify and talk about the things that they're hearing or the lies that they're dealing with, what a freedom.

Dannah Gresh: What a freedom. Even something like that, such a severe trauma, such a severe pain, the Word tells us we can have victory over that.

Ann Wilson: Yes, and I have found freedom and victory. But it's taken work too.

Dannah Gresh: It does take work. Jesus said, "You will know the truth and the truth will set you free." He said, "If you're truly my disciples, you'll abide in my word and you'll know the truth and the truth will set you free." Was some of your work getting in the Word and saturating your heart with the truth of the scriptures?

Ann Wilson: Dave knows this. I could not exist without the power of God's Word. It's not that I should read it; it's become my food every day. It sets me free every day. It reminds me of God's goodness, His grace, and His unconditional love and His power that has set me free. So the answer is yes.

Dave Wilson: So that's truth replacing lies. Is that what you're saying?

Dannah Gresh: We've got to take what is true in the Word and replace it with whatever emotional sticky feelings we have. Now, not all the time is a sticky feeling a lie. A lot of times we are allowing the emotion to become the boss of us rather than using it as a messenger and saying, "Okay, God has given me stress," or, "God has given me guilt. What is He trying to tell me through this?"

You go to the Word and you learn what it's for, and then the emotion goes away. That's how it's supposed to work. Like we should feel guilt, we should feel anger, we should feel fear. When a bear is chasing me, I want to feel fear because that's what makes me respond to it.

When we just feel them and we don't do anything about them, that's when sometimes they can settle in and become lies. If you don't fix them when you're young... did you ever see the VeggieTales Fib?

Ann Wilson: No.

Dannah Gresh: There's a VeggieTales cartoon where this Fib is teeny tiny. This little boy tells a lie and it's this teeny tiny fib. By the end of the thing, he's like the Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters. He's enormous.

If you don't deal with that lie when it's small and manageable, it does grow and become far more damaging in our lives. It spills into every area of our lives.

Dave Wilson: Is a seven-year-old or ten-year-old girl or boy able to identify the lies on their own or do they need somebody to help them?

Dannah Gresh: They do need help. That's why we wrote the book and that's why we wrote a "Mom's Guide to Lies Girls Believe" because we want mom to be the one to help her.

This book is beautiful. It's a workbook and it's beautifully written and illustrated and there's great questions. I like that it has a theme of Zoe. I'm realizing that's your granddaughter.

I didn't know I was going to have a granddaughter named Zoe when I wrote the book. She was born about a year later and named Zoe. Zoe shows up at the beginning of each chapter and it's in a story form chapter book type writing.

Let me read the introduction to Zoe: "Meet Zoe, and she's so cute. She has a little picture. She's a girl whose name means life. She's going to join us as we explore these sticky feelings, the lies they reveal and God's truth. And we're going to start with the very first woman who believed the very first lie. So what are you waiting for? Let's get started."

Zoe shows up at the beginning of every chapter with this cute little drawing of her, and she has a problem. The girls have to help solve that problem by telling her what the truth is. At the end of the chapter it says, "Zoe has believed what lie?" and they identify the lie.

"What Bible verse do you think Zoe needs to meditate and think about truth?" and they write in the Bible verse that they would have found in that chapter. We're putting them in the driver's seat of being the counselor and the advisor because sometimes it's a little easier to be objective and learn the process when it's not your own lies you're identifying. Then hopefully at the end of the book, we give her the tools so that she can start establishing that habit and practice for her own life.

Ann Wilson: How many truths do you have in the book that Zoe deals with?

Dannah Gresh: The book deals with 20. We surveyed 1500 church-going 'tween girls because we wanted to make sure that the lies that we introduced in the book were lies that they really were struggling with. We narrowed that down to 20 that were popping up pretty consistently.

Lies like it's not that great to be a girl or boys and girls aren't that different. That was not the predominant lie, but we were alarmed when roughly just under 10% of the girls were saying, "Yeah, I believe that lie." These were seven to ten year old girls five years ago. That's gotten worse in five years, very rapidly.

Dave Wilson: If that's five years old, would you jump into gender dysphoria today?

Dannah Gresh: We do jump into it in there. We knew it was coming. I've been studying that. I was part of a think tank on binary 15 years ago before it was in the news. I knew that this was coming fast and furious.

We don't talk about the lies in there; we don't talk about transgenderism or pronouns. What we do talk about is that sometimes almost all of us are like, "It'd be nice to be a boy because boys seem to be stronger athletes. It'd be nice to be a boy because boys seem to they can go to the bathroom outside."

That is not a thought I ever had. It's the one a granddaughter just told me like, "Oh, I wish I could do that." It is so normal to compare ourselves. With the culture telling all these other lies around those really normal feelings that girls have had for centuries, it can lead to some really scary lies.

We went ahead and said, "Let's talk about why it's so great to be a girl." There's some really basic theology in there about why God chose two genders. Let's go back to Genesis 1:26 and 27 where He says, "In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them."

There are so many things that are God-like about us. Our language proficiency, the ability to defy gravity and fly to the moon, our creativity, that we can compose sonnets and create great works of art—these are all very God-like qualities.

Even the way we have emotions. I'm an animal lover, so I believe animals have emotions, I think they're adorable and I love them, but we have them in a much more complex, sophisticated way and a much more purposeful way.

There's a lot of things about us God could have mentioned when He said you're in My image, but He says two things: maleness and femaleness are what display My image in this very critical foundational verse. It must matter that God chose you to be a girl.

I like to tell moms, one of the most important theological sentences you can say to your children right now is, "It's great to be a girl," or, "It's great to be a boy," or, "God chose you to be a girl," "God chose you to be a boy." You don't have to study the counterfeits to plant the truth. That's just one of the lies we deal with in the book.

Dave Wilson: Man, as we celebrate 50 years of ministry, we continue to hear stories of how God is transforming families through FamilyLife. Like Andrew and Eileen, for example. When they married, they were so full of hope.

Ann Wilson: Weren't we all? But life's storms came fast: a newborn, family tension, and strains on their marriage. Their home just felt heavy. But God wasn't finished. Through FamilyLife's Weekend to Remember and Love Like You Mean It cruise, they rediscovered Christ's design for marriage. They were even able to help Andrew's parents reconcile after years of distance.

Dave Wilson: Which is really what it's all about. God changes our marriage so we can impact others. Thousands of couples are facing storms like this right now. Some are quietly hurting. Some are on the brink of divorce. Some need hope today.

Ann Wilson: This ministry is supported financially from partners like you who say, "I believe in this and I want to give." Right now, every monthly donation will be matched for a full year, doubling the impact of your gift.

We really hope and pray that you'll consider joining us. All you have to do is visit familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-FL-TODAY. Together we can shape the next generation of families who walk with Christ.

Encourage moms right now who have those daughters between that age. Why is this so important to talk about these things?

Dannah Gresh: One of the really important reasons we're going to talk about it is so that they can have that long-term freedom. One of the first girls I mentored believed the lie, "Everyone leaves." She was in high school, I was in my 20s. She was always fearful that I was going to abandon her.

Her youth pastor had left her. Then she gets married, she goes away to college, she comes to see me and she's 25 now. I'm like, "You're still struggling with that, aren't you?" She's like, "Oh, I'm terrified my husband's going to leave me."

We began to pray because by then I had learned you can know the truth and the truth will set you free. I said, "Let's try to figure out when you started feeling that way." We spent about two hours that night praying.

Her lie was attached to her parents' divorce. She was in sixth or seventh grade and her mom and dad divorced. She said from that night on she had panic attacks that everyone would leave her. The truth is that people will fail you.

Where do we go in God's Word? The verse that God brought to her heart as we prayed for her was, "I will never leave you or forsake you." Being able to be anchored in that changed her forever. She drove home that night—and one of the ways it manifested is she could never really sleep alone. She had a twin, so she always had a twin in her room, roommates in college, then her husband.

That night she drove 18 hours to go home and got tired on the way, stopped in a hotel room, never even thought to be afraid, and slept like a baby. That's how powerful truth can be. If we can give our daughters that gift so that they don't have to go through 10 or 15 years of believing a lie, they can live in the security of the truth of God's Word.

That doesn't mean her life's going to be easy and perfect and there aren't going to be heartaches. It means she will thrive through them.

Ann Wilson: She'll thrive through them. That's what we want: women and our daughters and men and boys to thrive in the freedom that God brings. Through the cross, really.

Dannah Gresh: Amen. It's all through the cross.

Dave Wilson: Well, I always love having Dannah Gresh in the studio.

Ann Wilson: I really love her. I feel like this book is going to be so helpful for so many. Again, the book is called "Lies Girls Believe and the Truth that Sets Them Free".

Dave Wilson: And you can get it at familylifetoday.com; just click on the link in the show notes. We've got Dannah back with us tomorrow.

Ann Wilson: And we have resources to help you as a parent. You can go to familylife.com/parentinghelp. FamilyLife Today is a donor-supported production of FamilyLife, a Cru ministry, celebrating 50 years of helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.