An honest guide to cultivate connection and confidence with your tween.
Growing up today can feel like chaos. Everyone expects the teen years to be tough, but what about the years before? Pink Chaos is a guide for moms who are navigating the stormy waters of parenting daughters aged 9 to 12.
Having a strong mother/daughter relationship can help prevent serious mental health issues—including suicide, disordered eating, and self-harm—as girls move from tweens to teens. Shayna Barksdale shows how now is the time to put a foundation in place to support daughters to prevent mental health struggles in later years.
Kids are living in a world that’s totally foreign to their parents—Barksdale calls it “Girl World”— a place full of pressures and anxieties around school, parents, relationships, friends, social media, and global events as well as wonderful things moms probably couldn’t have even imagined (like greater representation around gender, body size, abilities, and more). Girl World is a lot, and tweens desperately want to receive attention, validation, and support from their moms.
With practical tools in each chapter, Pink Chaos teaches you how to validate your child’s feelings, show up with empathy, and engage in active listening that can benefit both moms and daughters. Including simple conversation scripts in girl-approved language, Pink Chaos is a vibrant, easy-to-digest book that moms can turn to again and again as they navigate life with their tween daughters.

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Emily Schultz is the author of the novel Joyland and the short story collection Black Coffee Night. She is the former editor of This Magazine. Her poetry has been published in 18 different publications across Canada, including The Walrus. The Globe and Mail recently called her fiction “mesmerizing.” Schultz lives in Toronto.

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