Collaboration is hard. Collaborating on a book can be very hard. Kasey Edwards and Dr Christopher Scanlon are a husband and wife team who’ve written several books, including two young adult fantasy novels under the pen name Violet Grace. The answer to the question of how they find the collaboration process lies not only in what they say, but how they say it, often adding on to what the other has said to provide further explanation or a different angle.
When they write, Kasey does the first draft, Chris’ “superpower is structural editing”, so his part of the process is to “organise it and add evidence.”
Kasey sums up the process: “I like writing dialogue. I don’t like writing worldbuilding. And Chris is really good at the worldbuilding and the fight scenes; we actually get to do the bits that we like.”
Their latest book, Raising Girls Who Likes Themselves: in a world that tells them they’re flawed, arises from their other collaboration in life: being parents. They explain with succinct eloquence that “with a lot of the parenting advice we read when we were new parents, it was all do the same thing, but just a little bit better […] And, well, if we do the same thing as people were doing five years ago, ten years ago, how are we going to get a different result? So, we really feel if we want to change this cycle of downward spirals of low self-esteem and anxiety and self-doubt, and insecurity in girls, we actually have to do something different.” Thus came about the creation of their book.
Raising Girls is a rallying cry to rethinking how we confer the respect onto our children to give them the tools to make their own decisions. And that attitude comes from a really lovely place, which is obvious in the delightfulness which characterises their interactions, not simply with me, but with each other, too.
They’re clearly a wonderful team
What they say has a certain common sense to it, and indeed, that thoughtful yet unpretentious approach which looks at the reality of how we live as a society and responds to that reality characterises the advice within their book. Kasey tells me “everything in our book, we have done ourselves. If you look at the leading parenting experts in the country at the moment, it’s been a long time since they’ve raised a child.” While that’s a significant point of difference between their book and other parenting books, it also explains why Raising Girls is written in such a clear, accessible way. Despite the fact that I don’t have any children, the interrogation into the baggage we carry that we can pass on to our children, means I understood exactly what they were saying at every point. I make the comment that while the book is about parenting, it has very down-to-earth elements of self-help because it encourages the reader to consider their own hang ups. Kasey acknowledges immediately, “Through this process of working out what kind of parents we wanted to be, we actually had to be really honest with ourselves about the changes that we wanted to make.”
I read the book in preparation for my interview with Kasey and Chris, expecting to collect a few tips to store in the back of my mind for when it comes time for me to have a child. I didn’t expect that it would provide such rich food for thought about what’s layered into my own worldview, perception, and thought. It makes sense; if you’re parenting someone, you need to reflect on why you may impose a certain boundary, or provide a certain piece of advice. Often, that means you need to unpick what’s driving those actions, which can lead to re-evaluating your own attitudes. It’s self-help, but not, because the end result is about shaping young women to be healthier and happier, rather than focusing on yourself. But a consequence is that you can remould elements of yourself. Like virtually every woman I know, I’ve struggled with questions of body image and body autonomy, so when the book points out that women are often taught to hint that they may want something rather than directly ask (for example, saying “oh, I’m really hungry,” or “I wish I had something to motivate me through my homework” rather than outright saying, “can I have something to eat?”), I felt gently called out. Even now, in my late twenties, I still hint. Similarly, when the Edwards and Scanlon discuss the fact that young girls are often put in awkward situations where a stranger may solicit a hug or kiss which the child may not want to give, I too at times find myself in the occasional situation where someone wants an embrace that I don’t want to give. And sure, these things happen to boys and men, too, but women are taught that asking is too bold, and the cultural coding around women’s bodies and women’s politeness still gives them less recourse to politely establish body boundaries. The pragmatic advice of encouraging girls to ask directly for something they want, and decline a hug but instead offer a high-five or fistbump shouldn’t be a revelation. But it is. Kasey points out to me that women are often taught, “it’s okay to say no, but all these micro messages they got all the time actually reinforce the opposite.”
So what Kasey and Chris outline are techniques I’ve resolved to consciously incorporate into my own life. I ask Kasey how the process of writing the book has affected her understanding and perception of those elements within her own life. Her answer is immediate and definite. “I can absolutely state that I like myself more. Because I have applied the strategies in the book to myself.” She continues, “it’s which makes me speak with confidence about this book, because if I can change myself at 45, we can get this foundation right for our girls.”
There’s a powerful message within her response—and the book—which speaks to the fact that Raising Girls definitely has a place, not only as a way to guide parents in how they forge their girls into strong, confident people, but as part of a broader conversation.
But of course, Raising Girls is a parenting book. So it gives clear and simple advice, backed up by research, and unpacked in a fashion that explores the logic behind what they recommend parents actually do. Chris succinctly describes it the book’s approach, “a strategy,” which includes “the principle behind it, and the research that’s informed it.” When it comes to how to meaningfully work towards instilling a sense of body autonomy into girls, Kasey explains “we’ve created a framework, which then gives clarity and confidence to all those other micro decisions that we make each day,” and that principle is exemplified in the single rule: “if it’s not permanent and it’s not harmful she gets to decide. One rule clears up 100 different questions.” In the manner that characterises their dynamic, Chris immediately adds an example: “our youngest recently cut her own hair. [I thought], hey, she can decide. She was quite happy with it […] It becomes a lesson for her, you know, your body to decide. We wouldn’t have chosen that. But it’s not our choice.”
That principle—is it permanent, or harmful?—guides so much of the advice they give across so much. When it comes to the books or shows they may stop their girls from watching, the books they don’t allow their girls to read are generally only the ones which can “lay the foundations for an eating disorder,” or have “the romance presented as toxic relationships.” When it comes to screen time, for social media, “the first rule is the guidelines on the app, you know, if your daughter is 12, she’s too young for Instagram,” but beyond that, “if your child is doing everything that they should be doing […] and you don’t see time screen time is a problem, don’t worry about it.” The book goes to extensive effort to deconstruct the science which theoretically backs up the claims about the dangers of too much screen time (my favourite being that people who wear glasses have a higher correlation with negative wellbeing than those who spend a lot of time in front of screens, which Chris restated as we chatted, with a humorous comment about my own glasses). It’s just one example of the way Raising Girls cuts through so much of the anxiety and needless debate surrounding oft-fraught topics.
If I had to sum up the consistent approach to the philosophy, I’d say that Kasey and Chris advocate critical thinking in parents by asking them to consider the underpinning principle behind what they tell their children, but also in children, by giving them the tools to make decisions for themselves from an early age. It feels that this is the appropriate time to champion such an approach given the rise of fake news and the need for skills that impart critical evaluation to assist in separating spurious claims and spin from truth. Kasey wrote an article in the middle of last year (2020) about the struggle being close to someone who has bought in to conspiracy theories, in addition to an interview she conducted with a reformed anti vaxxer, so it feels like she has a specific insight into the importance of teaching critical thinking.
She comments, “our approach is, it’s not the big grand experience, it’s the little things we can do every day, that lay the foundation […] we set them up as critical thinkers, which means we set them up to value their opinion more than anyone else’s…they’re micro moments that just add up.”
And of course, Chris comes in to sum it up: “It’s consistency over time.”
Chris goes on to paint a picture of how those conversations and everyday moments take place through conversations that try to get his daughters to think about “portrayal of girls and women in media, in the beauty industry, in advertising, and things like that, to try and kind of foster that conversation from a very young age because I think you can do it in age-appropriate ways in which kids will respond to, and once they start to see the pattern and cotton on and so they can start identifying it.” The clarity with which they articulate how to lay such a vital groundwork make it really accessible, which I think is the other key appeal of the book – everything is presented in a really unintimidating, approachable manner.
I finish the interview by asking what they like about working with each other. As he replied, Chris becomes reflective. “The final product is kind of strange to me,” he admits. “It’s intersubjective, like there’s a third person who wrote the book…the final product is somehow between us.” Kasey adds that on a pragmatic level, “having a shared project is a protective factor in marriage.”
That clear sense of communication and connection is obvious when I ask my final question, what’s their favourite thing about parenting with each other. They both pause, and Kasey jumps in first with a smile. “It’s fun,” she says simply.
Chris responds after a moment, “and the girls are just funny, too.” He shares a funny anecdote with me about how their younger daughter was winding up her elder sister. “You kind of want someone to tell that story to, but knowing the characters involved, too. So I think that’s been…sharing the hilarity of them.”
It’s a lovely thought to take away; that while parenting is indeed hard work, it’s really rewarding too. And when you have a good set of guiding strategies, it makes that task just a little bit easier.
