A Mighty Girl's top picks of building and engineering toys for inventive Mighty Girls from toddlers to teens.

It starts the first moment an infant or toddler realizes that one block can balance on another block. Before you know it, building a tower to the sky (and making it crash down!) has become a favorite activity. For many kids, building toys remain favorites throughout childhood, with structures becoming more complex as kids' building skills advance. And once they can incorporate moving parts, budding engineers get to really explore all the incredible things they can put together! Continue reading → Continue reading

A Mighty Girl's top picks of books and toys for teaching kids about money management.

Financial literacy is an essential skill for every child to learn! Money is an integral part of modern life, and whether your child is a preschooler counting coins, an elementary school child saving for a new toy, a tween learning about investing, or a teen budgeting for school expenses or their first full-time job, there are plenty of opportunities to teach kids how to earn, save, spend, donate, and invest. And yet a recent study from the Girl Scouts found that only 12% of girls aged 8 to 17 feel very confident making financial decisions, proof that we need to do more to improve kids' financial literacy.

In this blog post, we've showcased our favorite resources to help kids (and maybe parents too!) learn more about money and how to manage it. From play money that helps young kids learning to identify coins and bills, to books that introduce concepts like debt, entrepreneurship, and investing to older kids, and even a few titles to guide parents in money conversations, these resources will help you give your Mighty Girl the confidence to manage her money successfully — and use it to plan for her future. Continue reading → Continue reading

Our top picks of empowering books celebrating adoption and adopted Mighty Girls!

“If the standard route for creating a family had worked for me, I wouldn't have met this child. I needed to know her. I needed to be her mother. I know now why all those events happened. Or didn't happen. So I could meet this little girl. She is, in every way, my daughter.” — Nia Vardalos, Instant Mom

Today is National Adoption Day, a day for “celebrating a family for every child.” Around the the world, there are millions of children who have found the home and love they deserve through adoption — and millions of parents who have found joy and love in return! Continue reading → Continue reading

"My daughter's body is actually hers, not mine."

The many gatherings of family and friends during the holiday season give parents a special chance to teach their daughters an empowering lesson: you don't owe anyone your physical affection. "The ritual of demanding affection from children on cue is one of those tiny, everyday little lessons in which we teach children — especially girls — that they are to tailor their emotional responses to please others," observes blogger Kasey Edwards in a Daily Life op-ed. By letting kids decide whether to greet someone with a hug or a kiss, parents can teach the basics of consent and bodily autonomy as early as the toddler years. And, such lessons can have an impact for years to come as Girl Scouts' development psychologist Andrea Bastianai Archibald explains: "The notion of consent may seem very grown-up and like something that doesn’t pertain to children, but the lessons girls learn when they’re young about setting physical boundaries and expecting them to be respected last a lifetime." Continue reading → Continue reading

Before Sara Josephine Baker took charge, a third of children died before their 5th birthdays.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the pioneering physician Sara Josephine Baker revolutionized public health care for children in New York City. When Baker started her public health work, the impoverished slums of Hell's Kitchen on the city's West Side were among the most densely populated places on Earth, and epidemics killed an estimated 4,500 people each week in the overcrowded immigrant tenements, including 1,500 babies. With a third of children born there dying before their fifth birthday, Baker famously remarked that "It is six times safer to be a soldier in the trenches than a baby in the United States." Thanks to her initiatives, the death rate plummeted, and Baker became famous as doctor who had saved 90,000 children in New York City and countless others as her reforms were replicated across the United States and in other countries. Continue reading → Continue reading

Remembering the forgotten history of the Women's Suffrage Movement's "Night of Terror"

The Silent Sentinels picketing the White House in 1917.

When we tell our children about the fight for women's suffrage in America, we often tell a sanitized version of the story. We talk about letter-writing campaigns, activist conferences, and stirring speeches — and occasionally, we mention defiant suffragists being hauled to jail. But we often shy away from the darker truths about the sacrifices and suffering many suffragists had to endure in the fight for women's right to vote. Continue reading → Continue reading

16 Trailblazing Female Wartime Heroes Who Belong in the History Books

Often, the popular image of women in wartime is worried wives, girlfriends, sisters, and daughters, pining at home for the men they love who are risking their lives on the battlefield. The reality, though, is much different! Women have always made significant contributions to war efforts — both on the homefront and on the front lines. While women's contributions at home, especially during WWII, have become more widely known, the stories of their heroism on the battlefield are rarely told. In every war there have been women who dared to spy across enemy lines; treat wounded soldiers in the midst of the fighting; report from the front as journalists, and fight shoulder to shoulder with their male peers. And although we don't hear of them often, women also fought for an equally important cause: peace. Continue reading → Continue reading

A Mighty Girl honors women veterans of past and present with reading recommendations for children and teens.

“If the nation ever again needs them, American women will respond.” — Byrd Howell Granger, WASP pilot

On November 11, 1918, World War I formally came to an end with the signing of armistice but despite the hopes that this would mark the war to end all wars, conflict has stayed with us throughout the decades. Today, countries around the world choose November 11 to honor the service of those who fought abroad or worked tirelessly at home and those who continue to do so today. With Veterans Day in the US, Remembrance Day in Commonwealth countries, and Armistice Day in other nations, we take a few precious minutes of time to pay tribute to the living veterans of war and remember those who died in it. Continue reading → Continue reading

A Mighty Girl's favorite Hanukkah stories starring Mighty Girls!

This year, Hanukkah, the winter Festival of Lights, begins on December 7. To help you celebrate the miracle of eight days of light, we're sharing our favorite Hanukkah books starring Mighty Girls. These books celebrate this special holiday and how it brings families together for eight special nights every winter. Full of joy, fun, and the importance of family tradition, these stories are a perfect way to remember this special holiday.

You can also learn about our favorite books celebrating Christmas in our blog post, Christmas is Coming: Mighty Girl Christmas Stories.
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"We are so busy teaching girls to be likable that we forget to teach them that they have the right to be respected."

Most parents talk to their children about their emotions, but there's one emotion that people often leave out when talking to girls: anger. "I don’t remember my parents or other adults ever talking to me about anger directly," observes Soraya Chemaly, author of Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger, "Sadness, yes. Envy, anxiety, guilt, check, check, check. But not anger.... While parents talk to girls about emotions more than they do to boys, anger is excluded." In fact, from an early age, parents, caregivers, and teachers expect girls to regulate their emotions more effectively than boys, teaching them that expressing "negative" emotions like anger is socially unacceptable. In this blog post, we'll explore why it's important to let girls be angry – and how to teach girls to channel their anger productively. Continue reading → Continue reading