As I started writing this review, it occurred to me that I never reviewed the first book by these three women! I definitely read and really enjoyed The Great Sex Rescue (enough to pre-order this book) but for all the real-life talking I did about the book and how it exposes the faulty marriage advice given by the primarily Northern American Evangelical church, I never did a review. So, you can expect that to be coming sometime soon after I do a reread.

Based on a new survey of 7,500 women on their teenage experience, and supplemented with the results from their original survey of 20,000 women, Sheila Gregoire, Joanna Sawatsky, and Rebecca Lindenbach’s aim for She Deserves Better is to use these stats to uncover the fruit of toxic teaching and suggest ways Christian women can raise their daughters to have positive long-term outcomes (on their self-esteem, in being able to identify and walk away from abusive relationships, etc).

If you’re curious about how rigorous the research is, I did find this post by them on how their study, how it’s different from a survey, and a bit about how they derived their findings, as well as one on why they are putting their dataset in ARDA.

Divided into 10 chapters, She Deserves Better covers:

• Common topics in Christian books aimed at teenage girls
• Mental Health
• Boundaries
• Dating and sexual relationships
• The modesty message
• Sex education
• Consent

As you can see, it’s not just about gender relationships, it’s about how we can help girls build healthy self-esteem and to have God be their “safe place”. Because all this is so basic, the authors never really talk about theology – it’s mostly about how to identify toxic teachings by their fruit and how to avoid it.

Honestly, some of the teachings here are shocking. Telling girls that their friends’ dads are going to fantasise over them if they dress “immodestly”? Having girls judge if their acquaintances are “disposable” or “indispensable” based on how they are dressed? That’s just not Christian and it’s awful that we are teaching such things to them.

Although I’m not a mother, I am a Church School teacher to the youth section and that includes (of course) teenage girls. I was lucky that a lot of American evangelical culture skipped Singapore when I was growing up, but I could still recognise a few of these toxic teachings when reading. I worry that with social media, these American influencers are going to be even more influential on the current group of teen girls – and that’s why I found this book useful. The authors go into detail on the various messages that are being given to girls and how they are harmful, and it helps to know who is teaching what so I can identify which material to recommend or avoid. Mothers will probably find this book even more helpful than I did, since there are mother-daughter sections at the end of each chapter for them to go through.

She Deserves Better is a great book for anyone who is a Christian and knows a Christian teenager. Although it’s aimed primarily at mothers, I think being able to identify toxic, un-Christian teaching is essential for any Christian, especially if you intend to be in any sort of mentorship role with a teenage girl. Of course, the other half is that we have to raise our boys not to believe in these same toxic messages, which again, brings me back to the point that this book is really for any Christian who intends to continue in a Church community because we can use the findings in this book to make sure we’re not also passing the wrong message to our boys.