In Iowa: What messages are we sending our girls?

I read something recently that broke my heart.

The Iowa Department of Public Health 2014 Iowa Youth Survey, released March 13, polls sixth-, eighth- and 11th-graders on topics including substance abuse and mental well-being.

The results found 53 percent of Iowa girls said they felt worthless at some point in the past 30 days. Thirty-seven percent of boys felt that way.

I am disturbed to learn more than one-in-three boys have felt worthless. But more than half our girls felt that way?

Something is very wrong here.

The department collected surveys from 77,139 students representing 85 percent of public school districts in Iowa.

For a variety of questions on depression and mental well-being, from simply feeling sad to planning and attempting suicide, Iowa's teenage girls were consistently about twice as likely as boys to be suffering.

Twenty-three percent of girls reported feeling sad or hopeless for an extended period, compared with 12 percent of boys.

Seventeen percent of girls said they had thought seriously about killing themselves, compared with 9 percent of boys. Ten percent of girls had planned how they would kill themselves and 5 percent had attempted suicide - that's compared to 6 percent and 2 percent for boys.

What messages are we sending our girls that lead so many more of them to feel so hopeless? What are they internalizing that their male counterparts are not?

I don't know the answer to that, but it's clear they are messages they learn as they get older.

That statistic about feeling worthless? Forty-two percent of sixth-grade girls reported feeling worthless. That number jumped to 64 percent for 11th-graders.

I have to credit to my colleague Chelsea Keenan for noticing and writing about these numbers while most people were looking at kids' drug and alcohol use. She interviewed some great organizations such as Girls on the Run and the Girl Scouts that are working to build girls' confidence.

I talked with an organizer of another such group, Girls Rock! Iowa City, a summer camp where girls write and perform rock songs.

'Girls, as they're approaching middle-school age and hitting puberty, they're hearing all these things about how their physical self isn't acceptable,” co-founder Merit Bickner said. 'They're really internalizing that and translating it into they're not acceptable.”

Younger girls are hearing that message, even if they haven't yet internalized it as much as their older counterparts.

Here are lyrics from 'LOUD”, a song by Girls Rock! participants Erin Partridge, Liliana Moessner, Rebecca Michaeli and Ali Meredith, who were all 8- and 9-years-old when they wrote this:

They say be a lady,

Act like a lady, too.

We say we will act however we want to.

Girls are brave,

We have our own thoughts,

We don't need a boy to show us who we are

They say we're not strong, that category's wrong.

We're strong on the outside, stronger on the inside

We're beautiful inside and out

These girls are my elementary school heroines. I hope they don't lose touch with this message as they grow older.