Why “What Are You Proud Of?” Is the Wrong Question for Girls (And What to Ask Instead)
The first time I asked it, I thought I was doing everything right. It was a Tuesday night, pasta and salad, and my daughter Mira had spent the whole car ride home talking about a friend who’d copied her artwork. She wasn’t mad, exactly. She was more confused. “She said mine was better, so she just did the same thing.” I waited until we sat down. Then I asked the question I’d read about in a parenting email: “What are you proud of this week?”
Mira looked at her plate. She moved her green beans around. “I don’t know.”
“Really? Nothing?”
“Um. I helped Mrs. Nguyen clean the art table.”
“That’s nice, honey. That’s kind.”
Across the table, her older brother Sam was already three sentences into a story about the class reptile show. He didn’t pause for permission. He just talked.
I didn’t think much of it until Mira’s friend Zoe slept over the next weekend. Two nine-year-olds, pancakes, and I figured I’d try the same question. “So, girls. What are you proud of from this week?”
Zoe put her fork down. “I don’t know. My spelling test, I guess?” She said it with a rising voice, like a question. She looked at Mira to see if that was the right answer.
Mira shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Two girls. Two “I don’t knows.” Both perfectly bright, capable, and comfortable with adults. But neither could easily name one thing she felt proud of. And both looked to each other for permission before saying anything at all.
I should have let it go. But I’m a teacher, and I’ve seen this exact moment play out in my classroom for years. A question goes up. It’s not even a hard one—”What do you think the author meant by that?” or “Which experiment surprised you?” The boys’ hands fly up. They don’t always know what they’re going to say until they say it. They think out loud. The girls wait. They form complete sentences in their heads. They double-check the ending. By the time a girl is ready to raise her hand, some boy with half an idea has already talked twice, and the discussion has moved on.
It’s not shyness. It’s not low confidence. It’s something more specific.
I started paying attention to the exact moments girls go quiet. In my classroom, when I gave a question and then waited—counted five slow seconds—more girls would answer. When I said, “Think for thirty seconds before anyone talks,” the girls contributed far more. But if I let the room go straight to hands-up, the boys owned the airtime.
I also started listening more carefully to the answers themselves. “This might be wrong, but…” “I don’t know if this makes sense…” “Not sure, but maybe…” One girl, Camille, gave a sharp interpretation of a character’s behavior in a story. It was the best answer of the afternoon. Then she added, “But that’s probably silly.”
It wasn’t silly. She just didn’t trust it yet.
So I began changing the questions. Not dramatically, not as some grand experiment. I just made a few adjustments to see what would happen.
The first change came from a science lesson. We were doing circuits, and the class was restless. Instead of my usual “What did you learn today?” I asked, “What did you try that didn’t work?”
Dead silence. Then Danny said his circuit got wired backward and the bulbs exploded. Then Lucy said her wires got hot and she had to start over. And the strange thing was, Lucy smiled when she said it. She hadn’t failed. She’d figured something out.
That got me thinking about the word “proud.” It’s a heavy word. It asks a girl to evaluate herself. To make a public claim: I am proud of me. And a lot of girls are practiced at making claims about everyone else. She’s proud of her friend, her sister, her teammate. But proud of yourself, out loud? That sounds like bragging. And a lot of girls have already learned that bragging costs them.
So I stopped asking Mira “What are you proud of?” and started asking “What did you figure out this week?”
The first few times, I got “I don’t know” again. That’s fine. It’s a new question. It takes time.
But around the third week, she said, “I figured out that if you use oil pastels and then color over them with black crayon, you can scratch patterns into them.” She described the whole technique for two full minutes. Then she asked if we could buy oil pastels so I could try it.
That was a better conversation than anything “proud” had ever given us.
At school, I’ve added a few similar prompts to my routine:
“What did you get stuck on today?”
“Where in your draft does the writing stop moving?”
“What are you about forty percent sure about?”
That last one is the quiet favorite. “What are you sure about? What are you forty percent sure about?” The girls respond well to it because forty percent is safe. It doesn’t require certainty. It’s a beginning point. Once they start talking, they often walk themselves up to seventy or ninety percent confidence before the conversation ends. They just need an entryway that doesn’t feel like showing off.
At home, dinner sounds like this when I remember to do it right:
“How was school?”
“Dunno.”
“What did you figure out today?”
“We learned fractions. I figured out why one-third is bigger than one-fourth. Because four is smaller than three. In fractions, I mean.” She laughed. “That makes sense. But not. You know what I mean.”
I knew what she meant. And I noticed the word “proud” never came up. “Interesting” came up. “Figured out” came up. Laughter came up.
None of this means the old pattern is gone. Mira still pauses before answering in groups. She still watches other girls to see which answers get approval. She still uses “I don’t know” as a default when an answer might cost her something. I’d be lying if I said I’d solved it. I’ve just found a question that goes around the guardrail rather than slamming into it.
A few weeks ago, she came home from a three-day overnight camp. She was quiet in the car, tired, full of half-stories. I asked, “What did you figure out while you were gone?”
She rolled her eyes. But then she said, “I figured out how to French braid my own hair. Sort of.” She paused. “Also I figured out I don’t actually like being away from home. I thought I would, but I don’t. Which is also figuring something out.”
That last phrase—”which is also figuring something out”—felt like a small win. She was recognizing that learning what isn’t true counts as much as getting something right. And that’s really the shift I was after. When I ask “What are you proud of?” she narrows her identity into things that look good to other people. When I ask “What did you figure out?” she gets to be someone with curiosity, someone who experiments, someone who doesn’t have to be right immediately.
I don’t know if this stays the right question. When she’s thirteen, “What did you figure out?” might earn an eye roll and a slammed door. That’s okay. The question will have to evolve. What I hope stays is the habit: asking her to describe her own mind, not her own image.
I’ve also started asking Sam the same questions. He doesn’t need them the same way, but he gets them anyway.
At dinner the other night, I asked both: “What did you learn this week that you didn’t expect?”
Sam said, “Spiders can survive underwater for a while.”
Mira said, “That people can be mean and nice in the same day.”
She looked at me for half a second—I caught her checking the answer for approval. Then she picked up her fork and kept eating. No apology followed. No “that’s silly.”
I don’t know exactly what to do with that except pour more pasta and ask again tomorrow.
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