Free Stress & Girls Handouts
Stress in girls doesn’t always look like stress. Sometimes it’s a stomachache on a Sunday night, or a kid who used to love soccer and suddenly doesn’t want to go.
So we made a set of one-page handouts — what stress actually looks like in girls, what to say, and how to tell when it’s more than ordinary stress. One page for each person in her life.
Free to print and share. No form, no email address, nothing to sign up for.
The handouts
Download — For Parents & Caregivers
What’s actually stressing her by age, the ten minutes when she’s most likely to open up, and a word-for-word script for the hard conversation.
Download — Your Stress Kit, For Girls
Five tools she can use in sixty seconds, written straight to her, with nothing in it we’re selling.
One thing worth knowing before you read them
Stress has an end date. Anxiety usually doesn’t.
Ask her how she’ll feel when the thing is over. If she can name the finish line — “Friday, after the test” — that’s stress, and stress is survivable and even useful. If she can’t name one, or the worry just moves on to the next thing the moment one is done, that’s closer to anxiety and it’s worth a closer look.
She’ll try the hard thing if she’s not doing it alone
That’s the whole idea behind our Glow Girl groups. A small group of girls, working on what’s actually hard — walking into a room, starting a conversation, having an opinion out loud, surviving a friendship that went sideways. It isn’t a lecture series. It’s practice, with other girls who get it.
- 4th & 5th grade — Mondays, Oct 5 – Nov 9, 5:30–6:45 pm, with Molly Mead, LCSW-S
- 7th & 8th grade — Sundays, Sept 20 – Nov 1, 4:30–5:45 pm, with Shayna Barksdale, LCSW-S
- 9th grade — Sundays, Sept 20 – Nov 1, 6:00–7:15 pm, with Shayna Barksdale, LCSW-S
Six sessions, $450 total, at our South Austin office off Menchaca Road. The groups stay small on purpose, which means they fill.
We’ll call you back. Or reach us at 512-981-LCSW.
Austin Therapy for Girls is a boutique practice on Menchaca Road in South Austin for tween and teen girls and the parents raising them. The handouts were written by Shayna Barksdale, LCSW-S, founder of Austin Therapy for Girls and author of Pink Chaos: Navigating the Mother-Daughter Relationship with Your Tween.
