Girls and Risk, The Conversation That We Need to Have – Jennifer Oaten
I want to talk about something that makes many of us uncomfortable, including, at times, me.
As parents and as educators, our deepest instinct is to protect the young people in our care. We want to keep them safe, shield them from hurt, and smooth the path ahead. It comes from love. But I have come to believe that when we follow that instinct too far, when protection becomes the organising principle of how we raise and educate girls, we risk taking away the very thing they need most: the chance to discover what they are capable of.
Over-protection does not build confidence. It quietly undermines it. Every time we step in to solve a problem our daughter could have solved herself, every time we remove the obstacle before she has the chance to face it, we send an unspoken message: I don’t think you can handle this.
That is not the message I want Santa Maria to send. And I don’t think it’s the message you want to send at home either.
What risk-taking actually looks like
When I talk about girls and risk, I am not talking about recklessness. I am talking about a productive challenge: the kind that sits just beyond a student’s comfort zone, where growth happens. It looks like standing up in front of your peers to present an idea you are not sure about. It looks like tackling a project with no clear right answer. It looks like navigating disagreement in a team and learning to hold your ground with kindness. It looks like struggling with something, feeling the sting of it, and choosing to try again.
These are not dramatic, headline-making risks. They are the quiet, everyday acts of courage that build a young woman’s belief in herself. And they do not happen by accident. They have to be deliberately designed.
Teaching the toolkit, then putting it to work
At Santa Maria, we approach this through two programs that work together by design.
Our Mercy Wellbeing Learning Continuum runs from Year 5 through to Year 12. It is a structured, year-by-year curriculum that builds the internal toolkit girls need to navigate challenges. In the younger years, it begins with recognising emotions: understanding what they feel in their bodies when they are anxious, frustrated, or out of their depth. As students progress, the Continuum moves into understanding the link between emotions and behaviour, developing strategies for self-regulation, learning to reflect on setbacks, and building the social skills to collaborate, communicate, and resolve conflict.
By Year 9, students are working on some of the most complex wellbeing capabilities we teach: exploring their personal values in light of social justice, identifying their own emotional patterns, and learning to apply conflict resolution in situations where there is no easy answer. By Year 10, they are expected to identify personal barriers to self-discipline and generate their own strategies to overcome them. This is not a feel-good program. It is rigorous, progressive, and intentional.
Then there is emPOWER, our program that runs from Year 5 to Year 10, where every year group takes on a different real-world challenge. In Year 5, Fearless5 asks girls to make the school more environmentally friendly. In Year 7, Seek7 tackles water sustainability. In Year 8, Explore8 challenges students to innovate for people and the planet. In Year 9, Strive9 puts girls in front of a panel to pitch for real funding for an Australian charity. And in Year 10, Future10 asks them to make real financial decisions for themselves and their world.
The Wellbeing Continuum teaches. emPOWER enacts. One builds the internal foundation; the other gives girls a stage to use it on problems that genuinely matter.
What this looks like in practice
Let me give you a concrete example. In Year 8, the Wellbeing Continuum is teaching girls to identify emotional regulation strategies. That means learning to recognise when they are coping well and when they are not, and figuring out what to do differently. At the same time, Explore8 provides them with an innovation project that is deliberately designed to be an emotional rollercoaster. They have to work in teams, manage disagreement, tolerate ambiguity, and push through when their first idea fails. The Continuum gives them the language and the strategies. Explore8 gives them the reason to use them.
In Year 9, the intensity increases again. The Continuum is working on identity formation, personal values, and conflict resolution in complex situations. Then Strive9 asks girls to do something genuinely daunting: research a social issue that matters to them, make direct contact with an Australian charity working on that issue, and build a persuasive pitch to convince a panel to donate real funds to their chosen cause. It is a Shark Tank-style challenge we call Pitch for Purpose, and it requires everything the Continuum has been building toward.
Think about what that asks of a fifteen-year-old. She has to pick up the phone or write a professional email to an organisation she has never spoken to before. She has to research a problem with enough depth to present credible data to a panel of adults. She has to collaborate with her team through disagreements about which cause to support and how to tell the story. She has to stand up and deliver a pitch, knowing that a real donation of $1,000 is on the line, and then answer questions from the panel on the spot.
That is not a classroom exercise. That is the kind of challenge that changes how a young woman sees herself. And it only works because the Wellbeing Continuum has spent years preparing her for it: teaching her to regulate her emotions under pressure, to resolve conflict within a team, to reflect on what is working and what is not, and to connect her personal values to something bigger than herself.
This is not a coincidence. It is architecture.
Why this matters for girls specifically
Research consistently tells us that girls, more than boys, tend to internalise failure and attribute setbacks to a lack of ability rather than a lack of strategy. They are more likely to avoid tasks where they might not succeed, and more likely to interpret struggle as evidence that they are not good enough. When we add to this the social pressure to be perfect, to be agreeable, and to avoid making mistakes publicly, we create conditions where girls learn to play it safe.
A girls’ school has a particular responsibility here. We cannot claim to be developing confident, capable young women and then design an experience that protects them from everything that might be hard. Confidence is not built through comfort. It is built through supported challenge: facing something difficult, discovering you can manage it, and carrying that knowledge into the next challenge.
"Our girls do not need to be shielded from difficulty. They need to be equipped for it."
What this means for you as a parent
I know the instinct to protect is strong. I have felt it myself many times in my years as a principal, watching students struggle with a project, a friendship, a disappointment. But I have also seen many times what happens when we trust young women to face a challenge with the right support around them. They surprise themselves. They discover capabilities they did not know they had. And they carry that self-knowledge forward into everything that comes next.
If your daughter comes home frustrated by a project that feels too hard, or upset about a team that is not working well, or anxious about a presentation she has to give, know that these feelings are not signs that something has gone wrong. They are signs that she is being stretched. And behind the scenes, she has been taught the skills to manage exactly what she is feeling.
Your role is powerful too. When she tells you it is too hard, resist the urge to fix it. Ask her what she has tried. Ask her what she might do differently. Let her know you believe she can work through it. These small moments at the kitchen table are just as important as anything we do in the classroom.
Our girls do not need to be shielded from difficulty. They need to be equipped for it. And then they need us, parents and educators together, to have the courage to step back and let them rise.
- emPower Program, Featured, girls confidence development, Girls education WA, growth mindset for girls, Mercy Education, risk-taking in learning, Santa Maria College programs, student leadership skills, student resilience, wellbeing education
Author: Santa Maria College
Santa Maria College is a vibrant girls school with a growing local presence and reputation. Our Mission is to educate young Mercy women who act with courage and compassion to enrich our world. Santa Maria College is located in Attadale in Western Australia, 16 km from the Perth CBD. We offer a Catholic education for girls in Years 5 – 12 and have 1300 students, including 152 boarders.
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