A good friend’s mother dies. A beloved classmate struggles with cancer. She reads about the war in Iraq in the morning paper each day before school. She asks why life is so unfair. What did her friend’s family do to deserve the loss of their mother? Why would a kid get cancer? If there really is a God, why all this?

Having a deep sense of faith and spirituality can help us help our daughters navigate the big questions in life. But how do we help our daughters find a spiritual path that speaks to them, a path that is girl-affirming? How do we help them find that quiet place within that consoles them during tough times?

Girls benefit from spirituality, says Pat Davis, author of Beyond Nice: The Spiritual Wisdom of Adolescent Girls (Augsburg Fortress, 2001), because spirituality gives us a sense of identity and meaning. It helps defines our relation to the cosmos, to others, and to God. Yet finding a place of worship that addresses “the real hard what-about-God kind of questions” that girls need to ask requires some scrutiny, she says.

Too often, faith communities can’t adequately answer girls’ hard questions about sexuality, boundaries, responsibility, and becoming more adult within their bodies, she says. Whether they’re looking at a mainstream denomination or an alternative tradition, parents need to find a girl-friendly faith community “that takes her questions seriously, listens to her, and lets her participate in important ways in the worship,” says Davis.

Those that don’t allow girls or women to be active in worship “can be very toxic for girls.”

What do we look for when seeking a positive faith community for our daughters? Adult mentors and meaningful ritual are powerful ingredients to a healthy spiritual community, says Linda Kramer, an Episcopal priest and founding director of Borderlands Education and Spiritual Center in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Borderlands offers youth programs that focus on ritual, understanding of sacredness, and learning about the spiritual teachings of the Lakota people indigenous to the area. One girl-centered ritual is to celebrate a girl’s first menstruation as “a wonderful and honored event, not something to be kept a secret,” Kramer says.

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