Encore Donna Jackson Nakazawa: "Girls on the Brink"

This week's episode is an excerpt from a recorded interview of Donna Jackson Nakazawa conducted by PACEs Connection team members, Carey Sipp & Natalie Audage. The interview occurred on October 12th, 2022 and is the second installment of PACEs Connection's Connecting Communities One Book at a Time initiative. In this interview, Donna Jackson Nakazawa discusses her latest book Girls on the Brink (2022), which focuses on the impact of modern society on adolescent girls. Anyone caring for girls today knows that our daughters, students, and girls next door are more anxious and more prone to depression and self-harming than ever before. The question that no one has yet been able to credibly answer is “Why?” Now we have answers. As award-winning writer Donna Jackson Nakazawa deftly explains in Girls on the Brink, new findings reveal that the crisis facing today’s girls is a biologically rooted phenomenon: The earlier onset of puberty mixes badly with the unchecked bloom of social media and cultural misogyny. When this toxic clash occurs during the critical neurodevelopmental window of adolescence, it can alter the female stress-immune response in ways that derail healthy emotional development.