Some recent comments on a few teen based blog posts here at families.com has called out Dad’s and their absence in the life of teen girls. As the mother of both a male and female teen, I have to admit that my husband and I tend to team off according to sex. My daughter and I have our girl things, and my husband and son have their boy and tech stuff.
There are few people alive who would poo-poo the importance of the value of the father in a boy’s life, especially the life of a male teen. However, few acknowledge that a female teen needs as much, if not more attention.
Here are some of the things that girls get from their father’s:
Girls learn to respect themselves based on the amount of respect that her father gives her and her mother. If he makes her feel valuable, she will be valuable.
Girls learn positive body image, or negative body image based on compliments from her father. If he calls your daughter fat, it isn’t going to make her lose weight, it is going to make her hate herself.
A girl will choose partners based on the kind of person her father is. Women with abusive husbands had abusive dads. Women with aloof husbands had aloof dads. Women with doting husbands had doting dads.
As a teen girl grows up and enters the world, no matter how wonderful her mother was, without the proper attention from a male role model, preferably her father, she will be lost in many ways.
Girls without a good relationship with her father ends up looking for love in all the wrong places and we all know how easy it is for a bad boy to lead a good girl down the wrong path.
As a mother of a girl beginning her teen journey, I am training myself to remove myself from the scenario when it comes to my daughter and my husband. As they both have gregarious personalities, they love to go out to the mall, and into public venues and interact with other people. As much fun as they are to be around, sometimes I opt to stay home so they can have some one on one time. I also keep my eye open for father and daughter events that they can attend. By pushing them together more, it fights the natural inclination to always pair off by sex, and my daughter gets the benefit of a good relationship with her father. Dad also gets to stay connected with his baby-girl.
The benefits for me are that my daughter is happier and has a good sense of self, and that I get some alone time with my son as well.
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