This is a serious question, mostly addressed to the adult women among us but also to anyone else who has a stake in the matter.
What did your father do for you/not do for you, that you needed?
Context: I have recently become a father to a daughter, with a mother whose father was not around when she was growing up. I won’t bore you all with the details but our daughter is here now and I am realising that I’m the only one in our little family who has really had a father before. But I have never been a girl. And I know that as a boy, my relationships with my mother and father were massively influential and powerful but at the same time radically different to each other. People say that daughters and fathers have a unique relationship too.
Question: What was your father to you? What matters the most when it comes to a father making his daughter loved, safe, confident and free? To live a good life as an adult?
I’d like this to be a mature, personal and real discussion about daughters and fathers, rather than a political thing, so I humbly ask to please speak from the heart and not the head on this one :)
Thank you
P.S Apologies if this question is badly written or conceived; I haven’t been getting enough sleep! It is what it is!
Treat other women / talk about other women like you want her to be treated / talked about by men.
Respecting and partnering with your spouse teaches your daughter a model of respectful partner she can look for as an adult.
Seeing how you treat other women, friends, strangers, service workers, teaches her how she should expect to be treated by men.
Seeing how you treat other boys and men also teaches her a model to set her expectations around. If you treat boys and men similar to how you treat girls and women, she sees that and grows up knowing she deserves equal respect. If you treat boys/men differently, specially, with more respect, your daughter will grow up and expect to be treated as secondary by other men.
If you see men mistreating women, you don’t have to confront them necessarily, but make sure your daughter knows what they are doing is not ok. Sometimes the world isn’t fair, but it’s still wrong and we want to be people who make the world a better place.