Guiding your daughter as she grows up

You can’t tell your daughter who and what she will be in life, or do her self-discovering for her, but as parents, you have a vital role to play in helping your daughter along the way. You can give her plenty of help and guidance.

The jury on the nature/nurture debate may be out still, but you have helped form your daughter’s character and can make a pretty good guess at understanding of what she feels like going through some of the difficulties of growing up with her particular character.

Work out what you felt like when you were younger. How do you react now? This should help give you a greater understanding of your daughter. If you understand, it will show and she will feel more secure.

A supportive loving environment is essential to self-esteem and gives a stable rock from which she can explore her inner and outer world. Your daughter needs to know that she can take risks, make mistakes and fail sometimes, and that she will always be able to come back to you. She needs to know that you love her even when, in her eyes, she has “failed”.

The one thing your daughter needs from you is time. You can’t always give this but should try to give as much as you can. Time allows for space for discussion, for questions to emerge and to be answered, and for a re-affirmation in your daughter’s eyes that you are always there for her. Car journeys, meal times, while doing the chores…. all these give opportunities for “casual” chats.

And if all of this seems rather passive, then finally what as a parent you can do for your daughter is to provide opportunities. The more opportunities your daughter has and the more exposure she has to different activities and events (within reason – stability and routine are essential too), the better able she will be to know what is ‘out there’.

Opportunities that you can provide include:

Female role-models and networks: girls learn from their mothers, other female family members and from female role-models. The lifelong friendships and networks that girls and young women develop are invaluable in supporting them as they move through their lives.

Education: a good school is much more than just lessons and preparation for qualifications – a good school will form the basis of friendship groups and will have tremendous opportunities for clubs, activities, trips and events.

Facilitating your daughter’s passion: you can go a long way to help develop your daughter’s interests, within the bounds of what is practical, affordable and possible of course!

Outings and visits: seeing different things and meeting different people will allow your daughter to expand her world-view and her understanding of her place in it.

Voluntary work and community service: from helping out with siblings at an early age to volunteering in the community in her late teens, your daughter will benefit from taking responsibility and learning how to deal with other people.
Aiming high: how to help your daughter understand her values and motivations, and set goals

Values are important in life. Your daughter will have absorbed many of your values, but she will develop her own value system based on the influences she encounters in the course of her life journey. Discussing with her what matters to you and to her, this will help her to understand her values.

Values underpin our motivations, and it is your daughter’s motivations that will help propel her into choosing goals – short-term and long-term – in life. Identifying goals and working out how to get to them is a sure-fire step towards success in any area of life, and is often not done enough.

Girls benefit from goal-setting. If you have on-going discussions with your daughter about what she feels, what she believes in, and what she might like to achieve in life, then you can help encourage her to set these goals. A word of warning, though: you cannot give her the motivation, nor can you set the goals for her. By encouraging your daughter to think about her values and motivations, and by taking the opportunity to talk to her about them, you can help her clarify her thoughts about what she wants to achieve in life.