Hey Dads: Don’t Treat Your Daughters Like Princesses

You don’t want your sweet little girl to grow up to be a helpless adult.

I can’t write about what it’s like to be a dad, since I’ve never actually been one. But I do know a lot about being a daughter. So from one daughter to all the dads, here are a few thoughts.

Dads, I know you are crazy about your little girls. They twist and pull your heart strings like no one else ever has. They use their adorable charm to convince you to put on a tutu and dance with a teddy bear, give up your last bite of ice cream and sing their favorite song a thousand times in a row before bed.

It’s good to love your daughters!

If you really love them though, you need to stop treating them like princesses. You need to stop catering to their every whim and caving to every request that is accompanied by a pouty bottom lip. Yes, your daughters are special, but that doesn’t mean they should live on a pedestal, calling all the shots and having every wish granted.

You need to let them experience and survive disappointment. They need to solve problems on their own, pick themselves up when they fall and sometimes understand that things just don’t go the way they want them to.

Girls are tough. But they’re also smart. If they know you’re waiting in the wings to swoop in and fix every tough situation that comes along, they are happy to let you do it.

The problem is that girls who get used to having their dad remove or blow up all of life’s little hurdles for them don’t learn to problem solve or be independent thinkers on their own.

And it’s hard to stand by, watching tears run down your daughter’s cheeks when she gets the orange balloon instead of the pink balloon. Every bone in your body wants to step in and and swipe that pretty pink one right out of the hand of the sweaty little kid with a Kool-aid mustache next to her.

You’ve got to hold back though. Let your daughter feel sad. Let her figure out a solution. Maybe she’ll punch out sweaty kid or maybe she’ll make peace with orange. Either outcome is better than her feeling powerless to fix her own problems because you keep stepping in to fix them for her.

I know you don’t want to think about it when your girls are little and cute, but girls grow up into women. Women who have careers, relationships, babies, homes, full back tattoos. Women who go out alone at night, women who start businesses, women who pay down debt. Women who need to know how to do shit in order to survive.

My dad is awesome. He taught me to use a drill press when I was four and a bandsaw when I was five. At ten, I was driving a tractor to rake hay on the fields across the street from our house.

I can’t say these particular skills are ones I now use on a daily basis, but learning a lot of skills when I was growing up gave me tons of confidence that helps me in almost all aspects of my life. People often ask how I learned to do so many things, and the real answer is I’m just not afraid to give things a shot. I’ll try anything, which is why the top rear corner of the piano in my house is missing. I had to cut it off with a hacksaw to get it in through the door.

My dad didn’t build me a treehouse, but he let me have as much scrap wood as I wanted and even gave me a hammer with my name engraved on it for my birthday one year. When I desperately wanted a Coleman tent to camp out in, he gave me a new blue tarp and some 2x4 lumber.

I’m not saying my dad made me into a jill-of-all-trades or anything, but I know the floor plan of Home Depot better than most of the employees and more than once, the custodians at my school have come to my classroom looking for a tool or an idea to fix a leaky water fountain. I can do math in my head and I can estimate most measurements to within a quarter inch thanks to hours spent in the shop with my dad making flooring and stacking lumber.

When I was young, I sometimes envied the girls whose dad’s would bend over backwards to give them the world. But now that we’ve all grown up, I’ve seen those women struggle to fix simple problems, instead always relying on other people—mostly men —to do the hard work and the heavy lifting.

It bums me out when I see a grown woman who can’t jumpstart a car, kindle a fire or do a little soldering to reconnect a loose wire in a lamp. There’s nothing masculine or feminine about any of these tasks, it’s just that for some reason, they usually fall to men.

So dads, stop with the princess schmaltz. Instead, teach your daughters how to do real, useful things. Whatever you are good at — help your daughters learn to be good at it too. Show them how to cook, take care of the lawn, read a subway map. Learning real world, useful skills at a young age will help them grow up to be strong, confident women who can tackle anything.

Help your daughters learn how powerful they are. Forget about being powerful enough to reign over an imaginary kingdom. Instead, focus on teaching them that they are powerful enough to speak up for themselves, to shout out the right answer with pride, to try something and fail. Show them that troubleshooting problems is a way of life, not something you call an 800 number for.

Don’t tell them how pretty they are, instead show them how strong they are.

If your little girl wants wear a tiara and sparkly shoes, that’s totally fine. Just make sure she knows which cleaner to use to get the bike chain grease off them before she goes to bed.

Hey Moms, you should also be teaching your girls how to be awesome, badass, individuals who clear their own plates and know their way around a socket set. But you’re all already daughters and moms, so chances are you’re already doing it!

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