There is a Reason People Blame Fathers When Daughters End up on the Pole

There are so many things wrong with that sentence, I don’t even know where to begin.

I spit it out of my mouth during a fight, a disagreement on how to handle our daughter’s misbehavior.

Luckily, my husband didn’t hear it.

At first, it felt good. It was my triumphant spike of the ball. If you don’t listen to my way of parenting, your daughter will be negatively judged by society, unsuccessful, and doomed to a life of sex work to overcome her daddy issues. It perfectly summarized my anger and fear and delivered it in one gut-punch of a sentence.

I’m still grateful he didn’t hear it.

But what exactly is wrong with it?

For starters (unpopular opinion alert), I don’t think there is anything wrong with sex work. What I said is blatantly disrespectful to thousands of women who choose to make their living this way. There is even evidence to suggest that decriminalizing sex work could result in a reduction of human trafficking. I’m not alone here, but I certainly expect that I’m not in the majority.

Side note: That doesn’t mean it is what I want for my daughter. I want her to find the problem she wants to solve in the world, educate herself to the highest echelon she can go in that field, and work hard to achieve her dreams and positively impact and contribute to society.

Another problem — what I said was intentionally mean. I wanted my husband to feel a sense of responsibility for how my daughter builds relationships and grows up (but that’s silly because he already DOES).

I thought being mean would make him listen.

But, it honestly would have made the fight so much worse. And he wouldn’t have listened, he would have (rightfully) gotten defensive and angry. Any point I try to make after that would have been on deaf ears.

WHAT I MEANT was…

o If we force our daughter to give us hugs or kisses before we agree to give her something she asked for, I’m afraid it will normalize the feeling that she needs to give out physical affection in order to get what she wants.

o If we tell her to stop crying, I’m afraid we will give her the impression that her feelings don’t matter and she needs to suppress them instead of work through them.

o If we put her in timeout every time she has a meltdown, I’m afraid she will learn that her feelings don’t matter to us and she deserves to be socially isolated.

o If we ask her what she did wrong when someone was mean to her, I’m afraid that she will learn that when people do bad things to her — it is her fault. I’m afraid she will internalize this and end up in a toxic, or worse, abusive relationship.

Finally, what I said is not only mean — it’s simply not true. Parenting is messy, complicated, and shared between ALL people raising a child. This includes dads, more dads, moms, more moms, grandmothers, aunts, and the whole village.

Parenting is hard, and that is compounded by the fact that what we do now has much larger impacts in the future. As the adults, we need to stop and think before we react and consider the implications of what we are and what we aren’t saying.

The struggles women face are being highlighted every day, and we can benefit from this and do better by our own daughters.

And that’s what I should have said.