Parenting girls | Family Times

Parenting girls involves the same fundamental parenting skills as for boys.

These skills include setting up a good one-to-one relationship with your daughter; discussing with her your expectations and supporting her with her difficulties.

Additionally, parents need to run a well-organised household that provides structure and routines so that your daughter is supported in her efforts to meet the demands of family, school, hobbies and sports commitments. Finally, it also involves setting clear boundaries and providing natural and logical consequences if she persists in breaking those boundaries.

As well as practising these critically important parenting skills, it pays for parents to consider that the strengths of girls? personalities can also have associated liabilities.

Many girls have strongly developed empathy skills, which enables them to form close and supportive relationships with both family and friends. The downside of this is that girls can become over-involved with too many social relationships, and become overextended in trying to meet the resulting maintenance demands of these relationships. Wise parents monitor the danger signs of this and help their daughters to moderate this tendency.

Associated with this tendency of having too many social contacts, some girls overburden themselves with the worries of their friends and relatives, and become anxious and preoccupied about their inevitable ups and downs. Some girls have large friendship groups in which all the girls are endlessly preoccupied with yet another problem of one of the members, and these constant worries affect the mental outlook of all the girls involved in the group.

Including in this mix of relationships is the tendency of some younger girls to become intensely involved with one particular friend with which they share their most intimate and personal secrets. Sometimes these friendships can blossom into enduring adult friendships which bring great happiness and support for both girls. However, they can also end into catastrophic breakups which unleash intense feelings of grief, betrayal and anger. At times these feelings are shared and amplified by the wider friendship groups of both girls, and then a longstanding social vendetta involving rumours and slander can go back and forth between the ex-friends and their friends, causing a great deal of hurt and misery to the girls involved. Wise parents and teachers then should intervene, and should invest time and counsel the two girls into accepting the breakup of their friendship, and to insist on stopping the social vendetta.

It also pays for fathers and mothers to consider their individual approaches with their daughters.
Fathers have a great influence on their daughters, and the strength of this parental relationship will delay the need for a girl to start searching for a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. This delay is an advantage, because it will enable your daughter to embark on these kind of relationships with far greater maturity and internal stability. Fathers also need to be aware that many girls want to process their feelings by just talking things through, and that often the best thing a father can do is to lend a listening ear, without too much advice giving.

Mothers too can benefit from standing back and reflecting on their relationship with their daughter. Many daughters will testify that their mothers are their best friends, and research shows that mothers support their daughters right through their adult lives. However, there can be a downside to these strong mother-daughter relationships in that the daughter is unable to extricate herself from her parent, and is not able to ever become a truly independent and autonomous person in her own right. A mother therefore needs to be careful to foster the independence of her daughter.

Before girls embark on their teenage years, it pays for parents to lay a strong foundation of instilling safe self-management practices. Teenage years are exhilarating and at times difficult, but the best parents manage to negotiate and/or insist on safety first. Research shows that those parents who have developed and maintained strong, caring and mutually respectful relationships with their daughters manage to get their girls through the difficult adolescent times, and witness them blossoming into strong and wonderful young women.

All this takes steady self-reflection; the determination to be the best parent you can be; the wisdom and love to engage with your daughter as she encounters difficulties and the courage to intervene when she requires your boundaries, support and guidance.

By Joseph Driessen, education consultant
Driessen speaks to parent and teacher groups about education. Email zn.oc1347190614.artx1347190614@d.o.1347190614j1347190614.

Source: http://www.familytimes.co.nz/parenting-girls/

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