Daughters

If you are a father who hasn't yet experienced teens and twenties with their daughter, you are in for a very rude awakening (if you allow your daughter to communicate honestly with you).

One of my daughters is now 21 I we have been doing relatively fine for the past couple of years but my now 14 year old daughter and I have trouble speaking to each other at all. I think part of it is the dynamic of being a girl and having to push off of your father because you need someone in authority to rebel against in order to grow up a healthy female adult. However, being a father it is sort of like hell to go from a daughter that mostly seems to adore her father to a place where her father is always wrong about everything. "Oh, and by the way, Dad, you are so old and don't know anything!"

So, I either have to laugh in her face at this point or feel kind of wounded so I kind of bounce between these two points of view as the Dad of a teenage girl. Laughing in her face only pisses her and her Mom off so I have to pretend to take her seriously. This is a very big challenge for me even after raising kids continuously since 1974 when my son was born. So, if you are a father of a girl under 12 enjoy it because it won't last. Pretty soon you will have to be more disciplined and adult than you ever thought possible.