A father writes: "How to raise girls that don't hate you when they become teens"

As a youth worker, I had a conversation with the father of a couple of my charges. I asked him if he feared the time when one of his daughters would, in the middle of a fight, scream at him, ‘I hate you,’ or ‘I never want to see you again!’ *insert door slam here*

His response has remained with me, and is pertinent because I have three daughters. Even then, even though my girls were only 2, 5 and 6, I feared that eventuality, and believed it was inevitable.

‘It doesn’t have to be like that,’ was all he said.

The conversation stopped and we parted ways, leaving me to reflect on his words.

In times when my doubts about my abilities to effectively father my girls have crowded out all other voices to the contrary, this one sentence comes back to me. You see, as a father, I have many choices on a daily basis, about how I carry out my role as ‘dad’. What resting face am I wearing today? How do I react when a glass of milk spills across the table at breakfast? How do I speak to the girls’ mother? What response do I have to being cut off in traffic taking them to school? How willing am I to stop playing a game on my iPad when they call to me?

In all of these moments I can choose the path to relationship, or I can choose the path away from it. And it’s not even altruism or compassion for their position that I need to display. It is merely the awareness that my job is to be dad. You see, I chose the path into parenthood. They did not choose me as their father, but I chose to father them. So isn’t it only fair that I should take that responsibility with a sober mind and an eye towards fostering, growing a relationship that allows my girls to feel confident and safe communicating with me? Shouldn’t it be my responsibility, and not theirs, that our lines of communication are not blocked by me either allowing things to come between us, or by me carrying on a ‘kick the dog’ attitude?

I believe now that my own fear is the fear of many fathers. Those words or that argument may not have occurred to them, but the fear remains. During a conversation I had with the father of a one-year-old recently, he told me that his daughter would not go to sleep in his arms; that either her mother, or more worryingly, her grandmother, had to put the young lady to sleep.

His long working hours, a mortgage and life in a big city have conspired to keep him away from his daughter far too often. As much as I have tried to convince both he and his wife of the advantages of living in a smaller city and working in a less stressful job, the city is as much a part of them as they are of it. All I can do is to talk from my experience and to exhort him to make choices that will benefit his daughter, and the relationship they are growing together.

This, after all, is the thing that people tell me we all wish on our death beds; we wish for more time with those we love. In saying that, we acknowledge that the choices we made at particular junctures of our lives were the wrong choices. Why is it then that generation after generation continues to make the same choices? What does it benefit us if we too will lie on our death beds wishing that we had made the choice for relationship instead of the one for our job, our money, our house? When we make the choice for our kids – which will also be for our partners, I am sure – we make the distinction about what matters most to us.

Interestingly, when we fathers spend more time with our kids, we have better relationships with them. When we are actively involved in their lives, consistently and intentionally, other, unintended consequences result. For instance, when fathers read to their children, the children are more likely to be avid readers. This effect on the children is also increased when children (particularly boys) see their fathers reading, for enjoyment, regularly.

When fathers work less, they are less stressed (of course, this isn’t the same for those who are unemployed, who have a whole raft of other stresses) and are therefore more able to work with their children’s habits and routines than coming home tired and stressed, trying to ‘fit in’ to an already set routine. Less stress means less health issues and a happier life, both in the now and in later life.

In all, the benefits of working less and spending more time with our kids are numerous and well worth consideration. So the next time you have the choice, either to spend more time with your kids or more time at work, think about making the decision for your kids. The more you do it, the more you will enjoy it. You may even want to make a choice for a different work situation that allows for it, without guilt or shame.

I did. In 2010 I quit my job and became a stay-at-home dad to take some of the pressure off my wife, who was then writing her Honours Thesis. Since then, I have gone back to study too, finishing a BA that I began too long ago and am now looking forward to a career in teaching and writing. I had always been a hands-on parent, having as one of my jobs the bedtime reading routine. We have progressed from picture books to short novellas over the years and my daughters have moved from stumbling over word after word to reading Harry Potter under their own steam.

We have an electronics-free day on Sundays. Instead we play cards or board games together, spend time with friends on their farm or at the beach. And we have a much more relaxed household. I don’t get it right all the time and I still find myself yelling far too often and far too quickly for my own liking, but I have the space and the time to work on that. I also reap the benefit of having spent a significant amount of time at home, doing school runs, helping out with school sports and going on excursions, building special bonds with each of my girls in the areas of their interests, which means that our relationship is stronger than either of us getting a bit upset with the other. The bonds that hold us together are stronger than those forces pulling us apart.

So, perhaps that dad was right. I’m hoping that the investment I’ve made in the lives of my girls, and therefore in our relationships, can carry us through the trauma and hormone-fuelled teen years to gentler waters and in one piece.

I hope that you can too. Remember, it doesn’t have to be that way.

What tips do you have for raising girls?