I confess that I, and several other gentlemen, once paid a group of young girls in the US to let us watch and follow them around! Now, before you get any wrong ideas, we were not perverts (some of my male colleagues were, however, questioned by security personnel for suspected stalking). Rather, we were corporate jocks desperate to understand the spending habits of teenagers, particularly adolescent girls. We were in the Feminine Care and Beauty Care division of the company that I was working for at the time and were just trying to apply the eternal wisdom of Socrates to know thy customer. And so we gave several groups of girls some money to burn and released them in the mall. We tried to be as inconspicuous as possible as we trailed them, eavesdropped quietly on their conversations, and tried to make sense of any patterns in their purchasing decisions. I don’t know about my other co-workers, but I frankly failed to get any great insights from the activity (neither, I might add, did the DVD on the menstruation cycle that we were asked to study help me as well). Then again, I’ve never really been a sales or marketing guy. I’m supply chain and folks like me would much rather prefer solving the complexities of multi-country sourcing instead of trying to unlock the mysteries of the mind of the young female consumer.
Fast forward a decade or so to the present where I’ve traded my briefcase and expat lifestyle for my kids’ schoolbags and the occasional typewriter-style keyboard. And as I punch in these words, I find myself worrying as I did back then about how to understand teenage girls. My own sweet baby girl who was less than five pounds at birth is now taller than her mother and has just officially entered teenhood. Gone are the days when I could still dance her to sleep as she clung to me like a Koala bear. Now, she’s, well … 13. I do think that I so far have maintained as close a relationship with her as any other father has. But I find myself entering unchartered waters and I worry how it might all change. While the same concern will likely be true for my younger son in a few more years, I guess that it is easier for fathers to maintain a relationship with their teenage boys simply because they have more in common. Being of the same sex, there are also fewer things to feel awkward or to be intimidated about. But I think it is important for fathers to not let go of their daughters and to not just leave them to the moms. According to some psychologists, “…most fathers and teenage daughters never get to know one another as well, or spend as much time together, or talk as comfortably to one another, as mothers and daughters.” Some people may brush off this assertion as but a natural and harmless progression in life. As I’ve written in several articles before, however, studies and research have shown that “…a father has as much or more impact as a mother does on their daughter’s school achievement, future job and income, relationships with men, self-confidence, and mental health.”
The big question, of course, is how to go about maintaining a meaningful father-daughter relationship throughout their teenage years and beyond. I’ve read some material about this subject and two insights seem to resonate with me more than the others. The first is ensuring enough father-daughter time alone. Just daddy and his not-so-little-girl-anymore. I don’t think I’ve done a lot of this in recent years especially as I’ve been spending a lot more one-on-one time with my son. After a certain age, it does become a bit more challenging to find things for you and your daughter to do together. But experts say that these occasions don’t have to be grand or necessarily always mean a dinner-date. They could be simple things like doing chores or shopping together. The important thing is that you are regularly doing something that you both enjoy and that it involves only the two of you. The second lesson for me is learning how to listen to her better. As parents, we often want to impose our point of view on our children. However, as they get older, they will increasingly want to assert their independence. Without relinquishing our parental authority, we need to pay attention to what they say and try to understand their point of view even when it seems unreasonable. Some communicators define this as “active listening” or “…a way of listening to others that lets them know you are working to understand the message they are sending.” This includes “attentive body language such as eye contact, and nodding your head to let the person know you are listening, reducing distractions that will steal your focus, and noticing the expression of feelings the person is trying to convey.”
Now and then, my daughter still agrees to let me carry and swing her around even though her feet already drag on the floor. It’s a concession perhaps to an aging though persistent father who would soon be unable to do so without breaking his back. Ten years from now, I hope that we’d still be as close as we are now and, over a cup of coffee (or maybe even a bottle of beer), talk about boyfriends, family, work, politics, movies, music, and everything else under the sun. For that to have a chance of happening, however, I need to do whatever it takes to stay engaged in my daughter’s life. And if that means doing things like following her around the mall or studying the hormonal cycle of girls, then so be it. As the great Greek philosopher himself might have admonished: Know thy daughter!
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