What to do when your daughter starts liking One Direction

I’ve always dreaded this moment. I knew it would happen eventually, but never really knew when or how it would enter our home.

And now I know: Facebook.

The invasion of One Direction has begun.

Sure, you could say it’s our fault, letting our 10-year-old daughter have a Facebook page in the first place. But you might as well cut her off from friends completely if she isn’t able to communicate via FB over the summer. Anyway, we monitor her online activity that way (luckily, she has befriended us). Her online interests began innocently enough with cute images of kittens, little quizzes, sharing pictures of Jesus and such.

And now this: close-ups of grinning, gawping 16-year-old Harry Styles, his moppish hair all but obscuring his eyes.

Noooooooooo!!!!

Any father of a daughter knows this feeling. I liken it to a termite infestation. Before you know it, the whole foundation of her Facebook environment is crawling with images of the UK/Irish boy band, with lyrics from Little Things posted everywhere like it’s freakin’ T.S. Eliot. You feel like the whole thing could collapse at any time in a mess of hair product.

But it’s not wise to overreact: you can’t smoke-bomb her Facebook page, ridding it of pernicious tweenish elements, or shut it down completely (though that is tempting). That would be overkill.

I used to brush off the coming teenybopper invasion. Never happen, I thought. After all, my daughter had shown complete resistance to Biebermania in the past. Her immune system was strong, I kept telling myself. People from Young Star would smirk and ask me repeatedly, has your daughter’s soul been taken over by One Direction yet? No, I’d say, dismissing them with a wave of a hand. She’s still listening to Taylor Swift, thank God.

Then this.

I guess I also should have been clued in when her literary interests started turning from the heroines to the bad boys, the sly criminals like Artemis Fowl replacing geeky, prepubescent Harry Potter. We are what we read, after all.

For my wife Therese, it wasn’t so much the sudden emergence of teenage boys on her Facebook radar screen. It was the drop-off in musical quality. “She used to like Jeff Buckley,” Therese lamented, as though Isobel had run off to join the nunnery or The Pussycat Dolls. “And now… this.”

The Facebook wars heated up when someone posted a picture of lead dreamboat Styles on our daughter’s wall.

“How dare they compare themselves to The Beatles?” my wife fumed online. “Where’s my shotgun?” I fumed back.

This elicited a lengthy comment thread, and it turned out a lot of Therese’s friends have experienced the same alarming rash afflicting their own daughters. They even remember (sigh!) their own teenybopper infatuations from back when they were kids.

The comments ran the gamut from contempt for the boy band’s hair to total understanding, ‘cuz, you know, he’s “kinda cute.” It started feeling like one of those Freaky Friday movies where the moms get into switching roles with their teenage daughters.

I must say, being a father of a daughter has led me to put on certain blinders. I still see my 10-year-old, at times, as the little girl I pushed around in a stroller through the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, baby bottle affixed to her mouth; or the seven-year-old in Disney Princess dress, riding a pony on her birthday. All these images of your daughter have to learn to coexist with another reality, one that you can postpone but never really dodge completely: one in which she discovers boys. Sure, she’s in an all-girls’ Catholic school. But that doesn’t prevent her from hearing about them. It’s not a convent, after all.

And sure, she has plenty of good sense, and we have no trouble keeping the lines of communication open, 24/7, in case she wants to know anything (up to a point) about the opposite sex.

But still. Those pictures of gawping, fresh-faced Brit teens on her Facebook wall (posted there by others, she’s quick to point out.) Sigh…

You have to deal with the Tiger Beat invasion with caution, and with care. I notice even mentioning One Direction causes my daughter to break out in a kind of embarrassment rash. I must proceed carefully. After all, as my wife notes, “By the time she’s 16, I’m sure she won’t care about them anymore.”

Yeah. But who will she be caring about then?