May the peace of God find you wherever you are!
This is an extremely uncertain situation we all are in. Only God can calm our spirits and souls and only God can say to coronavirus, “Enough! Stop!”
Until then, we pray and wait.
While we are quarantining ourselves with our spouses and kids in our homes, praying about this situation and trying to comfort ourselves and others with the word of God, I want to share something with you. And not something about coronavirus, but about what a young girl wants from her parents so that she can be a sexually responsible individual.
I put together eight points on to how to relate with our daughters. These eight points may help us find a way that gives us a viable opportunity to be close to our daughters and be able to impart and pass on our spiritual and moral values we hold dearly unto them.
So, here are the eight points:
1. Starting from an early age, girls want to be noticed and admired by men and the one man they meet first in their lives is their dad. So, fathers, please notice and admire your daughter’s beauty. This does not mean that mothers don’t need to do that. Mothers have a noble role to play in this as well. As a number of different studies have repeatedly shown, young girls who grew up in this kind of environment, where a mother and a father affirmed their daughter’s beauty, they had a relatively low chance to be sexually active in their teen years, even twentieth. This tells us this: Most young girls become sexually promiscuous at early age when they look for a man who notices and admires their beauty.
2. Our daughters desire to be heard, listened to! We parents are guilty of preaching to our daughters, taking all our time to lecture but we give little or no time to listen to them. You see, unless we listen to them, we have no way of knowing them as an independent individual. When we listen to them, we learn a lot about them, about their unique fears, insecurities, weaknesses and strengthens. Knowing these things will help us to equip ourselves to be better parents, speaking life, for example, into our daughters’ fears and insecurities.
3. Our daughters want to see Christ in us, not preach to them! Yes, we all are guilty of preaching Christ to our daughters but we show them little or no Christ in our characters and behaviors. For example, when we make a mistake, let’s be quick to ask our daughters to forgive us. In this way, we attract them to us so we pass on to them our spiritual values. You see, only Christ in us can attract them, not us!
4. Our daughters want to be close to parents who love and care for one another! This is KEY! When we parents fight and shout at each other, our daughters stay away from us. If, for example, they have some personal issues that they want to share with someone, they won’t choose to share it with us because they say, as one second grader girl said, “I don’t want to add anymore burden to my mom.”
5. Our daughters want to be close to parents who lighten the burden of their guilt and regrets they naturally carry with themselves. Unfortunately, some parents think and believe that guilt will motivate their daughters to do better in life. But this is totally wrong. Instead, we need to teach our daughters how to practically handle right guilt feelings and how to reasonably and logically avoid unnecessary guilt feelings.
6. Our daughters want to be known and appreciated by their parents apart from their achievements and accomplishments. Our daughters want to know, for example, if they are worthy of their parents’ love and care regardless of their school grades and achievements. Most of us parents want our kids to have straight A’s. I mean, there is nothing wrong with that desire but we should know that not everybody is created to have and maintain straight A grades all the time. And we should not show any favoritism or partiality among our children based on their achievements. If we do that, our daughters choose to talk to a stranger than to talk to us their parents. And they will be willing “to give love” at any age to any man who seems to accept and appreciate who they are.
7. Our daughters want to be heard by their parents when a fight erupts among their siblings/friends. (Remember: This point is different from the second point in that, here heated fight is going on.) In this situation, we parents desire to see our kids do the right thing so much so that we totally forget to listen to them and we go ahead and start our LECTURE. This actually pushes our daughters away from us for life! Fighting among siblings and friends actually gives us an ample opportunity to learn more about our daughters and to build a healthy and strong relationship with them.
8. Last but not least, we parents should not get involved in our daughter-God relationship. This is the most dangerous thing that we can ever do to our daughters. We have this natural tendency to desire to rescue our daughters from every possible danger but can we do that? No, we can’t because we are not God. Instead, we need to strive to help our daughters to strengthen their relationship with God who can save and rescue them from every possible danger. So, even when they are as little as first or second graders, we should learn to say to them something like, “You know Hun, I am not really sure about this. Why don’t you tell this to God in your prayer? God may show you to do something.” In that way, we teach our daughters how to walk with God without anybody’s interference.
After all, at the end of our parenting journey, what do we desire to see in our daughter’s life but a strong and vibrant relationship between them and God for this is the only foundation upon which a healthy, strong and fulfilling life builds. ///