High school graduation is just around the corner, but it’s not too late to start gifting your daughter with skills she will need to successfully launch out into the world. Here are four crucial ways to parent proactively for the long-term.
1. Space: As girls enter their junior and senior years of high school, they need more unsupervised time and space to make their own decisions, take care of themselves, problem solve, and to resolve friendship and dating conflicts to become more self-reliant. That includes not requiring them to contact you via text every time they move five feet. Untether yourself from needing to know where they are and what they are doing 24/7 now so that it won’t be so difficult when they go off to college.
2. Manage emotions: If parents rush in to bolster their daughters up every time they falter, make a mistake, or start to suffer, they will never learn to handle the normal ups and downs of life. Coping with failures, disappointments, frustration, and hurts is a muscle that needs plenty of exercise. Start now so that they will go off into the world prepared for life’s challenges.
3. Their path: Start letting go of the idea that you know what’s best for them. Kids have their own lessons to learn in their own way and in their own time. Allow them the freedom to choose their path and destiny and to make their unique mark on the world. Teach them to slow down, get quiet, and look inward for insight and to trust their intuition.
4. Limitless future: Let girls know that they can “have it all” as long as they are the architects of exactly what that looks like. Guide them to define success and balance on their own terms, not society’s. This will bring them fulfillment and contentment.
If you want your daughter to leave home with confidence, self-reliance, hope, optimism, grit, and the ability to handle whatever challenges life throws her way, be sure these four gifts have been given to her in abundance during her teenage years. These gifts will not be found on store shelves, but their value is never-ending.