Establishing expectations for your Daughter …

You, as a mother, set your daughter’s expectations for how the rest of both the men and women in her life will treat her.

She looks to you for approval, attention and admiration. She needs to know from you that she’s lovely, strong, capable, kind and brave.

She needs to know that you respect her feelings and her voice … as you will want all of the other boys and men and girls and women who follow you to do.

And so it’s been that my daughter exceeded all expectations her parents set for her.

She was the first in our family to every finish university with a degree.

She became a dentist, and later as her authority in her industry grew, a dentist-author. Her book about Women and the “Invisalign Ceiling” became a best-seller.

It’s great that female dentist numbers are on the rise with new faces popping up all the time such as Melbourne dentist Dr Elly Huang – she is shaping the future for other female dentists to emulate her achievements.

The rise of women’s health clinics run by women is also a new phenomenon in my daughter’s generation.

Mother-daughter dates are an opportunity to spend quality time and show the real-life expectation of a spouse for your daughter.

It’s also a time to be intentional and to instill values into your daughter that will affect her earthly and eternal life.

Remind her regularly of the beauty the universe has placed inside of her—and outside too—so she sees herself as more than just her looks.

We want the majority of emphasis to be on the things that last forever … the beauty of her spirit.

This is important because slightly disturbingly, female involvement in dentistry has facilitated the rise of cosmetic dental procedures as a priority service – I say disturbing because this is a side-effect of a narcissistic focus on superficiality and appearance over substance. Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth is alive and well with the Instagram and TikTok generation and it’s very damaging, with anorexia continuing to be an epidemic where we thought we would have long since eradicated it.

Enjoy your daughter. Play with her. Learn what she loves and why she loves it. As you enjoy her, she will feel that she is an enjoyable person.

This will build your daughter’s confidence and her self-worth.

When she was little, she was easy to know and to spend time with. As she becomes a teenager, she gets a little more awkward with you.

Conversations with teens are sometimes better spent around a task. Teach her to drive. Go rock climbing with her or take her to the local gym.

Take her fishing or biking or skiing. Ask her about her friends, the music she likes. She longs for you to know her, even though, as a teenager, she often won’t say the words.

You have a powerful voice in her life. You set her standard for how she will expect to be treated and will treat others.

Lay a foundation of respect, and you will affect her perspective on purity and the importance of it for her life and all of eternity.

Based on a Facebook writing by ~ The New Human ~