A safety expert has shared five lies that parents often accidentally teach their daughters about boys that we really need to pay attention to.
Raising girls can be a minefield for parents and a stressful one at that. We want to raise strong, independent women who can stick up for themselves and teach them the behaviour that they should and shouldn’t tolerate from other people – especially boys.
We want our girls to grow up and develop healthy relationships with the opposite gender if they want to and something that will help is modelling those relationships ourselves and giving them the right information about what they should expect from the opposite sex and relationships.
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A safety expert from Damsel in Defence, a company that helps fight human trafficking, has shared five things that many parents accidentally teach their daughters about boys. These are so common and you may have accidentally said them yourself, but it’s not your fault; it’s how we were spoken to when we were growing up, and that’s not an easy thing to forget!
But making ourselves aware of them is the first step, so here are five accidental lies that parents should avoid telling their daughters.
5 lies we tell our daughters about boys and relationships
- He is mean to you because he likes you – We have probably all heard (and believed this) at one time or another, but what we should be teaching them is that ‘boys who like you are kind to you’. ‘When we tell our daughter that the boy who is pulling her hair has a crush on her, we’re teaching her that cruelty is a form of affection’.
- Boys will be boys – This teaches your daughter that a boy’s behaviour is ‘something she has to tolerate instead of something he’s responsible for’.
- He’s only jealous because he cares about you – The expert says that jealousy is not love, it is ‘control wearing a mask’. Saying this teaches a girl that when a man monitors her phone and controls who she is with and where she goes does it out of love and devotion, which is just not true. ‘That’s the beginning of a very toxic relationship’.
- He just doesn’t know how to express his feelings – This phrase is damaging for girls because it gives the make ’emotional illiteracy’ and gives the girl ‘the job of decoding him’. ‘She is not his translator, if he cannot express himself without hurting her, that is his problem to solve.’
- If you really loved him you wouldn’t give up on him – Of course relationships are work and honest mistakes and hard times are worth pushing through and often make a relationship stronger. However, this does not include abusive behaviour and it is ‘never a season to push through’.
@officialdamselindefense 5️⃣ lies we accidentally teach our daughters about boys 💛 Every one sets her up to tolerate the wrong treatment later. Number 4 is the one we’ve all said. Say it to her — or send it to her. 👉 Raising a son too? I made the companion, “5 lies we tell our sons about girls,” posted separately on my page. #girlmom #girldad #parentingtips #safetyfirst #creatorsearchinsights ♬ original sound – DamselinDefense
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