Nancy N. Rue - What Happened to My Little Girl?: Dads Ultimate Guide to His Tween Daughter

Dads Ultimate Guide
to His Tween Daughter

Nancy Rue with Jim Rue

For all the dads of mini-women,
and, of course, for Marijean
and Baby Maeryn

You come home from work the way youve done every night of her nine-year life, pretty much whipped but still ready for her to belt out of her room, eyes dancing, arms open, squealing her girl-child squeal. It is a sound only dogs can hear. Dogs and daddies.

You turn on your laptop, pour the usual cold whatever, and wait for the welcome. Whether youre likely to scoop her up and make an obnoxious noise into her neck, high-five her, or simply say, Hey, Baby Girl, wheres your mother? you at least secretly savor the fact that somebody is ecstatic to see you no matter how you smell or who youve impressed or what you earned that day.

Yeah, so, where is she? No door has burst open. No flip-flop-clad feet have flapped down the hall. You do hear muffled squealing coming from the direction of her room, yet you have the immediate sense that its directed not at you but at the other squealers who are obviously in there with her. Sounds like theres a platoon of them.

Mystified, if not slightly miffed that your arrival hasnt been heralded, you head for her doorway, already picturing her leaping up from her pile of stuffed animals and chirping, Daddy! I didnt hear you come in!

But the door is closed, and the cutesy pink-and-purple sign her mother bought at some froufrou boutique, proudly declaring this to be Her Room, has been replaced by one scrawled in Magic Marker on a piece of your laser printer paper. It says:

Snickering, you turn the knob and poke your head in.

The squealing chokes itself out. Four ponytails swish as faces turn toward you. Faces that look vaguely familiar, although youre sure youve never seen those particular lips gooey with color or those eyelids smeared with a shade of blue you havent witnessed since your mom wore it in the 80s. You can pick out your daughter because hers is the mouth that opens and says,

Da-ad! Didnt you read the sign?

Yeah, you manage to say, as your gaze takes in the tumble of MP3 players and polka-dotted journals and what even you recognize as your wifes old makeup bag. Where are the Barbie dolls? The tea set? The crayons in every color known to man?

Hell-o-o! your daughter says, hands on hips you werent aware she had. Youre a boy!

You think you might grin, might even say something clever and giggle-producing. But then she does a thing you could not have foreseen, even in the darkest colic-screaming, tantrum-throwing days of her baby-and toddlerhood.

She rolls her eyes at you.

Right up into her head. The thought comes to you that she must be having a seizure before you realize that this is merely the universal signal for You just dont get it.

Whether you respond by backing out of the room or sending the friends home to their own fathers so you can ground her for the rest of her childhood or warn her that if she rolls her eyes at you again youre going to roll her headyour existence has been rocked. In that instant you know that you no longer automatically trigger, Stop the worldtheres Daddy!

You might tomorrow. You might even later that evening when the other goopy-lipped girls have departed and she once again climbs into your lap. But youll never again take that for granted, because, Dad your daughter is now a tween.

Most of us look at them less as potential consumers than as children who are no longer sweet little baby people but who have not completely lost their minds yet and become teenagers. They are definitely between innocent childhood and confused adolescence, a station in life youd think would be pretty easy, fairly carefree. You should have as few worries and hang-ups as they do.

Until the mid-twentieth century, even psychologists would have agreed with that. The in-between years were often referred to as the latent period, and parents tended to let out a four-year-long sigh of relief as they steeled themselves for the teen years everybody kept warning them about. It wasnt unusual to be enjoying a day at a theme park with your eight-year-old and have somebody turn to you in line and say, Youre having fun now, but wait till she gets to be a teenager.

But our view of the tween years has changed, and not just because marketers decided to give them a name and prey on their $43 billion annual spending power. (An impressive sum for people who cant even drive themselves to the mall.) Were realizing that (a) a heck of a lot of important stuff is going on during those years, and (b) as parents wed better jump on that because society already has. Those same marketers who named them tweens have also fashioned the acronym KGOYKids Getting Older Younger. Their sales campaigns for everything from shoes to breakfast cereal are based on the belief that ten is the new fifteen.

And then theres you, the dad, looking at your eight-, nine-, ten-, eleven-, or twelve-year-old daughter and saying, Are you serious? Shes still a little girl!

Yeah. Try telling her that when the clothes on the store racks look like junior hooker wear and her friends are sniffing at her and saying, You still play with dolls? What a baby. Inform her that shes a little girl when she drags home a backpack full of homework, when the gymnastics teacher tells her she needs to lose that baby fat if shes serious about the Olympics, when she starts her period at age tenand even at that, shes a good six months behind her BFFs.

Child development hasnt changed. Eight-to twelve-year-olds are still on the same place on Maslows hierarchy of needs where theyve always been. Its society thats been alteredin some ways for the better, in some for the worse.

On the better side, weve come to realize that the tween years arent latent, nor are they merely a rest period before teen hormones reach their peak. We know, in fact, that more physical, emotional, and mental development occurs during this period than in any other in their lives except birth to one year. Armed with that information, we can pay more attention to whats going on with our kids and direct how they grow from it, rather than assume this is just the calm before the storm, and that at age thirteen all hell is going to break loose.

Fathers of teen daughters have a huge influence on how that goes down. Huge. The good news is that you still have enough sway with that mini-woman to guide her into adolescence as a strong, confident, authentic, God-centered human being. The bad news? If you do nothingand lets face it, thats easy to get away withyou direct her path too. She enters her teen years feeling unsure of who she is, insecure about her strengths, and doubtful in her faith. Dude, a big, big part of it is on you.

If youve even picked up this book and gotten to this point, its obvious you want to have that positive influence as a dad. Either that or your wife has threatened you with eternal dinner-less-ness if you dont read it. You are probably already taking a real good stab at being a great girl-dad, maybe even better than you think. But chances are youre parenting that girl-child the only way you know how