10 Ways We Accidentally Teach Our Daughters to Accept Bad Treatment from Men

The indoctrination into shitty relationships begins in childhood, and sets girls up for failure.

It’s one of the most painful truths about being a woman who has relationships with men: if you have kids with a sexist man (and the overwhelming majority of men are sexist, and absolutely will exploit their partners), you may never be able to fully escape him. Too many women of my generation have learned this lesson the hard way, and will spend their most productive years endlessly working so their shitbag partners can play video games. And no matter how strong they are, no matter how much feminist content they read, their quality of life will be permanently undermined by the men their children forever tie them to. Even divorce will not permanently relieve the suffering, since family courts are biased against women and mothers.

This is why the single most important thing we can do is teach the next generation how important it is to insist on either a feminist relationship, or no relationship at all. We must teach our girls that bad behavior early in a relationship almost always gets worse.

Having children with a man will permanently tie you to him, so choose wisely. This is the first, most central, and most important lesson we should teach girls. And it’s also a lesson most parents skip completely.

Instead, we encourage our daughters to seek out “nice” boys, and define niceness as chivalry or superficial kindness. And in so doing, we indoctrinate girls to seek out something that has nothing whatsoever to do with safety or happiness in relationships with men.

This allows the cycle to replicate year after year, generation after generation. Being a feminist is not enough. “Girl power” is not enough. Here are the ways well-meaning parents are accidentally indoctrinating the next generation to accept abuse.

Raising girls to obsess over dating and marriage

Practically from birth, we talk to girls about finding their prince. We teach them to look forward to marriage, and to define it as the main signal of adulthood and success. We talk about single people with pity and scorn. When they become adults, we pressure them to settle down.

The message is clear: Any relationship is better than no relationship at all. You need a man to be happy, and so being left by a man—or leaving a man—is one of the worst things that can happen. Stay. Work it out.

Meanwhile boys learn that marriage is an annoyance that silly, trivial women want, and act accordingly. The result is men who think they’re doing women a favor by marrying them, and therefore believe they owe women nothing in marriage.

Instead, we need to stop talking marriage and dating, and start teaching girls to take pleasure in doing things alone and with friends.

Princess shit

Princess culture is just a tool for indoctrinating girls into obsessing over marriage and beauty. We act as if it’s an inevitable part of girlhood. In fact, we’re so indoctrinated to princess culture that one of the most common responses people give me when I decry princess culture is, “Stop devaluing the feminine!”

Princess culture is not an inherent aspect of femininity or of girlhood, and the appearance and marriage-focused aspects of princess culture devalue girlhood and femininity, reducing them to caricatures.

Cut that shit out.

Centering a girl’s appearance

Your daughter does not need to think she’s pretty.

No, really. Young girls should not have a concept of pretty. The problem begins when they do. Because once a girl conceives of pretty as something good, it’s something she wants to be.

Girls do not need to be decorative objects. They’ll get enough pretty-centric bullshit from the culture. Make your home a safe space where effort and joy and empathy matter—not beauty myth garbage.

Investing in our daughters’ romantic relationships

When you get excited about your daughters’ relationships, when you encourage her to date or marry, you pressure her into an institution that has historically harmed women. Is that really what you want to do?

For many girls, romantic relationships are an escape from overbearing parents. This is even more reason not to emotionally invest in their relationships. You don’t need to have opinions on your daughter’s romantic partners, unless and except the opinion is that he’s abusive and she needs to escape.

This might seem an odd piece of advice, but hear me out: when parents speak negatively about their daughters’ partners, they can inadvertently push them more toward those partners. And when they fall in love with their daughters’ partners, they inadvertently create pressure for girls to stay with partners who may be bad for them.

Treating dating as inherently dangerous and adversarial

“Lock up your daughters!”

“My best advice for having a daughter is get a shotgun and a chastity belt!”

“All boys only want one thing.”

Gag me. We treat girls as prey and boys as predators from day one.

To some people, this might seem like a feminist act. It’s not. This language treats boys as innately predatorial, which they are not. And it normalizes predator-prey relationships between men and women.

If a girl has spent her entire life hearing that it’s normal for boys to be dangerous, that it’s girls’ job to protect themselves from boys’ aggressive sexuality, that all men are the same, what sort of man do you think she’ll choose?

If she thinks there’s no alternative to shitbag men, she’s going to choose a shitbag.

As a nice little shitty bonus, this lock up your daughters rhetoric creates an adversarial relationship between boys and parents. And for girls who want to feel grown up and free, who want to rebel against their parents, the instruction is clear: choose a predatory, aggressive boy.

Teach your daughter how to choose a good man instead. And remain neutral about boys, relationships, dating, and sex.

Indoctrinating children into gender roles

No, your daughter did not “naturally” like dolls and pink. There is not a pink gene. Sorry. She liked that shit because you gave it to her.

She’s also not “more emotional” than your son who regularly gets in fights and throws tantrums. You’ve just chosen to code her behavior as emotional and his as rational, thereby undermining her before she even has a chance to form her identity.

Did you know that research consistently uncovers ways parents impose gender on kids? For example, when parents are asked to predict how far down a slide their infants will choose to go—in other words, to assess their willingness to take risks—they predict the girls will be more risk averse. It turns out they’re actually slightly more willing to take risks than boys.

Other research has shown that when people see a crying infant, they assume a boy is angry and a girl is scared. No wonder adults slot themselves so willingly into these roles—the man scaring the woman, the man taking risks while the woman stays behind.

Gender roles harm kids. They limit opportunities. And they prescribe stereotyped behaviors, including the behavior that so often harms women in marriage and relationships.

There’s not girl shit and boy shit. Cut it out. Expose kids to lots of options and let them be who they are.

Modeling harmful gender relationships

What we experience in childhood ends up feeling normal. Even if it’s beatings and abuse.

This is why seeing harmful gender relationships between parents is so harmful to kids. Lots of women make the mistake of staying together for the kids. The reality is that kids need to see women leave bullshit. And when leaving is not possible, they need clear instruction that the environment in which they are being raised is not ideal. If you’re stuck in a relationship you can’t leave, please find alternative relationship role models for your child.

Not teaching girls about the value of friendship

No one wants to be lonely. Loneliness feels awful. And for many women, it’s ultimately fear of loneliness that gets them into bad relationships. “Well, it’s not perfect,” the reasoning goes, “But at least I have a partner.”

Romantic relationships are not the only way to avoid loneliness. But in a culture that devalues adult friendship, it can definitely feel like they are. Your daughter can live with her best friend. She can adopt a child and live in a community of women. She can build a network of friends who get her out of bad relationships and offer a village.

But that all begins with teaching girls about the value of friendship. Encourage their relationships with other women. Help them plan playdates. Support them to mediate conflicts. Talk to them about how friendship is just as valuable as romance. And model this to them by nurturing your own friendships whenever and wherever possible.

Shame-based parenting

The way you speak to your children becomes their internal voice.

Our entire culture centers around shaming women, and especially shaming them for their choices in marriage, relationships, and mothering. Men eagerly weaponize this shame to get out of treating their partners fairly—and it works.

It begins with shame in childhood.

Please don’t shame your daughters.

‘He’s really a great dad!’ bullshit

If you have to append, “but he’s really a great dad!” onto anything, especially complaints about how your partner treats you, consider the possibility that he’s not actually a great dad at all. When you use this language, you hold men to a lower standard than women. And you model to your daughter the following:

• That men don’t have to try as hard.

• That men can’t tolerate criticism—and they shouldn’t have to.

• That criticizing men is wrong.

• That mistreating women is fine.

Stop praising men for doing the same things we criticize women for. They already get enough praise. Don’t add your voice to the cacophony.

Readers: What else do you think parents should do to protect their daughters from bad relationships?

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