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Your Parents Guide
Parents are hurt when their kids are hurt. A failure is not only
painful for your daughter, but is painful for you, too. This is
one of those times when you wish you could make it all better, but
you may not be able to. You can't make the pain disappear, but you
can help your daughter understand that failure is a normal,
acceptable, and often unavoidable, experience throughout life.
There are three major "needs" that
are likely to be important for your daughter's positive transition
to adulthood:
First,
it is important to teach your daughter about her own health and
encourage her to actively seek answers and opinions about
health-related issues.
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She needs
to "take charge" of her health through good prevention and health
maintenance strategies, including a healthy diet and regular
exercise, monthly breast self-examinations, yearly Pap smears, and
regular checkups with her physician.
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She needs
to know and understand the dangers of eating disorders=and how
they can actually do long-term damage or even be deadly.
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She needs to be
well informed about STDs, pregnancy, and effective contraception.
As a parent, it is your
responsibility to make sure that your daughter has access to the
most accurate and up-to-date health information possible.
Second,
familiarity with the new technologies is no longer an option. It
is a necessity. Your daughter's adulthood is likely to be vastly
different from yours in terms of the prevalence of technology in
all aspects of her life. And, while men still dominate the
technological fields, women must understand the importance of
becoming equal contributors, partners, and consumers of
technology or they will be left behind. Therefore, you need to
ensure that your daughter has ongoing access to the new
technologies through her school, library, and if possible, at
home.
Third,
your daughter must be prepared to take care of herself. She needs
to be self-reliant and self- sufficient and not assume that she
will have a partner to take care of her. In fact, the present
trend suggests that more and more women are deciding to put off
marriage until they have finished their education and begun their
careers. In addition, many women today feel comfortable deciding
not to marry at all. Even if they do marry, the high divorce rate
makes it increasingly important that they have the skills and
strategies necessary for self-reliance. Your daughter needs to be
confident enough to take charge of her own life and not be
dependent on anyone else to run her life for her. Teach her that
being self-sufficient does not mean that she limits her
relationship choices but rather that she is far less likely to
feel trapped and stay in a relationship just because she can't
take care of herself.
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