Teach your kids to pick good partners. We can do this by talking about it, starting at a young age. Discussing things like:
Teach your kids to pick good partners. We can role model picking a good partner by being in a healthy, connected, loving relationship. And the hard work that goes into that is something they greatly benefit from (see Parenting Counselling).
Learning to be a good partner and be with a good partner comes from the implicit and explicit messages we give to children like:
Here is a beautiful letter that a father wrote to his daughter that was touching to read. It’s an example of conscious and connected parenting. His words are an example of what we all should be saying to our kids. He reminds us of the importance to teach your kids to pick good partners.
Dad’s heartwarming letter to daughter about Mr Right
Dr Kelly Flanagan’s letter to his daughter on the importance of picking a man who truly loves her has received plenty of online love.
WHEN daddy blogger and clinical psychologist Kelly Flanagan posted a letter to his young daughter about picking Mr Right, he was bowled over by the public response.
Entitled A Daddy’s Letter To His Little Girl (About Her Future Husband), Dr Flanagan’s letter has received thousands of Facebook likes since appearing on a popular blog called The Good Men Project. The site and its Facebook page were set up to “have a conversation about what it means to be a good man”. “I dedicated this post to my daughter … but I also wrote it for my wife, who has courageously held on to her sense of worth and has always held me accountable to being that kind of ‘boy’,” Dr Flanagan said.
“I wrote it for every grown woman I have met inside and outside of my therapy office — the women who have never known this voice of a Daddy. “And I wrote it for the generation of boys-becoming-men who need to be reminded of what is really important — my little girl finding a loving, lifelong companion is dependent upon at least one of you figuring this out.” Below is Dr Flanagan’s letter in full.
Dear Cutie-Pie,
Recently, your mother and I were searching for an answer on Google. Halfway through entering the question, Google returned a list of the most popular searches in the world. Perched at the top of the list was ‘How to keep him interested’. It startled me. I scanned several of the countless articles about how to be sexy and sexual, when to bring him a beer versus a sandwich, and the ways to make him feel smart and superior. And I got angry.
Little One, it is not, has never been, and never will be your job to ‘keep him interested’. Little One, your only task is to know deeply in your soul — in that unshakeable place that isn’t rattled by rejection and loss and ego — that you are worthy of interest. (If you can remember that everyone else is worthy of interest also, the battle of your life will be mostly won. But that is a letter for another day.)
If you can trust your worth in this way, you will be attractive in the most important sense of the word: you will attract a boy who is both capable of interest and who wants to spend his one life investing all of his interest in you.
Little One, I want to tell you about the boy who doesn’t need to be kept interested, because he knows you are interesting: I don’t care if he puts his elbows on the dinner table — as long as he puts his eyes on the way your nose scrunches when you smile. And then can’t stop looking. I don’t care if he can’t play a bit of golf with me — as long as he can play with the children you give him and revel in all the glorious and frustrating ways they are just like you.
I don’t care if he doesn’t follow his wallet — as long as he follows his heart and it always leads him back to you. I don’t care if he is strong — as long as he gives you the space to exercise the strength that is in your heart. I couldn’t care less how he votes — as long as he wakes up every morning and daily elects you to a place of honor in your home and a place of reverence in his heart.
I don’t care about the color of his skin — as long as he paints the canvas of your lives with brushstrokes of patience, and sacrifice, and vulnerability, and tenderness. I don’t care if he was raised in this religion or that religion or no religion — as long as he was raised to value the sacred and to know every moment of life, and every moment of life with you, is deeply sacred. In the end, Little One, if you stumble across a man like that and he and I have nothing else in common, we will have the most important thing in common: You. Because in the end, Little One, the only thing you should have to do to ‘keep him interested’ is to be you.
Your eternally interested guy,
Daddy
“teach your kids to pick good partners”