Imagine yourself as 20-year-old woman...What a chic becomes depends on her father and first boyfriend

Imagine yourself as an impressionable 20-year-old woman who just joined college.

You are beautiful, intelligent and ambitious. At 20, both men and women are known to make mistakes. For women, it is mostly about the choice of men. It is a natural, even evolutionary, for them to gravitate towards bad boys.

Of course, the bad boys will play and leave them just when they have started painting rosy pictures about their future.

Now imagine if such a woman came from a family background where the father used to abuse the mother.

By abuse, I mean beating her, cheating on her and sometimes marrying secretly only for the daugther to find out about it when she is a teenager and her father suddenly dies.

This young woman will grow up thinking men are evil. That is because the men she trusted the most, abused her trust at very critical stages of her life.

Daughters are precious, special beings. Fathers who have raised their daughters with love and attention rarely get disappointed. How you raise them greatly determines how they turn out.

I know many women who would have otherwise turned out great, were it not for the abusive fathers they had, and the jerk they dated for their first love.

It is a vicious cycle.

Daughters are predisposed to danger from the word go.

As soon as they walk, there are predatory male relatives who want to rape them. You just cannot trust any man with your young girls.

It is a fact many mothers learn rather too late. Even some fathers I know are dangerous and have been rumoured to do bad stuff to their daughters. It gets worse, the older they grow.

You cannot raise daughters in the same way you raise sons. Sons are mostly ignored. But we turn out fine, even though we have complicated relationships with our fathers.

You cannot afford to treat your daughter with the same casual detachment as you treat your sons. Treat your daughter nicely and she will know how to filter out bad men later on in life.

This is why I call on fathers to pay special attention to their children, and be even keener on daughters.

My generation had the most disconnected parents who thought paying school fees was the ultimate demonstration of love, but in the long run ruined our character development.

Ever wondered why we have so many childish men in their 30s? Bearded men in blue Subarus hooting the hell out of neighbourhoods? Yes, scratch deeper and you will discover their father was a career civil servant, who was hardly home.

But new age parents need to know better. We live in age of highly dysfunctional families, being rattled by infidelity, financial stress, medical anxieties, depression, drug abuse and everything in between. And this can take a toll on the children without even the parents being abusive.

I urge fathers to be faithful or if they have to cheat, to do so discreetly in order to protect their children.

We all hate it when our mother is insulted. Children take such insults personal. Women tend to be terribly affected by family breakups occasioned by infidelity, on the father’s part.

Equally, a father may disagree with the mother along the way, it is the nature of marriage, but this should never be extended to children.

Methinks, by agreeing to be a parent, you only have one job: make sure the kids turn out just fine. We can learn a lot from our parents about how not to be bad parents.

@nyanchwani [email protected]