Teaching Our Daughters Some New Rules

We play the numbers in our house all the time.

Mostly they break down 3 to 1, or sometimes 4 to 1, on occasion 5 to 2. It is the 6-year-old who likes to do the counting, divvying us up the “natural” way, as they do at school. The girls against the boys.

She and her sister and I stand united. And then there’s Dad. The baby-sitter, too, is a girl, as is one of the cats.

So there. Majority wins. Girls rule.

And plus, my daughter points out, the neutered male cat (with a female name) acts like one of us.

But my daughter doesn’t often need to split that hair. The arithmetic is simple enough in our house.

Dominance, well . . . that would be nice. In the meantime, equality is something that she settles for. “Because you’re a girl” is never uttered from her parents’ mouths.

Then there’s the outside world.

As a mother of daughters, as is my mother, and as was her mother before that, I am forever honing my skills in dealing with that .

That is the assumption that girls begin with less. Girls must “prove themselves.” Boys just are.

Girls, my mother used to tell me, must be smarter, and work harder, to get the same things as boys. Mothers are still telling their daughters the same today.

These things are not always tangible, like the job and the promotion, or the mortgage and the car. Confidence is a fragile commodity that often translates to far more.

Then when they get older, today’s girls are told about all the “choices” they can make in their lives. Except these choices usually involve giving something up.

When was the last time you heard a successful male professional wonder if he can possibly hold down a demanding job, be a “good” father and play golf in his spare time? He doesn’t, of course, because the world conforms to him.

Women, however, hold conferences on this. These are usually a mix of anger, guilt and angst . That’s because women are forever trying to please.

A soon-to-be-published book, “Women and the Work/Family Dilemma,” includes a survey of 902 women who graduated from Harvard University’s business, law and medical schools from 1971 to 1981. Of these women, 594 have kids.

And guess what? Thirty-nine percent of the working mothers said that parenting had slowed their careers, 53% changed job responsibilities or specialties because of their kids and 30% said their family obligations cost them jobs or a step up.

A quarter of the business school mothers had dropped out of the work force all together. And, keep in mind, these are women who are used to being smarter, and working harder, than most men. Still, the rules don’t bend.

But no mother in her right mind would really burden her young daughter with all this. Certainly my mother never did.

They weren’t quite lectures that she’d give me, but inspirational mini-spiels. Of course you can do it, she’d say. Your father and I wouldn’t expect any less. You’re smarter than they are. Try again.

As a teacher, my mother worked outside the home. And, incidentally, I don’t remember feeling cheated by that. Neither my sister or I turned up pregnant or on drugs.

But this is not to say that couldn’t happen with my daughters a decade down the road. Society still conspires to chip away at girls’ self-respect. You can read studies that tell you the same, or you can just turn on the TV.

Pick your female role model: Surgically enhanced bimbo. Neutered Mom. Bitchy careerist. Mother Teresa.

In the real world, women may be the majority, but in most of the media, it seems we come in only a few molds.

So how do you tell all this to your daughters, without suggesting that the odds are stacked against them, that they might huff and puff all they want but they’ll never blow down all the barriers in their path?

You trick them, of course. This is not lying, really, but shading the truth. You offer a reality to shape their emerging world view.

I don’t tell them that most doctors are men. I just make sure we frequent women ones too. We take note of women police officers and cheer them on. We read books in which the feisty “good guys” are the girls.

And listening to Janet Reno on the radio the other morning, I tell the 6-year-old that this woman is “the boss” of lots of lawyers and officers with guns.

I don’t tell her that getting this job was a very big deal, that two other women candidates didn’t make it because they had failed at their womanly duty of choosing the right help. And I certainly don’t mention that once Reno was nominated to the post, there were raised eyebrows about the absence of a man by her side.

The future attorney general was forced to declare for the record that she’s “just an awkward old maid with a very great affection for men.” Whew. Was that a relief.

I’m not one of those parents who has exact plans for her children when they grow up. They don’t have to be doctors, or President or produce grandchildren for me to fuss over in my old age.

But there is one thing that I do insist on. They will be damn proud of who they are, and what they’re worth, as women and as human beings. And I am sure they will demonstrate that in their lives.

So they can change the world.