Customer Reviews
Very interesting of how to raise doughters 
2005-07-27
I loved the book, it helped me to see things that otherwise I didn't notice about our culture and how it relates to the girls. With the book advice I will be able to help my doughter to grow healthy and strong
Great book for good dads 2005-07-19
This book has help me value my daughter even more. I can now work on making our life experiences the best as possible. For being a single dad this book has help me to realize that I am doing a good job for being a dad away from home. If you are open to suggestions and learning more about raising a daughter and making her childhood the best it can be then this is a book for you. I grew up as a boy with three brothers and have no idea of how girls grow up. Thanks to this book now I do.
some good, some bad 
2005-02-07
This book has some very good advice about knowing when to speak up and knowing when to be silent when your daughter is expressing herself. It is also frought with some very bad advice about allowing "experimentation" in your daughters life.
I was confused about how one section deals with teaching girls that their self worth is not tied up in their bodies, then giving dads the advice to allow a daughter to wear provocative clothing. I quote, "wearing sexy clothing is a normal adolescent behavior". Some daughters might be all the better for allowing boys to ogle them, but mine better keep the receipt.
I say no thank you to most of the advice given in this book. Dad isn't meant to be a passive listener and enabler. Sometimes, Dad is supposed to put his foot down and say that some things are unnacceptable.
Inspiring Dads to Step Up 2003-05-14
This is a very important book. As parents, we would all risk life and limb to protect our children against a physical threat. But I sometimes feel powerless to prepare my daughter to face the advertising/body image onslaught that she faces (and that also poses a mental and physical threat to her). Kelly's book is very concrete in what we can as fathers, both in our day to day relationships with the girls in our lives --as well as in terms of political action against the advertising industry.
For adolescent daughters, not little girls 
2003-04-04
... and while it may be a quality item, it is definitely geared toward adolescents, not younger children. There was nothing that addressed the needs of dads for girls under the age of ten.
Fear and Control 
2008-06-27
I thought this was a pretty good book although the fearmongering was a bit much for me. I felt so much fear and despair after reading it I wanted to curl up in a closet with my little girl to protect her from the hurricane of evil that the world was portrayed as. Particularly the media. The book has some very good, strong points, but the way it gets there sometimes makes me pause. It is definitely geared for the pre-teens on up. I really found nothing applicable mentioned that would apply to younger girls. The book does make some good points about role modeling, leadership and support. I suspect however that those fathers that are reading this book probably fall into two categories - those who are really concerned about being good dads and want to plan ahead and do all they can and those that have found themselves in bad situation they are trying to find some way out of. Either way, dads that are reading such books are likely to be waaayyy ahead of those for whom the thought hasn't even crossed their mind. There probably is a third group of readers, which I suspect are probably moms and wives trying to clue their spouses in. As it is geared towards pre-teen and older girls, I recommend that those with younger girls wait to read it when they reach this point.
Dad's - Time to Wake Up!!!! 2007-08-06
This is the must read book for ANY Dad that has a daughter. Preferably, please read soon after your daughter is born and read over and over again as she grows up. Once she is a teenager, if you haven't read it you are in trouble! If you want to really know what is going on in your daughter's mind and body, PLEASE read this book.
Dads' Manual for A Teenage Daughter 2007-08-01
Well written and filled with common sense. Every Dad needs to read this in order to understand a teen-age daughter and how to develop an open-minded relationship with his daughter. Bettye Johnson, award-winning author Secrets of the Magdalene Scrolls.
Respectable Women are the Product of their Fathers 2006-11-16
Just take a look at women who achieved and are respected ... and you will find the personification of the father's daughter. This book is a brilliant explanation of why the biological father must be around his children. The whole notion of single super power mother is complete fallacy because fathers are a much better protector of a daughter for reasons that have nothing to do with being anti-feminist. Studies and research has shown that women raised by single mothers are often at risk for relationship problems and addictions. Case studies have also proven that a step-father cannot take the place of the real father, although not the same is true with a step-mother. Nonetheless, a woman raised by a strong father figure often grows up to be confident, intelligent, achieving, and often lands leadership positions in life. Margaret Thatcher, the first female Prime Minister is Great Britain was profoundly influenced by her father, Golda Meir (Prime Minister of Isreal) same thing, and of course Indira Gandhi (Prime Minister of India) yet again. In sports there is Steffi Graf and Christ Evert whose fathers were their original coaches and mentors. So ... for all the women who say that fathers are irrelevant ... think again about how selfish that statement is to the child .... and consider what kind of person you want your daughter to grow up to be. If you don't believe me, read the book and do your own research. Men deserve to be in their children's lives just as much as the mother.
An interesting article on the importance of father's is also probed in this insightful commentary by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach - Friday, 15 April, 2005 on his website:
What to do about female promiscuity
American culture grows more crass by the day. One of the most successful American TV shows is The Apprentice starring Donald Trump, a man loaded with money but bankrupt of class. The highlight of the show is when Trump humiliates potential employees by barking at them, "You're fired!"
One can only grieve over a culture that promotes a coarse womanizer who has dumped a wife or two in favor of young models as its symbol of professional success.
Indeed, watching people be humiliated is big business on American TV. Shows such as American Idol feature judges like Simon Cowell ? known as Mr. Nasty ? who shoot the middle finger at contestants they don't like. Public degradation has become as American as apple pie with programs like Fear Factor garnering huge ratings by having participants eat bugs and swim with dead mice.
But perhaps the most disturbing example of the culture of crassness is the growing trend of famous young women going through the rite of passage known as the nearly naked photo spread.
Such recent graduates of the you-may-think-I-have-a-brain-but-let's-instead-focus-on-my-bust school of celebrity include Scarlet Johansson, who acted superbly in Lost in Translation, which made her famous enough to qualify for a cleavage-bearing photo op. Janet Jackson, of course, joined the club when she decided to have us all forget about her dancing and focus instead on her nipples, while Britney Spears is the club's founding member.
The reduction of talented and intelligent women to two breasts and a vagina has reached its apogee with the Girls Gone Wild videos, in which tens of thousands of college girls, often on spring break, flash for the camera, their sole remuneration being a feeling of deep satisfaction that they have played their God-given role as entertainment for lecherous men.
Why have millions of young American women abandoned the feminist dream of being taken seriously by men and instead decided to gain male attention with degrading spectacles of their bodies? I am convinced that the principal cause is an increasingly weak link between fathers and daughters.
IN OUR society, we have it all backward. Too much is made of the father-son relationship at the expense of the father-daughter one. The image of a boy being taught by his dad to catch a baseball or throw a football is commonplace, while the only mainstream image of a father interacting with his teenage daughter is telling her not to come home too late when she goes out with her boyfriend.
Pop tarts like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, who use partial nudity to advance their careers, are often close to their mothers, who may even serve as their managers, while their dads are nowhere to be seen.
Where you do read about a father's central involvement in his daughter's career, it usually leads to respectable women like Steffi Graff and the Williams sisters, who have resisted the offers for provocative photo spreads even after they became famous as tennis stars. This is not because mothers don't love their daughters but because men are much more successful at protecting their daughters from other men. And when a daughter receives strong masculine validation from a loving and caring father, she is usually not desperate for sexual attention from manipulative and hormonal men.
Recently the New York Times ran a front-page story about a 15-year-old girl who refused to have sex with her 16-year-old boyfriend. He promptly cheated on her. When the girlfriend found out, she told her boyfriend that they should cut class and go and have sex. She did so, she said, "in order to keep him." When I read this story, I wondered Where is this girl's father? Had her father been a strong male presence in her life, she would not have been so desperate for the affection of a scoundrel.
EVEN WHEN I go to a Yankees game, I take my five daughters along with my older son. True, they often don't know the names of the players or even the score, but they know their father loves them and hates being separated from them. There is a special connection that daughters have with their fathers that even a mother cannot replicate, which grants young women a startling immunity from compromising themselves with jerks.
Indeed, when a daughter is close to her father and respects him as a man and a dad, she begins to judge other men by that same high standard. When she dates men, she will not judge them by their smooth talk but by the depth of their commitment because her own father was not a talker but a doer. She will not jump into bed with a man just to please him. She has high self-esteem, and she expects the men in her life to make an effort to please her rather than the reverse. Her idea of a relationship is not going down to the guy's level but raising him up to hers.
THIS IS why it's so important for a father to remain the most important man in his daughter's life until she is at least 20. I always lament witnessing the deterioration of the homes of my friends whose teenage daughters are always out, either with girlfriends or boyfriends. My daughters will not date until they are of marriageable age ? in our communities from 19. Up until that time, my own love for them will sustain their need for male attention. They will not be forced at too early an age to worry whether they're pretty enough, smart enough, sexy enough, or attractive enough. To their father, they are just perfect. And they will internalize that message in their most vulnerable years so they can grow into confident and robust women who attract men out of strength rather than weakness.
As for the criticisms that too close a relationship with your daughter will impede her ability to later form close connections with romantic partners, exactly the opposite is true. A young woman with an involved and loving father gains the confidence in herself to sever the childhood ties with her father and begin a loving relationship with a man precisely because she has learned to trust men. She has no fear of being vulnerable ? a prerequisite for romantic love ? because her father has shown her an example of a man who can be trusted and relied upon.
But if she feels betrayed by her own father, she will often run to another man more to escape pain than to find love, which is what usually makes her a prime candidate for that revealing photo spread.
Trouble? 2006-08-18
My dad and I had problems ever since I started high school. Since I was the oldest of four kids, it was hard for him to accept the idea of me moving away...not only for college. During those years, he was very defensive and my adolecent attitude didn't help much.
We always had a good bond and when we worked together, we kicked butt. This book has helped me get in touch with my dad more, and he is now starting to get over the fact that his kid isn't a kid anymore...
It was good stuff.
