You inquired about what general principle I’d give as a pastor on how to shepherd daughters. You noted my little book on fatherhood where I mainly focused on training boys to be kings. But there is a different kind of texture when it comes to parenting girls that the book does not apply.
One central principle is brewing in my mind over the last few years and I want to lay a brief overview of it. One of the first concerns facing young ladies in our day is the need to embrace femininity in its all glory. After all, woman functions as the glory of man (I Cor. 11:7) and that biblical assessment ought to shape how fathers prepare their daughters. The woman is not the head of the man, and therefore, her role is fundamentally doxological. She exists to be glory before she glorifies.
Young teenage girls are not in need of exposure to the world or pep talks on how professional you can be in a man-saturated world, she is called to understand what glory means and how her presence can communicate that role in the life of her future husband and community. Fathers should not instruct young ladies in the art of the deal, but in the art of glory. Therefore, she is formed first and foremost to bring glory to God as a future woman, and to prepare herself to be a source and giver of glory to others.
But what is glory? The concept of δόξα (doxa) in Paul’s writing provides a clear relation between the glory a woman bestows as a result of the proper headship of a man. A woman cannot–in its pristine sense–bestow glory unless or until the man adequately understands his role as head. A thwarted version of headship belittles the woman’s glory-role. Thus, in its ordinary role, a father prepares his daughter to be a glory-bearer to her future husband.
It appears that we have not said that loud enough because we are not accused enough of patriarchalism. A well-informed Christian father/man should know that when ungodly voices accuse us of patriarchalism because we believe in the priority of the home for our daughters or that we imprison our little girls with archaic ideals, we should rightly laugh. The reality is they don’t know just how powerful godly and principled women can be reigning from their headquarters.
The other false sense of daughter-raising we hear from unseemly voices is that we are keeping our daughters in a servile posture all their lives. But that is false in every conceivable way. We are not training daughters to never leave the home, we are training daughters to be satisfied in the home so they can shine their glory outside of it. If dads attempt to raise overly assertive/independent young ladies who despise the home and cherish the professional standards of the world, they will quickly realize that they are contributing to the rise of feminism and not femininity.
The mothers I know are not only feminine, but they are also glory-givers in their hospitality, kindness, and wisdom. Fathers need to begin their principled training with their young daughters with that end in mind. Equip them to glorify the home and their husbands, and many of the other societal concerns fade. I know I have more to say about this in the future.
