By David Magallanes /Guest contributor
I have had the experience and privilege of raising a daughter. Many people throughout the years have indicated to me their belief that I had accomplished this task successfully. It was not always easy nor without considerable reading, research, reflection and discussion with other parents. During the time that I raised my daughter, I was married with her mother for the first five years of my little girl’s life; we divorced but I stayed in close contact with my daughter for the following ten years, at times even driving home every weekend from a remote desert work site four hours away. At age 15, my daughter moved into my home, where she lived harmoniously with me for six years. At this writing, she is now 28 years of age, is working as an elementary school teacher, and recently gave birth to my second grandson.
Raising a daughter is a privilege that no parent should take lightly. It is a task of supreme importance, for these daughters are the ones who will eventually “rock the cradles.” Our daughters do, therefore, “rule the world” in a very real sense, for they are the ones who nurture, for better or for worse, the next generation.
When as a young man I girded myself to take on the responsibilities of fatherhood, I realized, like so many other parents, that I did not have access to any training or “operating manuals.” Neither did I have too many male role models around me that I discerned to be reliable templates for the building of daughters. I saw far too many examples of what I did not want as my gold standard, judging from the results that prevailed after fifteen or so years of effort on the parts of these fathers. I also noted that daughters’ relationships with their mothers were often frayed or severely strained, rendering healthy communication impossible.
I ultimately ascertained that most fathers had no clue, really, about the invisible workings and intricacies of father-daughter relationships. I also realized that Hispanic fathers faced another layer of difficulty in this endeavor because of cultural aspects that impeded or outright obstructed the necessary acquisition of wisdom required for the optimal raising of daughters.
Many of us fathers of Mexican descent, if we have any interest at all in parenting, rely on our fathers who raised our sisters, or on other close male relatives, to show the way. We depend on them to teach us, by silent example if nothing else, how to take a baby girl and, ideally, form and forge her character in such a way that she develops into a confident, successful, emotionally healthy, and — above all — happy woman. Ideally, our daughters will become women who have no problem invoking their right to their pursuit of happiness, who possess the wisdom to make their lives — if not a heaven on earth — at least a pleasant journey, laden with blessings and joyful moments that constitute a life with meaning and purpose; a life whose light radiates outward with such exuberance that the next generation has no choice but to exultantly pass on that light and that wisdom and that joy.
The potential problem, however, is that this reliance on our fathers and other assorted relatives may be problematic in that they themselves may not have had the tools, the training, the background, the willingness or the wherewithal to lovingly and skillfully raise happy and healthily fulfilled daughters. Often, by imitating the methods of our relatives, we unwittingly doom our daughters to the same misery, weeping and gnashing of teeth experienced by myriad females brought up in Hispanic homes, including “traditional” and especially “religious” households.
However, we Hispanic fathers have a distinct and ponderous ancestral advantage over fathers of other backgrounds who in many cases have lost virtually all contact with their parental predecessors, whatever their cultural roots.
This is an excerpt from David Magallanes’ upcoming first book, “Fathers and Daughters of Mexican Blood.” He may be contacted at adelantos@msn.com
— David Magallanes is the creator of his own enterprise, Real World Projects, a speaking, writing and Internet marketing business dedicated to the advancement of the American Dream. An emerging branch of Real World Projects is Edifiquemos, a Spanish language enterprise dedicated to teaching the Spanish-speaking how to create a profitable international (U.S./Mexico) enterprise with low investment and high earning potential. David may be available for speaking opportunities. To contact him and for more information, you are invited to visit and explore his web sites at www.realworldprojects.info and at www.edifiquemos.com His e-mail is dmagallanes@RealWorldProjects.info