Mums, you can't be your daughter's friend and parent

 Mums, you can't be your daughter's friend and parent (Photo: iStock)

Women are not only good liars but also good pretenders. Since adults can never be honest with their children, we end up with a confused lot of young adults.

It’s impractical to be perfect friends with one’s daughter even when one wants to. Firstly, because a perfect friendship requires peerhood that confers comfort in being vulnerable with one’s secrets, including outrageous ones.

Secondly, perfect friends must share experiences and consult for advice from time to time over situations. What does a teenage daughter have to offer her mother about certain realities in this life? Nothing.

As mothers, we are tasked to nurture the young ones to become the best version of themselves. We take our daughters to the church and have them learn the holy communion and be baptised in time to usher them into the perfect Christian space.

While we can dress skimpily when a date requires and gulp down a bottle or two of hard liquor in safe adult spaces, we can never be the ones to expose our babies to such sinful liquids.

Recently enough, just when the anti-FGM chants were already loud enough in the air, mothers ensured that their daughters embraced the cut albeit secretly.

They had been brought up in a generation when the cut was necessary as a rite of passage, imagining their girls would not be women enough if they left them with the ugly fullness of a woman’s organs.

Some women, buoyed by the need to erect strong foundations of independence in the girlchild, invest a little too much information too early in the children’s minds. We turn them into our friends when they can barely hold a womanly conversation with their agemates about menses and tampons.

We should understand there is something called timing; maybe we should draw from the fact that the school syllabus is a well-planned document that releases knowledge stage by stage as the mind grows.

In one grade, they first learn how to count before the learners are introduced to more complex concepts in the next grade.

On this front, men are doing a much better job, not exposing their relationship problems to their sons prematurely.