Raising a daughter who doesn't fold

Make her make the phone call.

From about nine, she books her own haircut. She tells the swim coach she'll miss Thursday. She asks the librarian whether the second book in the series is in. You stand in the kitchen with your arms folded and you don't take the handset off her, even when she goes bright red and says "um" eleven times and forgets to give her surname.

It takes four minutes longer than doing it yourself. It's excruciating the first six times. And it's the cheapest training available, because the thing that stops most grown women from asking for what they want isn't conviction, it's the physical awkwardness of the asking. Get the awkwardness over with at nine, in a situation where the worst outcome is a rescheduled fringe trim.

Let her be wrong out loud at your own table

A girl who's never argued with a safe adult won't argue with an unsafe one.

The rule in our house is simple: you can hold any position you like, as long as you can say why. You can't sulk it, you can't eye-roll it, and "because everyone knows that" isn't a reason. But if she's got a reason, she gets the floor, even if her reason is thin and you can dismantle it in a sentence.

Don't dismantle it in a sentence. Ask her a question instead, and let her find the hole herself.

The cost is real. Dinner runs longer. You will hear a fourteen-year-old defend a position you find genuinely daft, and you'll have to sit on your hands. Some evenings you're tired and you just want everyone to eat the pasta quietly. Take those evenings off. But if the standing rule in the house is that disagreement gets you shut down, she'll learn to go quiet, and she'll take that skill to her first boss and her first serious boyfriend.

Stop fighting the small ones for her

The email to the teacher about the unfair mark. Don't send it.

Instead: she writes down one sentence on a scrap of paper. "I think I was marked down for something that wasn't in the question, can you show me where I went wrong?" She says it to the teacher's face, alone, before class. She reports back. If it doesn't work, she tries once more with better wording.

After that, you can step in. Two attempts, then reinforcements.

There are things you go straight in on, and you shouldn't be vague with her about what they are. Anything involving her safety. Any adult using their position against her. Sustained cruelty she's already tried to handle and can't. She needs to know the door is open and you'll walk through it without hesitating, so that she never quietly absorbs something she should be telling you. The point of making her handle the small ones isn't to prove she's on her own. It's so that when she does come to you, you both know it's serious.

Give her the actual sentence

Children don't freeze because they lack courage. They freeze because they haven't got the words ready and the pause is unbearable, so they say yes to make the pause stop.

So give her the words, and make her say them aloud in the kitchen until they're boring.

• "No thanks, I don't want to."
• "I'm not comfortable with that."
• "I need to check with my mum first." (A useful shield at eleven. Let her use you.)
• "That's not okay."
• "I've changed my mind."

That last one matters more than it looks. A lot of girls will hold a line at the start of an evening and then feel they've forfeited the right to move it once they've already agreed to something. Tell her plainly: you can leave. At any point. From anything. A taxi home at eleven at night costs less than most trainers, and you'll pay it without a single question asked, tonight or ever.

Then watch the apologising. Not to ban it. Just make her notice it. "Sorry, can I ask a question?" Sorry for what? She's allowed to take up the space she's standing in.

One hard thing, kept going for years

Pick something difficult and let her stay in it long past the point where it stops being fun.

Judo, distance swimming, climbing, a grade five music exam, a Duke of Edinburgh expedition with her own pack on her own back. The activity doesn't matter much. What matters is that she accumulates a file of memories in which something hurt, she wanted to stop, and she didn't.

That file is what she draws on at twenty-six when a job goes wrong. She won't be reasoning from principles. She'll be remembering the 400m medley and the fact that she got out the other side.

Two honest caveats. It doesn't have to be sport, and if she's miserable in a particular thing for a year rather than a fortnight, changing the thing isn't weakness. Also, somebody has to drive her there at half six in the morning for the best part of a decade. That somebody is you. That's the actual price and it's worth knowing before you sign up.

Praise the thing you want more of

"She's so good" is the most dangerous compliment a girl gets, because good almost always means compliant, quiet and easy to be around.

Praise something harder to earn. She told the truth when a lie would have been smoother. She went back to the club the week after the bad week. She sat with the new girl when it cost her something socially. She said what she thought when the room had already decided otherwise.

Be specific. "You were brave" is weather. "You said what you thought when Chloe had already said the opposite, and you said it kindly" is a photograph she can go back and look at.

Backbone, not spikiness

These aren't the same thing and the difference needs teaching directly.

Backbone is holding a position under pressure. Rudeness is making a person feel small. One is a spine, the other is a hobby. She can say "I don't agree, and here's why" to an adult without contempt in her voice, and if she can't yet, that's a skill to coach rather than a phase to indulge.

And if your daughter came out of the box combative, your job is the reverse of everything above. You're not building the spine, it's there. You're teaching her when not to use it, how to be wrong gracefully, and why the fact she can win an argument doesn't oblige her to.

She's reading you, constantly

She knows whether you say yes to the committee because you want to or because you couldn't face saying no. She's watching how you handle the relative who makes remarks. She's noticed whether you apologize properly, without the word "if" in it.

Let her see one of those go well. Decline something in front of her and don't explain yourself for three minutes afterwards. Hold a boundary with somebody who outranks you socially. Say "I was wrong about that" at the table, out loud, to her.

One day, probably around fifteen, she's going to use every bit of this on you. She'll hold a position you hate, calmly, with reasons, and she won't back down because you raised her voice.

That's the bill. Pay it without complaining.