Dear Everyone Telling My Daughters They Can Be Anything They Want,

Please stop.

I agree with you in spirit, but telling my five and four-year-old daughters they can be anything they want only gets their hopes up, which you’re forcing me to dash. I’m already the bad guy at bedtime, dinner time, and any time that interrupts screen time.

Practically, they can’t be anything they want. For example, as both have requested, neither can become a penguin, an apple tree, or, apparently, the President of the United States. Also, my wife and I are both under 5’5", so a successful basketball player, house painter, and shelf stocker are likely out of the question too. Jockey, you say? We don’t have horse girl(s’) money!

Guess who gets to break the news to my daughters that they can’t intern with Santa? The same person who had to explain that the tooth fairy is a lifetime appointment and no, they’re not currently requesting résumés.

No one wants to destroy the glimmer of hope and magic in a young girl’s eye. Unveiling society’s historic and contemporary limitations on women is already super uncool. Thankfully, Virginia Woolf did that for all of us, but A Room of One’s Own isn’t exactly kindergarten reading material. So in the meantime, I get to explain the lack of gender equity while you’re telling them we’ve already conquered that mountain.

Here are just some of the things my daughters have noticed that fly in the face of “girls can do anything”:

SOPHIA (4): Why do girls always have to wear shirts and boys don’t?

ELLIE (5): Can girls be doctors? [Male schoolmate] told me only dads can be doctors (Note: Ellie’s mother is a doctor).

SOPHIA: Can I be a mermaid?

ELLIE: Boy baseball is boring. Can we watch girls play baseball?

SOPHIA: Why can only girls do gardening?

ELLIE: Do I have to wear those big shoes all the time like Minnie Mouse?

SOPHIA: Why can’t I be a mermaid?

ELLIE: I’m going to be an artist and live in a big house and have lots of kids and …

SOPHIA: [watching videos of Simone Biles compete] I can do that.

And it doesn’t stop when they’re kids. “Pursue a career in whatever makes you happy,” you will affirm to my one-day multi-AP class-taking teens. Everyone somehow forgets that once a woman turns thirty-five, she must have two and a half children and abandon her career to care for them or be pestered by relentless, personally inappropriate questions. (Note: I was an unemployed stay-at-home dad, and my wife was asked all the time when she was going to quit her job.) Fast forward thirty years, my daughters are saddled with student loans, a stunted career, and a BA in Art History because someone told them at an impressionable age they can be anything they want.

What my daughters could use is earnest support and encouragement from a society that won’t punish them for trying to be anything they want. Hell, I’d settle for even one piece of legislation hinting at real childcare assistance, widespread rebukes of Andrew Tate and tradwives, and for people to level with them. Some brave and focused women are out there doing the best they can to pave the way for my daughters to be assistant vice-presidents of something or other. Thank you for your service.

To the rest of you people brainwashing my daughters into believing they can be anything they want, I turn it over to you. They look forward to your answers and clarifications on why they can’t parade around topless, speak in meetings without being interrupted, or make an honest run at the highest office in the land. I hope your responses are more robust, practical, and grounded than the platitudes typically espoused in their direction.

Until then, I’ll just keep being the man explaining that girls can be mostly anything.

Thanks a lot,
Andrew