As a father, how do you relate to your three millennial daughters? Well, I must thank my wife for facilitating my good relations with my daughters. Not that I was unable to strike a similar frequency with them. There were many occasions when I would relate better with them than my wife.

Claiming that we never had any challenges would be wrong; our challenges were more about management than controlling. We decided much earlier in our married life that we would let our daughters grow on auto-pilot with occasional steering.

One of the first challenges I faced was to convince my daughters about the futility of grades in school system. Initially, they could not understand why their father was least concerned with their report card, while all other parents put extraordinary stress on high achievement in tests.

Our challenge was exactly the opposite of other parents. Here, we were trying to convince our children not to exert too much pressure on themselves and find time to enjoy life as it was. It took them a while to learn how not to compare a person’s potential in terms of school grades.

The second challenge was to guide them about the importance of good utilisation of their time. If you don’t spend each hour and minute on textbooks, you can’t just while away your time. They had to develop a habit of finding ways to keep them occupied in more productive and useful tasks. The charm of stories had to be displayed and that we did not only with story books but also with visual stimulation through movies. When they were small we watched and discussed movies, such as Shrek and Toy Story.

But then my challenge was to persuade them to go beyond what everybody else in their age group was watching. Making them sit through 50-year-old movies, such as Wizard of Oz and Bambi was not difficult. Soon they realised that it was fun and they were developing a unique narrative to share with their friends. Then came feature films, such as Singin’ in the Rain, Sound of Music, and Marry Poppins; all becoming their favourites.

Now they were on their own to look for and watch some of the best movies ever produced anywhere in the world.

With this background, suddenly we found ourselves with the challenges of the digital age and mobile technology. Our first daughter got her cell phone at the age of 16, second at 14, and the third daughter at 12. Now how do you keep them away from their phones? That has been a big challenge for us. Though my wife kept reminding me of the ill-effects of allowing them to keep their phones all the time, I seldom took away their phones. I did it under extreme conditions when I realised that it was becoming an obsession. My suggestion to parents would be to not allow their children 24/7 access to cell phones.

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Once they cross the teen-age period new challenges arise: the university education and the desire to see them grow as responsible citizens. Should or shouldn’t we send them abroad? My answer was to encourage them to get a scholarship. When my eldest daughter won a place at a youth exchange programme for one year of high school in the USA she was 16. The extended family started wagging their tongue but we were clear about this. Our daughter didn’t adjust in the US easily and had to change three foster families but, in the end, it was a worthwhile experience for her.

When the second daughter won a place for an exchange university semester in Tokyo, Japan, she was 20. Our challenge was not to convince anyone but to adjust to the fact that we were becoming empty nesters. With just one child left at home the challenge was not to howl at each other and keep a happy married life intact.

That challenge was soon overcome and we found for ourselves some more likeminded new friends. This strategy worked and our youngest daughter who had lost two sisters to university had to keep herself busy and learn some new skills, such as learning to play the piano.

The most important challenge that I still face and have been unable to overcome is to make them share their feelings with me. I come home, try to strike a conversation with them and after a couple of sentences there is a wall of silence. Maybe I have become difficult to access or they have become more self-centred, I can’t figure out.

This doesn’t happen always, but when it does I am at a loss to unpack my child from her cocoon, and that is the most frustrating challenge that I face.