Why Daddies Tease Their Daughters

We’ve had to explain to our girls while they were young that there are two kinds of teasing. One kind is bad, and the other kind is what we do to them. Or something like that. Anyway, when they’re young they like to be tickled, to giggle a lot. Weird, but it seems to do them good somehow. So with our youngest, I read her a book about teasing the other day, and she pieced it together that something didn’t quite jive with it being wrong to tease people, yet somehow it’s okay when I tease her, and I tell her I’m teasing her…. so we talked a little bit about there being two different kinds of teasing, and how daddies like to tease their daughters. (I tell sometimes them it’s a daddy’s job to tease his daughters.) “Why?” she asked. And then I just blurted it out, in a flash of insight. “Because it tickles your soul,” I said. A little while later, I teased her about something at the dinner table… she laughed, and said, “Daddy, that really tickles my soul!” Big grin. Hmmm. Mine too.