A perfect example of what happens when you raise entitled kids. She will walk up to her dad and put her arms on her hips, demand what she wants, and stand there until she gets it. I've seen her do that, and then look over at me and give me a little smile and a shoulder shrug! WTF?!? She is going to grow up to be an epic bitch.

Nail on the head I think.

I have a 9 year old daughter that has been splitting time between me and the ex since she was 5 so I'll throw my couple of pennies in for what they are worth.

My daughter is very well behaved. Around me. I don't know what her discipline is like with her mother because I can't see it, but from what I am told by all accounts she is just as well behaved there as when she is with me. I have feared and still fear the influence that her mother will have on her, with that whole "daughter of a single mother" mindset she inherited from her mother that she got from her mother (I was starting to think it was genetic prior to TRP)

My daughter doesn't back talk, she isn't sassy with me/other adults/teachers, she is respectful, and much better behaved than any of her classmates. Yes I am bragging, I feel like I'm doing a damn good job. She is also a straight A student that was placed into the gifted program early on. Maybe I got lucky or maybe I put in the work.

How did I do it? Especially when her mother hopped on the carousel, got "unhappy", and brutally divorce raped me?

Well. For one thing I act like the man I want her to seek out. That also keeps me constantly improving me, because if there is one person on the planet I will not let myself fail, it is my child. There is my motivation.

She also looks a lot more like me than her mother, don't know if that is here or there, but it is still commented on "No way you could deny that one!" as if I'd want to. I have a good kid. I think this resemblance similarity has had some sort of weird effect where she identifies a little more with me. She has the build of my sister and the blond hair predominant in my family's Swedish genealogy. I think it helps, who knows.

Here is one big thing though. I make sure she learns how to do things for herself (beyond the basic kid chores). Not easy things, but things that regularly intimidate adults. At age 8 as her summer project? She assembled an entire computer for me, complete with blue LED lights, and installing windows 7 on an SSD correctly. I'm an IT guy and I'll be damned if some beta nerd is going to need to fix her computer. It gave her a ton of confidence, pride, and built her self-worth up. Exactly what I want.

I want her to value herself. I want her to not give herself away cheaply in the future. What better way than to teach her that she has value outside of her looks. And by all indications she is going to be the type that I'll be chasing dudes away from. She is the size of a 7 year old at 9, in the 1% for weight and height, and if she inherits the huge cans my mother has and couples it with the 5' nothing of my sister... fuck, why did I go there? I'll worry about that when and if it happens.

Because the point is that I teach her how to do things that aren't typically feminine. She is involved in a lot of my hobbies, at least the ones I deem appropriate for a 9 y.o. girl. We tumble rocks, use the diamond saw to cut them and a lapidary to cab them, and make jewelry out of them. She gets to learn a skill that can eventually earn her money (jewelry making), has to do a bunch of manual labor with tools that are diamond tipped and could eat skin off her fingers, but she loves that at the end of it she gets jewelry to keep or sell (and do not bargain with this child, she will make you regret it). And she does have to sell some of it, because she has to pay me back for the raw materials used in anything she keeps. Nothing is free. Figured I'd teach her that too. Plus maybe she'll have some financial sense.

So we bond a lot, we talk a lot, I don't shy away from hard subjects, and I tell her the truth about the world as best I can.

As for the shit tests at an early age? I nip that shit in the bud. If it even starts I can stop it by saying her first name (not the shortened cuter version) in a certain tone. She immediately knows that the behavior she is exhibiting is unacceptable, that I disapprove, and that if it continues or if I see it again there will be consequences. And I hold firm to that.

I'll let her do a lot of shit other parents won't though as long as she follows my rules and keeps meeting my high standards. She was watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy with me at age 6. She loves the scene where Frodo gets attacked by the spider. She watched it over and over again. She has read the Hunger Games trilogy and we have discussed how it is a critique of society. Her mother let her watch the Twilight movies, she thought they were dumb. I was so proud.

I've also been talking high level philosophy around her since an early age. My degree was in Religious Studies which was a sub-branch of Philosophy so I got a lot of logic and rhetoric.

Here is something that happened that first year of the divorce (yeah, the damn thing took nearly two years, another story for another day). The ex enrolled her in school in the district nearest the apartment she moved into, 35 miles from where we had lived together, which was only 5 miles from my work.

Ended up I had to cart my child 70 miles round trip, twice a day (yes, 140 miles a day 5 days a week, so 600 miles every other week) to get her to school on time and pick her up on time. I'm lucky my boss didn't fire me. He worked with me and I made the time up. But I digress.

With a good 45 minutes of a captive prisoner in the car I would just talk to her about whatever philosophical topic was on my mind. I'd pose old logic puzzles from antiquity. Anything to pass the time, we did not listen to music, we still don't in the car, we talk. Then we moved on to Plato, Aristotle, and by the end of her Kindergarten year we were talking about Freud's theory on religion and various creation myths from different religions.

I've always been told that young children have great facility to understand abstract concepts. I have seen nothing to contradict this. She understood and has retained a lot of those complex ideas. It scares me at times because she is smarter than I was at that age, what will she become?

The other big thing with my daughter, and this really may be key, is that I keep her on a schedule. School or no school it doesn't matter. She gets up at the same time every day regardless. During the summer she goes to work with me every day and is my extra set of hands when I need to turn a screw on a computer, or run a maintenance program. During the school year we have a regiment. We have the same morning routine every day. When I pick her up from school she comes to work with me and the first thing she does is all of her homework. Once that is done she is allowed to do what she wants as long as she tells me what it is.

She is aware that there are consequences for lying as well, and that goes for any topic, no lies. Unacceptable. At the same time she knows that I will reward hard work, excellent school reports, and positive behavior. Not over the top rewards, but enough to keep her going in the right direction.

The reward for school grades can be tricky though for a smart kid that gets A+'s easy. So I've made the system work in both directions. She gets credit for an A, but anything below an A will cancel out that A's credit. One B costs one A. One C costs two As, One D cancels out all rewards and incurs punishment. I have repeatedly told her she doesn't want to know what happens if I see an F. She is aware that if she screws her grades up she can end up owing me money. She did the math.

So, discipline and routine, combined with motivation and a whole hell of a lot of hard work, making sure she respects me, and understands that her actions have consequences both good and bad.

Now that is a block of text. Guess I've had quite a bit to say on the topic.