This morning I was browsing Facebook and saw that my youngest daughter had posted pictures of her High School Prom. This is a new experience for me, both my daughters live in the UK and when I was in High School we didn’t have proms – they being a strictly American experience.

Both my daughters and I stay in touch a lot through email and sites like Facebook, they have friended me and I feel privileged to be given access to their “private” lives through the images and posts that they share. Seeing the pictures made me realize how grown my youngest daughter is now. Of course like many parents I have both of my daughters fixed at around 8 years old, the time they stopped seeing me as the greatest guy in the world.

Going through the 117 pictures that she posted, from the limo ride to the venue, to the meal, to the dancing afterward was like experiencing the event as though I were an invited guest. For American parents I am sure the sight of all the alcohol would be a shocking and troubling vision, but the attitude toward drinking and the legal age is different in the UK. The amount of out of focus pictures as the evening wore on perhaps said more about it than the actual content.

The real lesson for me in looking through these pictures was just how responsible they all were. Yes of course there was celebration, yes there was drinking but, as evidenced by the great email I got from her this morning, there was no harm done. The values that I had hoped to instill in my daughters are displayed on a regular basis.

I was once asked about being the Father of two teenage daughters, who were 17 & 15 at the time, the young man asked me wasn’t I worried that because I wasn’t there to check on them daily that they could be doing all kinds of things. I replied that if they hadn’t learned the lessons that I was trying to teach them by that age it was unlikely they were going to suddenly learn them.

What Facebook pictures and the emails, along with the summer visits show me is that, while worrying is a natural activity for all Fathers about their daughters, trusting that they were actually listening to you at times is a better activity.