Happy Daughter's Day!

 Happy Daughters’ Day! 

Today, I don't just want to celebrate daughters.

I want to celebrate the parents who believed in their daughters.

Because if we look back just a few decades, we realise how much has changed.

For generations, girls were often expected to adjust, compromise and follow a path decided for them. Education was not always considered equally important for daughters. Career choices were often secondary. Marriage was treated as the destination, while a girl's own dreams sometimes came much later—or not at all.

The world has changed significantly since then.

Since the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action, more girls are going to school, child marriage has declined, adolescent pregnancy has fallen, legal protections have expanded, and women have gained a much stronger presence in professional and public life.

But behind every statistic is a family.

A father who said, "My daughter will study as much as my son."

A mother who said, "You can have a career and a family."

Parents who said, "We trust your decision."

Parents who stood quietly behind their daughters when society questioned their choices.

And for those of us who grew up in the Boomer or Millennial generations, we know what that support meant.

We know that the freedom we sometimes take for granted today was not always available to women of our mothers' and grandmothers' generations.

Sometimes, it was a parent who quietly challenged an old belief.

Sometimes, it was a father who refused to differentiate between his son and daughter.

Sometimes, it was a mother who made sure her daughter knew that marriage was not the end of her dreams.

And sometimes, it was simply someone saying:

"Go ahead. I am with you."

Those words can change a girl's life.

Today, millions of girls around the world still face barriers. UNICEF estimates that 122 million girls remain out of school, nearly one in five girls globally is married in childhood, and adolescent girls continue to face violence and unequal access to opportunities. Progress has been real—but it has not reached every girl equally.

That is why Daughters' Day matters.

Not just because daughters deserve to be celebrated.

But because every generation has a responsibility to make the world a little fairer for the next generation of girls.

And today, I want to pause and say something that perhaps we don't say often enough:

Thank you, Mom and Dad. 

Thank you for believing in us.

Thank you for giving us the courage to make our own choices.

Thank you for supporting our dreams—even when they were different from what you had imagined for us.

And a heartfelt thank you to our in-laws too—for accepting us, respecting us, supporting us and giving us the space to remain the women we were before we became daughters-in-law.

We may have grown up, built careers, become wives and mothers, and created families of our own…

…but somewhere inside every daughter is still that little girl who remembers who stood beside her when she needed it most.

So today, let's celebrate our daughters.
Let's thank our parents.
Let's acknowledge those who supported us.
And let's make sure the daughters of tomorrow inherit a world where they never have to ask whether their dreams are "too much" simply because they are girls. 

Because the greatest gift we can give a daughter is not a perfect life.

It is the confidence to believe that she deserves to choose her own. 

Happy Daughters' Day.