My oldest daughter, the 12–year–old, may be turning into a woman sooner than I thought because the other day she asked me something that only a woman could ask.

She was looking at her painted fingernails with serious concern on her face. Without looking up, she asked, “Does this fingernail polish make my fingers look fat?” Of course, my male training — the training my wife has been working on for nearly two decades — kicked in, and I responded without taking the slightest glance, “Absolutely not!”

After I had digested the question a few seconds and realized who it was actually coming from, I looked at her nails. I did see fat little fingers but not because of some nail polish. She is my child, and I will always see the fat little fingers that could barely wrap around my finger when she was a baby. To me, she’s still the tiny toddler with curly locks and arms and hands so swollen with baby fat that she looked like she was wearing rubber bands on her wrists.

It’s the same way with my ten–year–old daughter, and my seven–year–old–son. In my mind, no matter how grown–up they get, they will always be stumbling through the living room wearing a droopy diaper and sucking on a pacifier. That’s what makes such questions like “Do my fingers look fat?” that much harder to take.

At least when my wife asks questions like that, my responsibility ends with the answer, “No.” Once I overcame my Pavlovian response to my daughter’s question, I started to worry if

should counsel her on the importance of a positive self image. My job as a parent is to make sure to the best of my ability that my kids are happy and healthy. It’s inevitable I’ll inadvertently inflict some kind of psychological damage, but I don’t want to be the one who caused my daughter to jam her fat little finger down her throat every time she had an extra brownie for dessert or wore the wrong nail polish.

Was my “no” enough? It’s usually plenty for my wife, even if she changes her clothes 14 times despite my trained response. But my wife is a grown woman, and I can blame someone else for most of her insecurities. My daughter is a different story. I know my sphere of influence will be shrinking soon, but, unfortunately, I feel like I’m still very capable of doing some major damage to her psyche if I settle for the one word instant response.

Maybe I’ll wait for something a little more complex than fingernail polish. I feel it’s safe for me to claim ignorance on that subject. I mean, my solution is to just remove the stuff, but apparently that still wouldn’t deal with the psychological ramifications of chubby digits whether they were imagined or not. I’ll just leave this one up to her mom. She’s much more qualified than I am to deal with the slimming or fattening effects of hot pink nail polish.