MyDaughter

» see mydaughter.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

A British website, run by an association of private girls' schools, giving advice to parents of teenage daughters. I was in my mid-twenties when it launched, in Turkey, and had no daughters. There is no angle from which this product was pointed at me, and that is most of why it is interesting: it is a reminder that a lot of the web in 2009 was built by institutions for one narrow set of people who needed something specific.

MyDaughter.co.uk opened in January 2009. The Girls' Schools Association had commissioned a survey of a thousand parents of daughters first, and the survey came back with a list of subjects that were causing anxiety. The GSA built the site to answer that list rather than to publish generally, which is an unusual starting point for a website and a very usual one for a trade body.

The content tracked the worry list closely. Articles covered choosing a school and pushing a girl toward her academic ceiling. Further down were the harder pieces, on eating disorders and the early signs of bullying, and on what to do about internet safety when your daughter is twelve and already on a social network.

~ the dossier ~

~ who wrote it ~

The answers came from headteachers at GSA member schools, with outside specialists brought in for the parts that needed them, mostly from nutrition and psychology. Registered users could post a question and have a panel answer it. Mechanically that is a question-and-answer site, except the panel was made of people who ran actual schools, which is a different proposition from a forum full of strangers.

The site also carried notable former pupils of GSA schools, among them Claudia Winkleman and Miranda Krestovnikoff, and ran a search tool covering every member school. The marketing purpose was never hidden: an association of fee-paying schools was running a free advice service with a school finder bolted to the side of it.

~ the book ~

In January 2011 the Friday Project, an imprint of HarperCollins, published Your Daughter, built out of the site's own material. A website getting a print edition two years in was a reasonable marker of success in 2011, and it is the only hard evidence left that the site had an audience.

~ where it went ~

MyDaughter closed in 2014 and its functions were moved into the Girls' Schools Association's own website. No announcement survives and no date more precise than the year. A trade body ran a separate brand for five years and then decided it did not need one.

mydaughter.co.uk does not resolve today. The GSA is still there, still representing the same schools, and the advice is still somewhere on its site under its own name instead. The thing that died was the idea that the advice deserved a front door of its own.

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