Is your daughter glued to the tube, fascinated by home-improvement shows like Trading Spaces? If so, she’s in good company. These programs, popular with adults, are also surprise successes with teens, who ranked Extreme Makeover: Home Edition among their top ten most watched shows. Tween and teen girls are the majority viewers among the youth audience for these shows, a phenomenon that many attribute to the presence of hottie hosts like Ty Pennington or to girls’ urges to redecorate their rooms.

If your daughter is exhibiting signs of being a home-show groupie, this can be a good thing. It presents you with the opportunity to use it as a launch pad for helping her develop self-reliance, explore nontraditional skills, find new passions, and explore potential careers.

“Design is a great way for a girl to tap into a subject she’s curious about, and a lead-in to learning math, science, and technology,” explains Rachel Muir, founder of GirlStart, an Austin, Texas based organization that offers workshops and resources to help girls develop technical skills. For example, a room makeover requires creating a to-scale floor model, calculating how much paint she’ll need, and determining appropriate furniture size. And, of course, notes Muir, “there's plenty of math involved in staying within budget.”

You can nurture her nascent interest in tech skills by first simply paying tribute to her apparent interest in home renovation. Don’t get impatient if she expresses interest only in stereotypically “feminine” aspects of home improvement and spends hours contemplating fabric swatches, curtain styles, or pillow choices. It might just reflect a tween and teen developmental desire to “redo” her old childish image into a new, sophisticated older one.

Try enticing her into more nontraditional arenas by noting that even when Extreme Makeover’s blonde bombshell Paige Hemmis sashays out in a pink tool belt, she's really using those power tools. Remind her she'll have a lot more redecorating options (and save lots of money) when she learns how to do simple carpentry and other home improvements.

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