To many parents, teenage daughters are an unfathomable mystery. What do they really mean when they snarl at you that they are “fine”? Why won’t they wear coats? Or socks? And what is it with all that black nail varnish?

Now, the combined insights and wisdom of Britain’s leading girls’ school headmistresses, who between them educate more than 100,000 girls, is being deployed in an attempt to unlock these and other secrets of female adolescence.

The My Daughter website, created by the Girls’ School Association (GSA), will be open to all parents, not just those with daughters at the GSA’s fee-paying schools.

It will offer tips and advice provided directly from the GSA’s 200 headmistresses on how to realise your daughter’s full academic potential, dealing with bullying, recognising eating disorders, use of social networking sites, friendships and the hardest nut of all to crack – communicating with your daughter.

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Its launch in January will come after a speech next week by Vicky Tuck, of Cheltenham Ladies’ College, the GSA’s president, who believes that Britain’s top head mistresses are perfectly placed to dispense such advice.

“We have had thousands of teenage girls pass through our care, as teachers and headmistresses. There’s not much that we do not know about dealing with girls and certainly nothing they could do that could surprise us,” she said.

Ms Tuck says that it is not only parents who could benefit from advice from the country’s leading headmistresses, but the nation as a whole. “Every organisation could do with a headmistress,” she says.

After all, they run some of Britain’s most successful businesses, with annual turnovers of up to £20 million, and command unswerving loyalty from their über-demanding clientele. They are rarely off duty, and yet they always have a ready smile with never a hair out of place. What’s more, they achieve this without the chief executive’s traditional support: a wife.

“As leaders, we are not interested in status or massaging our egos – what we want is to influence what happens and to get things done efficiently. As women, we are great multitaskers and list-makers and we are very systematic. As head teachers, we have to act with great moral authority and clarity as well as sensitivity,” Ms Tuck says. It is this mixture of common sense and compassion that the GSA intends to bring to the mydaughter.co.uk website. Research by the GSA has identified a type of parent – the Anxious Girl Guardians – who worry a lot about their daughters, but who do not want to hold them back.

Ms Tuck hopes that the site will appeal particularly to fathers, who often feel that their teenage daughters live in a parallel universe, but are too afraid to admit it.

Tips from the top on dealing with your daughter

— It is unrealistic to expect your teenage daughter to be happy all the time: she’s on a journey, some turbulence is inevitable (and healthy)

— Make sure she knows you love her for who she is, not for what you want her to become

— Don’t expect your daughter to tell you everything. You’re not her best friend (she’s got Facebook too)

— Don’t automatically believe her when she says: “Everyone else is allowed to”

— To the parent who says: “I know my daughter and she would never, ever lie to me,” our reply is: “Get real!”

Source: Vicky Tuck. The mydaughter.co.uk website will go live in January

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