The other day while my two girls were at school, I went through my house and gathered all the Disney princess books and movies and hid them. I’m not sure why I didn’t throw them away—perhaps it was nostalgia for my own childhood—but now they are tucked away on a high shelf in my storage room, behind the Easter decorations.

I wish I could teleport myself back to their babyhood and stop these princess messages where they started, but now, at the ages of six and nine, the seeds have been planted in their minds: You need a prince to be happy. Just wait, you’ll be rescued and whisked off to the ball to live happily ever after.

I want my daughters to rescue themselves.

I want them to love math, and create crazy science experiments in my backyard. I want them to dream about space exploration and veterinary heart transplants. I want them to create their own futures, no matter what prince (or princess) is in that future.

I want them to know that they can grow up to be one of the incredible women in space, a scientist working towards a cure for cancer, a chatbot developer, a marine biologist, or an FBI agent. I want them to feel empowered, strong, confident. I want no glass ceiling to get in the way of their dreams. The sky is the limit for my girls.

They can be hair stylists if that is their wildest dream. I’ll encourage them to be the best hair stylist imaginable.

But right now they’re in kindergarten and third grade. So how will I get them there? I will subscribe to National Geographic Kids magazine, not Seventeen Magazine. I will replace their princess stories with stories about powerful women like Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Harriet Tubman, Madam Curie, Amelia Earhart and Jane Goodall. I will tell them every day how smart and capable they are—pretty on the inside.

The world will tell them they can’t soon enough. Eventually they’ll face unequal wages, losing a job to a man, and glass ceilings. But before gender bias gets to them, I want to arm them with confidence. I want them to truly believe that nothing is impossible.