How to raise a feminist daughter, according to a feminist: Best-selling author Chimamanda Adichie has an actual manifesto guiding parents on how to raise their daughters to be feminists and steer clear of reinforcing the harmful idea that women are inferior to men. Before any of our readers begin to fret that raising your daughters to be feminists means she’ll spend her days burning bras and will swear off men for the rest of eternity, let’s just take a minute to clearly define feminism.

“Feminist: The person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes,” Adichie told the audience at her TED Talk, We Should All Be Feminists. (Readers who are well-acquainted with pop culture will recognize this excerpt from her speech from Beyoncé’s 2013 song, Flawless.) In her book, Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, Nigeria-born Adichie encourages parents to understand that “raising a girl to believe that she is inferior to a man, but that the man is expected to be good to her” does not count as feminism and still places women in a subordinate position. She also encourages parents to reject gender stereotypes, such as the belief that women should be likeable and not speak their minds, lest people think they are “rude” or “mean.” There are important lessons to be learned and passed on to girls at an early age, particularly in being able to identify situations that go against feminism, Adichie tells NPR’s Audie Cornish on an episode of All Things Considered. “By the time we are older, it’s much more difficult to unlearn things that we’ve learned, which is why there are so many women who ― even though ideas of gender are bad for them, stifle them ― they kind of still go along with it because that’s what they know.”