Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters

by Meg Meeker

  Through his tears, Doug continued. The accident had happened on the Florida causeway, heading toward the Keys. An oncoming car had crossed the center line and hit Judy’s side head-on. She was immediately thrust into a coma. Weeks went by as she lay in the intensive care unit of a strange hospital. Doctors told Doug that Judy would soon die. But she didn’t.

  While he waited, Doug asked a friend to search the remains of the rental car. He wanted to find his daily planner. He needed to restore order to his life. After all, he was an engineer.

  His friend returned with the planner in hand. As Doug took it, he had an epiphany. He told me, “If God could return my day planner from the mangled steel of that car, surely he could give me back my wife.”

  Doug prayed. He persevered in hope that someday Judy would open her eyes, get off the hospital bed, and walk.

  Then Judy did open her eyes. She fixed her gaze on Doug and the doctors. But behind her eyes, she wasn’t there. She recognized no one, remembered nothing.

  Doug’s daughter Mindy took over the story.

  “When my father brought my mother home from Florida, I was nineteen and scared. The mom I knew had died and someone else wore her clothes and stood in her shoes. She looked thin and ill. She couldn’t remember the movies we had seen together, the endless nights she had helped me with homework. I was grieving and felt crazy.

  “Life was really, really hard. The mother I knew was gone. My dad’s wife was changed. I felt extremely protective of my little sister and I felt protective of my dad. Our relationship became quite peculiar. I took over much of my mother’s role—which of course neither my dad nor I wanted—running the house and looking after my sister.”

  Mindy’s body language was telling. She wasn’t stiff or uncomfortable; she was attentive and clear. She looked directly into my eyes as she spoke. Sometimes she cried and occasionally she laughed.

  Before the accident, she had deeply loved and revered her father. After the accident, her love and respect for him had soared. He became her hero.

  “When he brought Mom home, she couldn’t remember anything. My dad brought out photo albums and hired a teacher to help. It wasn’t my dad’s nature to be patient, but week after week, month after month, he worked with her. And he helped us kids, me and my younger brother and sister.

  “Other fathers might not have been able to take it: to wake up every morning to a wife who didn’t know you; to reteach her twenty-five years’ worth of life. But my dad never gave up. Of course he knew that my mother would never be the same. He didn’t know what was ahead. And that was the amazing part—he always looked forward.

  “He changed his work schedule. He retired early and moved my mother up north, where life would be quieter and simpler. I know he still worries a lot about her.”

  “What was the greatest lesson your father taught you?” I asked.

  “Undiluted faithfulness.” She beamed. “He never caved. He stuck it out. He held on to God with his life and he fought for my mother.”

  Now, as an adult, Mindy realizes her father wasn’t fighting just for Judy; he was fighting for her. He wanted Mindy to have stability. He wanted her to share his strong faith. He wanted his oldest daughter to find her own depth of strength. Was he her hero? Absolutely, Mindy told me. No one else could hold a candle to him.

  Doug is a hero. I’m sure he doesn’t think of himself that way; heroes never do. But Doug is what a father should be. All men are capable of doing what Doug did.

  You may not think so. You may think his life sounds miserable. You may even think he’s a fool to have stuck it out.

  But you haven’t seen Doug’s face as he talks. You haven’t heard his calm voice imparting the wisdom he has learned from this experience. It is extraordinary. Doug has something I want, and something you want. It is an indescribable peace, a joy that comes only from persevering and doing what is right, even in the midst of anguish.

  Doug is a great hero because he saved his family. That’s what heroes do. They meet the deepest needs of the human heart.

  This is sobering stuff and I don’t take any of what I am saying lightly. It hits hard, but it is truthful and someone has to tell fathers to uncage their masculinity. In too much of popular culture, masculinity is either disparaged (often by feminists) or displayed wrongly (as in rap music). True masculinity is the moral exercise of authority. And your little girl needs it.

  Here are a few pointers that all dads should have.

  1. Make a plan. Your aspirations for your daughter will be clearest when she is young. When she’s an infant, you know with crystal clarity what you will expect from her: everything from what she will be allowed to say and do to whom she can date. Write it down now, and keep it clear in your mind and in hers. Teens love to tangle with your thinking. So have your rules inscribed like the Ten Commandments—and stick to them.

  2. Have courage under fire. Yes, you will be fired upon—by friends, pop psychologists, television programs, your wife, and your daughter. Keep your cool, but be firm and consistent. In the best men, kindness, strength, and perseverance go together.

  3. Be the leader. Remember that you have far more life experience than your daughter. Even if her IQ is higher than yours, she can’t make decisions as well as you can. You can see the big picture and weigh the consequences of actions in a way that she can’t. Young children, particularly smart young children, have an astonishingly cunning ability to manipulate fathers. So, nice men, beware. When your two-year-old daughter has a temper tantrum, put her in time-out and ignore her until she calms down. When she’s sixteen, do exactly the same. If you need to ground her for a week, or a month, do it. And don’t ever take personally the venom spewing from her lovely tongue. She’s still a kid. So you lead; don’t let her. She’ll have the entire rest of her life to run the show when she has her own home.

  4. Don’t cave, persevere. Heroes see a battle through until the end; they never run away. So stay in the fight, stay engaged with your daughter and your family, spend as much time at home as you can, stay consistent, loving, kind, and patient, and remember that you are more resilient than your daughter is. Parents often say that kids are resilient in crises like divorce. But they’re not; kids just don’t have a choice. You do. You can make the choice not to run when things get tough. You daughter can’t tell you this, so I will: If there is any way you can stay married, do it. Even if your marriage seems doomed, stay in it, stay at home with your children for as long as possible, for their sake. Getting divorced when your daughter is twenty is better for her than when she’s fourteen. And you might find that the best remedy for a bad marriage is sticking it out. Things really can improve.

  Don’t bend under peer pressure. You will have friends (probably most of your friends) who will be much more lenient with their daughters. So what? The risks out there are very real. I see them in my examination rooms every day, and I appreciate—and daughters and wives appreciate—fathers who are heroes, fathers who don’t relax until the battle leaves home (and really not even then).

  This is a tall order, but I have seen enough heroic fathers to know that it’s an order that every good man can fill if he sets himself to it. All it requires is that you be a man, a real man, which means a man of courage, perseverance, and integrity. You were made a man for a reason. You were made a man to be a strong, loving husband and father. So listen to your instincts, and do what’s right. Be a hero.

  Chapter Three

  You Are Her First Love

  Thomas Aquinas regarded love as the root of all other passions—hate, jealousy, and fear—and when I talk to daughters about their fathers, the conversations are almost always emotionally charged. They adore their fathers or hate them—sometimes they do both simultaneously. Your daughter yearns to secure your love, and throughout her life she’ll need you to prove it.

  A daughter identifies easily with her mother, but you are a mystery to her. You are her first love, so the early years of your relationship with her are crucial. The
love you give her is her starting point. You have other loves in your life, but she doesn’t. Every man who enters her life will be compared to you; every relationship she has with a man will be filtered through her relationship with you. If you have a good relationship, she will choose boyfriends who will treat her well. If she sees you as open and warm, she’ll be confident with other men. If you are cold and unaffectionate, she’ll find it hard to express love in a healthy way.

  When your daughter was born, oxygen was forced into her lungs so she could breathe. So too must love be pressed into her being if she is to grow into an emotionally sound woman.

  You will naturally feel love toward your daughter—especially in those first years of life—but that doesn’t guarantee she feels loved by you. Daughters’ reactions to words, actions, and situations are more complex, reflective, and diverse than those of fathers. She will read a litany of possible meanings into everything you do. When you buy your daughter a bracelet for her birthday, you’ll think of it as a straightforward gift. But she will think of it as fraught with meaning, good or bad.

  One of my standard questions when I’m examining a girl is, “Tell me who in your life loves you.” About half the girls respond, “My mom and dad, I guess. You know, they have to.” A quarter of them look at me quizzically. And the remaining quarter shrug their shoulders and say, “I don’t know.”

  My observations aren’t unique. A nationwide survey by the National Commission on Children found that when asked whether their parents “really cared” about them, 97 percent of kids between the ages of ten and seventeen from intact families believed their fathers really cared. For children in stepfamilies, 71 percent said their fathers really cared. In single-parent families, the number was 55 percent.

  If you’re in a stable marriage, you have done your daughter an enormous favor. But with the culture the way it is, you need to be vigilant. To be certain your daughter feels loved by you, here are some practical steps you can take.

  Words

  Use them. One of the major differences between men and women is how they use words. Woman like to talk; men don’t. That’s just the way it is. You might spend three hours watching a football game with your son and never say a word—and both of you would be happy. But your daughter isn’t wired like that. You have to talk to her. A good rule of thumb is to use twice as many words as you normally would, even if it means just saying things twice. Daughters can be prone to self-doubt. Pay her compliments repeatedly, so she knows you’re sincere.

  When she talks, she wants you to respond. Your daughter is sensitive not only to herself, but to others, and is always asking herself: Does he like being with me? Is he quiet because he’s thinking about something? Is he angry? Is he depressed? She wants you to be happy because then her life is better. She’ll often act as your personal aide, doing what she can to improve things. You are the center of her world.

  In return, you need, first and foremost, to tell her you love her. Not just on special occasions, but regularly. That might be easy when she’s five, but she needs to hear it even more when she is fifteen. She needs to hear you say it all the time. When a daughter hears “I love you” from her father, she feels complete.

  But your job doesn’t end there, because her next question might be: “I love you too, Dad, but why? Why do you love me?”

  You might find this exasperating, but she needs to hear the words. She wants to know why you feel the way you do, to test your sincerity. Men can find this frustrating, but I’m giving you fair warning. Girls who are seven years old might be satisfied with “I love you.” Girls of seventeen will want an explanation. She’s not trying to push your buttons. She genuinely wants to know.

  So you need to be ready. Reflect on your daughter’s character, praise her best attributes, talk about her sensitivity, compassion, or courage. Your daughter will draw a picture in her mind of how you see her, and that’s the person she’ll want to be.

  Be extremely careful. Many times fathers make innocent comments that are hurtful to daughters. If you comment on her weight, physical appearance, athletic prowess, or academic achievement, she’ll focus on her “external self” and worry about retaining your love through her achievements and appearance. Your daughter wants you to admire her deep, intrinsic qualities. Keep your comments positive, keep them on these qualities, and you can’t lose.

  Instead of saying, “I love you because you’re so beautiful,” tell her that you love her because there is no one else in the world like her.

  Expressing emotions can be tough for men. But loving people is tough. If you aren’t comfortable verbalizing your love, you can write her a letter. Girls of all ages love letters and notes. You might think they’re corny, but I guarantee that she won’t. Ponder your love for her, write it down in a very simple way, and leave the letter on her bed, in her backpack, in her drawer. It doesn’t matter. She’ll take praise from you anywhere, anytime. If you doubt my advice, do an experiment.

  Write a note affirming her in any number of ways. Leave it where she’ll find it. Then six months or a year later, go look for it. I’ll guarantee you’ll find it tucked away in a special place. She’ll save it because she wants to be connected with you and loved by you, always. Even if your feelings toward one another change as she grows older, the words on the paper won’t change. She needs these words.

  Fences

  In general, men are better at building fences than women are. I don’t mean literal fences, but the walls and boundaries your daughter needs around her world.

  When she is two years old, you define your daughter’s territory: what is safe to do and what isn’t. You establish how she can behave and how she can’t. You create borders around her movements, language, and behavior because you don’t want her to get hurt.

  As she grows older you take some fences down or move them back. You give her latitude to roam, but she is always under guard. When she is thirteen, some fences need to be reinforced—especially because she might try to break them. You can’t let her do that, because she’s still a kid. And because the boundaries make her feel loved.

  Daughters with a curfew know that someone wants them home and is probably waiting for them. Daughters without curfews wonder. Girls who are told to mind their language know their parents want them to grow up to be well-spoken women. Girls who grow up swearing in front of dad don’t believe that.

  Teenagers often try to manipulate fathers by accusing them of not trusting them. And this kind of manipulation often works. Tell your teenagers that the boundaries you’ve erected aren’t about trust, but are about keeping them safe and moving them in the right direction. We all have boundaries that we respect because life is safer that way.

  I recently spoke with Steve, a police officer in California. He can tell story after story of teens getting in trouble because their parents either were absent or weren’t tough enough to put up the boundaries they should have.

  We talked about how difficult it is for parents to be realistic about their own children. Because we want them to make good decisions, we assume they will. We want to believe our kids are stronger, more mature, and better capable of handling situations than other kids. And that’s when mistakes happen.

  Steve told me that he remembered when his sixteen-year-old daughter, Chelsea, wanted to go to the movies with her seventeen-year-old boyfriend.

  “I knew him,” he continued. “He was a great kid. They both were.”

  He told Chelsea that she could go, but only after they had a chat.

  “She rolled her eyes and groaned.” He laughed. “I know she thought I was going to lecture or preach to her. So I simply said I had a few questions to ask her.

  “We sat down and I asked her what she would do if her boyfriend suddenly changed his mind and decided to go to the drive-in instead of the theater. ‘I’d go to the drive-in,’ she said.

  “ ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s say you go and he jumps out of the car, opens the trunk, and pulls out two six-packs of Budwe
iser. What would you do then?’

  “Chelsea told me she wouldn’t drink. She got a little agitated. She told me I knew her better than that, and that she’d proven that she could be trusted. She started to get up from the table, but I said, ‘Hang on, Chelsea, we’re almost done. Only a couple more questions. Would you let him drive you home?’

  “ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I would if he wasn’t drunk, and if he was, I’d call home and ask you for a ride.’ She smiled and thought that was it, but I said, ‘Good. I hope you’ll always call home when you need to. But how many beers do you think would make Tom unable to drive?’

  “ ‘Come on, Dad,’ she said. ‘It’s not hard to tell: maybe six or seven beers.’ ”

  Chelsea’s answer, he admitted, caught him off guard. She had given the right answers all along. Then, bingo, he was reminded she was sixteen, and that meant he needed to move in the fences. Loving Chelsea meant no drive-in, no beer, but one movie at the theater, and then straight home afterward.

  Fathers often overestimate their daughters’ maturity. We’re all taught that girls mature faster than boys, which is partly true. But researchers now know that some girls don’t develop adult cognitive skills until their early twenties. This is explained in an article published by The Medical Institute:Dr. Jay Giedd, chief of brain imaging in the child psychiatry branch at the National Institute of Mental Health, has spent more than thirteen years performing MRIs and studying the brains of more than 1,800 kids. Through high-powered MRI technology, he has discovered that the adolescent brain, while fully grown in size, is still a long way from maturity.