by Meg Meeker
Long after the size of the brain is established, it continues to undergo major stages of development. One of the last regions of the brain to mature is the pre-frontal cortex—home of the so-called “executive” functions—planning, setting priorities, organizing thoughts, suppressing impulses, and weighing the consequences of one’s actions. This means the part of the brain young people need the most to develop good judgment and decision-making develops last!
According to new studies, the pre-frontal cortex usually does not reach a level of genuine maturity until someone reaches their mid-twenties. “It’s sort of unfair to expect [teens] to have adult levels of organizational skills or decision-making before their brains are finished being built,” says Giedd.1
This is another reason fathers need to be protective of their daughters.
Many fathers fear that enforcing rules on their daughters will only make them rebel. Some daughters do rebel—but not because of rules. They rebel because the rules aren’t balanced by anything else. Rules can’t be the center of your relationship. That’s where love comes in.
But you do need the rules. I have seen girls whose parents set no limitations end up in juvenile detention centers. And I know most conscientious fathers (and mothers) err on the side of being too lax.
The risks to your daughter can be close to home. For example, no seventeen-year-old girl—no matter how well behaved—should be at home alone overnight. Why? Because other kids will find out she’s alone and come over to the house. Chances are, she won’t call any adult (let alone the police) for help—and no seventeen-year-old has the cognitive skills to make consistently good judgments. This has nothing to do with character or intellect. It’s simply too easy for a girl to assume that having a few friends over is no big deal. Sure, maybe nothing will happen. But what if it does? She shouldn’t be put in that situation.
Silence
Most daughters tell me their fathers listen better and preach less than their mothers do. But there’s a catch. It’s harder to get a father’s attention. Mothers are better at reading a child’s mood and are more likely to ask questions.
But it is your attention she wants, because she senses the strength and concern behind your silence. She senses that you are genuinely interested in what she has to say—and that makes a daughter feel significant, mature, self-confident, and loved.
Many fathers complain that their teenage daughters won’t talk to them. They’re usually wrong. It’s just that these fathers have discouraged their daughters from talking to them. Daughters won’t talk if they know the result will be only constant reprimand and correction. Daughters want their fathers to listen while they unravel their own tangled feelings and beliefs. If a daughter can trust her dad to listen, she will come to him again and again to talk.
Listening is tough, particularly when the words don’t make sense and the ideas seem superfluous. But listen anyway. Sit down. Look her in the eye. Don’t let your mind wander. And you’ll be rewarded with a daughter’s trust, love, and affection.
Time
Being a father means giving up your time without resentment. It’s hard, I know. Men spend most of their time working for someone else. When you come home and there are even more demands on your time, you might feel like distancing yourself from your own family.
Your daughter realizes this, and because she wants to please you, she might not tell you how much she needs your time. So you have to take the initiative to spend time alone with her.
I realize that many good fathers feel pressured regarding time. There isn’t enough, for any of us, and the lack of time or misuse of it causes great anxiety. We carve out time slots for our kids, and we don’t want to waste that time. We want to ensure that it’s productive and meaningful. And that only adds to the pressure.
But spending time with your daughter shouldn’t be full of pressure, because she doesn’t need you to do anything; she only needs to be with you. So don’t worry about finding activities to entertain her. She doesn’t want to hitch a ride on your golf cart. (And she certainly doesn’t want to share you with the television.) All she wants is your attention. And she needs it on a regular basis.
Many fathers are uncomfortable being alone with their daughters. One-on-one time can be tough. But if you start dad-and-daughter time when she’s young, it will bring you closer when she’s an adolescent. The rewards can be enormous. Daughters often say the most meaningful conversations of their lives were one-on-one with their dads.
Keep one-on-one time simple. Avoid activities that put you in competition with your daughter. Always use this time for emotional balance, for relaxing and having fun. You can work out conflicts later.
If you think this is a waste of time, think again. One of the primary treatments for girls with eating disorders is to spend time like this with their dads. These fathers learn not to harp on problems, but to focus on having fun together, which helps daughters center themselves on this healthy relationship and disassociate their illness from who they are. Eating disorders can make girls agitated, manipulative, and volatile; they can make them lie, yell, break down in tears, and be disrespectful. In short, they can be really hard to deal with. So telling a dad to spend time alone with his daughter might not be what he wants to hear. But spending enjoyable time with her teaches father and daughter that beneath her illness, and the misbehavior it can cause, she is still a girl to be loved, and that’s the first big step toward her recovery.
As we will see in a later chapter, “family time” has diminished over the decades. One result of this is that communication between family members is worse than it used to be. Over the last forty-five years, the amount of time kids spend with their parents has gone down by ten to twenty hours per week. At the high end, that’s almost three hours a day gone from your relationship with your children.
For divorced parents, the challenges are even greater. And for fathers (who usually don’t have custody of the children) the time lost can be enormous. But you need to find those small pockets of time to be with your daughter. That time can make an enormous difference to her. Your physical presence alone can make her feel protected.
Some of the best medical literature about keeping kids out of trouble comes from the Add Health Study. With overwhelming evidence, the study shows that kids who feel connected to their parents (and who spend more time with them) fare much better than kids who don’t. Parents keep kids out of trouble; parental influence can be more important than pressure; and specifically, daughters who spend more time with their fathers are less likely to drink, take drugs, have sex as teenagers, or have out-of-wedlock babies. Your time with her matters.
Will
“If human love does not carry a man beyond himself, it is not love. If love is always discreet, always wise, always sensible and calculating, never carried beyond itself, it is not love at all. It may be affection, it may be warmth of feeling, but it has not the true nature of love in it.”
So spoke the great teacher Oswald Chambers at the turn of the twentieth century. Love, he taught, is a passionate feeling that needs to suffuse our relationships with others. It can’t be calculated, it can’t be turned on and off, and it has to be ever-present in your relationship with your daughter. But as a dad, you know love also requires work and recruitment of the will. Romantic feelings wax and wane between lovers. Even the most perfect love requires an act of the will. If it is to survive, it has to be nurtured, cared for, developed, and practiced. And it has to live in the real world. Real love is gritty. It sweats and waits, it causes you to hold your tongue when you want to scream obscenities in anger, and it causes many men to accomplish extraordinary feats.
As natural as the love you feel toward your daughter might be, there will be challenges to that love, from crying squalls when she’s a baby, to kindergarten tantrums, to other stresses of growing up that might show themselves in disrupted sleep patterns, moodiness, or ugly language. Your daughter, whatever her age, responds differently to stress than you do. If you’re upset, you
might watch a football game, go for a jog, or go fishing. Not her. She wants to spill her tensions on you. It makes her feel better. So be ready—and don’t be surprised if she does this from an early age. Many parents ask if daughters can experience PMS before puberty. My answer is yes. It doesn’t make good medical sense, but I see it repeatedly.
It’s inevitable, too, that your daughter will go through stages. She’ll draw close to you, then she’ll pull away; she’ll adore you, then she’ll want nothing to do with you. You need to love her not only when she is your sweet, affectionate girl, but also when she’s a real pain in the neck to be around. When she’s moody, you still need to communicate with her—and you need to keep yourself from exploding when she’s disagreeable.
How do you do that? Discipline. Grit. Will. If you need to distance yourself emotionally for a time, do it. If you need physical separation for a bit, okay. But always come back. Will, patience, calm, and persistence will pay off in your relationship with her. Nothing better expresses serious love than this combination of qualities. Let her know that nothing she can do, even running away, getting pregnant, tattooing her ankle, or piercing her tongue, can make you stop loving her. Say that if you need to.
Love, as Mr. Chambers said, must push us beyond ourselves. It will jab every sensitive part of you and turn you inside out. Having kids is terrifying because parenting is like walking around with your heart outside your chest. It goes to school and gets made fun of. It jumps into cars that go too fast. It breaks and bleeds.
But love is voluntary. Your daughter cannot make you love her or think she is wonderful. She would do that if she could, but she can’t. How you love her, and when you show it, is within your control.
Most parents pull away from their teenage daughters, assuming they need more space and freedom. Actually, your teenage daughter needs you more than ever. So stick with her. If you don’t, she’ll wonder why you left her.
I know this is tough stuff. But it’s worth it. Here’s the story of one father who recruited his will to love his daughter at a tough time and won.
When Allison started seventh grade, she changed schools. Her family had recently moved and Allison hated the move. When she got to her new school, she found a few classmates who shared her sour outlook on life. One kid’s father drank too much, another’s mother moved away. She and her friends got into a lot of trouble drinking and smoking dope. After several months of counseling and hard work, Allison’s parents decided that she needed to leave school—and even home—and receive treatment at a residential home for girls. She was furious. She began lying to her parents and stealing. This was particularly tough for her father, who was a new, yet highly respected, businessman in the community.
He told me he felt terribly guilty for moving his family and wondered out loud how he had failed Allison.
The weekend before she was to be admitted to the program, John did something brilliant. Painful, but brilliant. He told Allison that the two of them were going camping on an island with very few other people. I’m sure that this wasn’t exactly fun to think about for either of them, but he took charge. Miraculously, Allison packed her own things (John was expecting that he would have to). She even put her gear in the car, and off they went.
Neither spoke during almost four hours in the car. They ferried to the island and set up camp. Over the weekend they talked only occasionally. They went for hikes, made pancakes, and read books. (I’ll bet John chose an island because he knew she couldn’t run away.) No earth-shattering conversations occurred between them. As a matter of fact, John said he didn’t even approach the subject of her bad behavior or the treatment program. They just camped.
After they returned home, Allison left for an eight-month stay at the nearby residential home. She improved, her depression lifted, and eventually she pulled her life back together. Nevertheless, her early high school years were tumultuous, and John’s relationship with his daughter remained strained. But by the time she turned eighteen, their relationship had turned around. And by the time she graduated from college, he said, his friends were envious of his relationship with Allison.
When she was in her early twenties, Allison talked to her father about those difficult years. She felt guilty for causing her parents so much hurt. She told them she was sorry and that she couldn’t believe they had put up with her.
I asked her what had made the difference in her life. Without hesitation, she told me it was the camping trip with her dad.
“I realized that weekend that he was unshakable. Sure, he was upset, but I saw that no matter what I did I could never push him out of my life. You can’t believe how good that made me feel. Of course, I didn’t want him to know that then. But that was it—the camping trip. I really think it saved my life. I was on a fast track to self-destruction.”
You will always be your daughter’s first love. And what a great privilege—and opportunity to be a hero—that is.
Words, Fences, Silence, Time, and Will: What Difference Do They Really Make?
In Chapter One you read a litany of the troubles all American girls face. Now let’s get very specific. Before your daughter graduates from high school (maybe even from junior high), she or many of her friends will have dieted. Most girls go through a period of obsessing about their weight, and many develop full-blown eating disorders. In my experience, mothers understand why and how their daughters get wrapped up in the ultra-thin craze. Dads often scratch their heads—even as dads are crucial to the recovery process—and wonder, “What’s the big deal? Forget it, just put some food in your mouth, and get on with it.” You, men, are so very lucky in this regard. Your daughter, tormented by internal demons (in that active interior life that all girls have), can’t just “get on with it.”
Eating disorders are at an epidemic level in our country. These include anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating, and obesity. The common element in each is an obsession with food: either to restrict it, get rid of it, or indulge in it. The chances are excellent that your daughter will fall into one of these categories before she graduates from high school. So what can you do to prevent any of these from happening?
First, it will help you to have a basic understanding of the etiologies of these diseases. There is no need for you to be a psychologist or an expert, but it will help if you can watch life from the eyes of your little girl: to see what she sees, hear what she hears, and understand what she feels. Is this really necessary? Yes, it is really necessary, because according to all the best scientific research, no one has a more powerful effect in preventing and helping her recover from eating disorders than you do.2
Anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are complicated illnesses. They are incredibly painful for parents and they are frustrating for physicians. To help you grasp what’s going on in a girl’s mind, I am going to simplify a complex issue into a few workable concepts and tips to help you protect your daughter. According to the National Eating Disorders Association, the major factors that cause eating disorders are low self-esteem, feelings of inadequacy, depression, anxiety, difficulty expressing emotions, troubled family relationships, cultural pressures glorifying thinness, and physiological or genetic factors. Of course, other factors can contribute and it’s important to realize that no two eating disorders are the same; they are as varied as girls’ personalities. Sadly, 90 percent of eating disorders (anorexia and bulimia) occur in girls and women ages twelve to twenty-five, when their developing minds and bodies are most vulnerable. It is imperative to understand that each of these diseases must be taken seriously—because they are life-threatening. Anorexia (which literally means loss of appetite) nervosa (which means neurosis) can lead to decreased heart rate, decreased blood pressure, brain damage, and heart failure.3 Bulimia nervosa is characterized by binge eating followed by some method to avoid weight gain: vomiting, laxative abuse, or enemas. Though harder to recognize from the outside, bulimia can be equally devastating. It can lead to rotten teeth, erosion of the lining of the esophag
us, stomach damage, chemical imbalances, heart failure, and death. So if you suspect your daughter has either of these disorders, or even if your instincts tell you that she is at risk, get help for her right away.
Eating disorders are usually part of a process that starts with changes in her thinking, then in her feelings, and finally in her behavior. So let’s peer into her mind and see what she might see on a typical day, as she records it in her diary.
I go to school for my first hour class in Algebra. I’m nervous because I’m not sure if I got my answers right. The teacher calls on me to give my answers and my heart sinks. I’m frozen in my chair. Tim is sitting three chairs away and I know he thinks I’m stupid now. Or if not now, he will in a minute. Ugh, and my shirt’s ugly. I don’t want everybody to stare at it. Get up.
I get up and give my answers. Most were right. Two were wrong and everybody laughed. Why should they? I’m smarter than those jerks. I’m so glad it’s over. Anna and Jessie sat with me at lunch. They’re my best friends. I can talk to them about anything. Anna’s on my soccer team. Jessie bugs me because she only eats salad for lunch. She doesn’t put dressing on it, and I feel guilty that I do, because she’s thinner and prettier than I am. Her clothes are size 0. She’s so lucky. I don’t like shopping with her because she makes me feel fat. I guess I am. I’m a 2, but I could be a 0 if I tried.
I hate sitting next to her, and I feel guilty about that too. All the guys come up to her and drool. It’s sick. I mean, Anna’s a whole lot more fun and pretty. Maybe it’s because she’s strong and athletic. Maybe they think she’s ugly. They must. But they don’t talk much to me. I hate being shy.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the boys and Jessie. I should start eating more salads. I really would feel so much better if I lost a few pounds. I’ll start running. That’ll help.