by Meg Meeker
Many parents roll their eyes at the word humility. We associate it with weakness, and we don’t want our daughters to be weak or easily manipulated. We want them strong, self-sufficient, and independent. We want them to have self-esteem. These days, humility is a politically incorrect virtue.
But genuine humility is the starting point for every other virtue. Humility means having a proper perspective on ourselves, of seeing ourselves as we really are. It also means knowing that every person has equal worth.
Teaching your daughter humility is vital but tricky. You can’t simply tell her that she’s the same as her brother, the homeless woman on the street, and everyone else. Your daughter needs to feel unique and important in your eyes.
Teaching humility will demand more of you as a father than that. Humility doesn’t make sense unless it is modeled. If you want your daughter to love reading, you must read. If you want her to be athletic, go for a run. The same is true with humility. If you live it, she will get it. Remember, she is a dry sponge following you around, waiting to see what you think, feel, and do.
Humility can be hard for many men to embrace. But not to embrace it is a dangerous game of self-deception. You and I know men who lack humility. Their lives become futile chases for things that don’t matter, and neglectful of things that do.
I have known many successful men who embody extraordinary humility. They are successful professionally, intellectually, and emotionally because they understand that life is bigger than they are. Their work and their being fit into a much larger picture. Their successes benefit not only themselves—they also help those around them. A father’s humility is a gift to his daughter.
The late English writer Alice Thomas Ellis was once asked, “What is the most important moment in women’s history?” She answered, “The Annunciation.” Why does your daughter need humility? What does it have to do with her happiness, self-esteem, and success in life? Here are some of the answers.
Humility Makes Her Feel Significant
I know it sounds like an oxymoron to say that humility will make your daughter feel more significant, but here’s why it’s true. To fulfill her potential, your daughter needs to understand who she is, where she comes from, and where she’s going. And her understanding needs to be accurate.
Perhaps she has a talent for music. Perhaps she is smart or athletic. Like any enthusiastic parent, you are proud of her accomplishments. You pour money and time into her talents to strengthen them. You cheer for her at spelling bees, piano recitals, or basketball games.
Your support and encouragement are important. But you need to be careful too. If all you do is bolster her self-esteem with applause, she’ll eventually see through that, and she’ll wind up feeling frustrated. If she doesn’t understand the virtue of humility, she’ll start looking in the wrong places to try to feel better about herself.
Humility is seeing ourselves honestly. It keeps us in the real world. Because we want our daughters to excel at everything they do, to be prettier, smarter, better than everyone else, we can confuse our priorities—and theirs.
Our daughters don’t need excessive praise to feel good about themselves. Deep inside, your daughter knows she’s good at some things and not very good at other things. She often views her talents more realistically than her parents do, and the harder her parents push the praise button, the more she questions herself: Is this the reason my parents love me so much? Am I worth more to my dad if I play the violin better?
Another problem is self-centeredness. When family activities revolve around what we believe our kids “need” or “want” in order to feel better about themselves, we drive them to become self-centered. Many times girls gain a sense of superiority over their peers when they excel at something. And when this happens, they can become isolated from friends, peers, and family. Competitiveness creeps in. Their sense of superiority makes their world small and self-contained. They find no joy in what’s around them. They focus on success, not on friends.
The writer Henry Fairlie was right to remark, “Pride excites us to take too much pleasure in ourselves, does not encourage us to take pleasure in our humanity, and what is commonly shared by all of us as social beings.”
Pride is the opposite of humility. Remember what Dante wrote about the proud in the Divine Comedy? They burned in their self-absorbed pleasures, lonely and isolated for eternity. As Dante leaves them, the Angel of Humility comes to him, bringing splendor, peace, and contentment: “She bore about her so true an umilita that she seemed to say, I am in peace.” Humility brings with it deep joy and satisfaction because it keeps us from becoming manically self-absorbed.
Don’t let this happen to your daughter. Keep her world larger than herself and her talents. Gently guide her to recognize her strengths and limitations. Let her fail. Let her know that you still love her when she fails. Let her know that she’s valuable not only for what she does, but for who she is. Here is your chance to teach her one of life’s greatest lessons: people are valuable because they’re human, not because of what they do.
But if you teach your daughter that improving her talent, intellect, or beauty will increase her self-esteem, you’re setting her up for a terrible lesson, a lesson that can be exploited by others. When she goes shopping, what does she see? Millions of products promising to make her feel better. When she buys glossy magazines, she sees the sexy women on the cover as models to emulate. When she follows fad diets, she expects them to make her more beautiful, popular, and valuable.
Every week, your daughter is encouraged to buy hundreds of image-changing products—all of which focus on the superficial, not on what’s real. Research has shown that, for example, people will buy outdoor clothing from signature companies like Patagonia not because they spend a lot of time outdoors, but because they want to feel or look like someone who spends a lot of time outdoors. Advertisers tell your daughter that her life will be more complete, exciting, and joyful if she buys their products, because they know the sales pitch works. It works because too many of our daughters have been set up to believe it. When fathers don’t teach their daughters humility—that we are all created equal and are equally valuable—advertisers, magazines, and celebrities will teach them otherwise.
Vogue and Cosmopolitan will teach your eighteen-year-old (or ten-year-old) daughter that her worth is based on having an emaciated body with large breasts, wearing the newest and most expensive clothes, and being a “constant turn-on” to boys and men. Paris Hilton—a product of money, marketing, and diet—will be, to her, the quintessential beauty. Your daughter will read and absorb Paris’s persona and try to imitate it. She’ll use Paris Hilton to fill the emotional emptiness and social and spiritual vacuity she feels. That should be warning enough. But her longing to follow Paris and her ilk will draw your daughter toward a hatred of not having beauty, money, or a thin-enough frame. And she will be drawn away from a life of humility.
Can a woman be both gorgeous and humble? Can your daughter be brilliant, in passionate pursuit of a successful career, but still appreciate that she alone is not wholly responsible for her success? Absolutely. Humility will make your daughter’s accomplishments shine all the more, and she will be more emotionally grounded, more satisfied, and happier than if she had tried to imitate Paris Hilton’s life.
Marketers, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton draw your daughter into a life of emptiness. You can lead her in another direction by teaching her that she’s valuable because of who she is—and because you love her. Her life is equal in value to yours and to everyone else’s. Talent, intellect, and beauty are wonderful things to have, but they will never make her life more meaningful or give her more significance as a woman. Only humility will.
Humility Strengthens Her Relationships
It’s hard to go through life without meeting someone who flaunts every gift you lack, or attending a dinner party where the conversation focuses on a subject you know nothing about, or being humiliated by a boss, a teacher, a parent, or ev
en a friend. All of us have been made to feel stupid, contemptible, ill-suited, weak, and generally awful at some point in our lives by people who think they’re better than we are.
Insecure people, we tell our daughters, call people names at school. And that’s often true. Fat girls call other girls fat, dumb girls call other girls stupid, and plain girls call other girls ugly. Bullies try to set themselves above others and pounce on the presumed weaklings to show their superiority.
Humility, however, prevents bullying and being bullied. When your daughter recognizes that all humans have equal value and never esteems herself above another, she doesn’t worry about asserting her superiority or take seriously a bully’s taunts. She knows that our worth is not in what we do, what we have, or what we are capable of being, but in the fact that we are human. And bullies can’t feel superior over people who refuse to feel inferior. Humility levels the playing field. This can make the insecure bully feel frightened. But it is the truth. And truth keeps us living in reality. It keeps us from being absorbed by a life of spite and self-destruction.
Girls who have the gift of humility are better placed to have deeper, longer-lasting friendships. With humility, your daughter is free to enjoy people for who they are; she’ll have no haughty desire to cut people out of her life. This is extremely important because your daughter is a social creature. She needs other people. She needs adults to talk to, girlfriends to hang out with, and young men in her life to learn about relationships. No one can be happy in isolation. We were not made for isolation.
Humility is the foundation of all healthy relationships. Humility keeps each party in a relationship respectful, honest, and relaxed. If your daughter lives with humility, she will discover who she is and what significance her life holds. She will experience joy and contentment in her life. Your daughter was created to live in an intricate web of relationships. Humility keeps her inside that web. Self-centeredness and pride pluck her out of it.
Humility, for many Americans, is grounded in the teachings of the Judeo-Christian tradition, in which everyone is equal in the eyes of God because He created us and wants each and every one of us. Compared to God, who made us from dust, we might feel utterly insignificant. BUT (my favorite word in the Bible) God made us, so we have a place and a purpose, and He is willing to fill us with every good thing. All we have to do to escape the suffocating quarters of our own lives, to see ourselves with humility, is to recognize that we alone are not the source of all power, intellect, and talent. As we’re told in the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.”
The great theologian Oswald Chambers says, “It is not a question of our equipment but of our poverty, not of what we bring with us but what God puts into us.” God has filled your daughter with unimaginable gifts. Humility teaches her that these are in fact “gifts” for which she should be grateful, not proud.
Here’s how one father experienced the joy of humility.
At first Andy wanted to be a priest. He enrolled in seminary, but soon realized how much he wanted to be married. So he left seminary, went to medical school, and is now a highly esteemed physician teaching at a large university hospital in Pennsylvania.
Even though Andy abandoned the idea of becoming a priest, he never surrendered his faith. His love for God and his prayer life stayed vibrant. He had three daughters, and, as the years passed, Andy knew that he and his middle daughter, Amy, had to take a trip together. He knew there was something they had to do.
When Amy was seventeen, he took her to the Dominican Republic as part of a team of fifteen volunteer health care workers. It was summer. The temperature rose to 101 degrees. They took a battered yellow school bus into a tiny rural village to offer the people free medical care.
The doctors filed into a cinder-block room, set up picnic tables as examination tables, and organized their supplies. The other volunteers sprayed for spiders, swept floors, and brought in lamps.
I was there and watched Andy work. He was remarkably patient and kind, always soft-spoken, no matter how much his hospital scrubs dripped with sweat.
One afternoon I saw him pleading with a woman. She responded angrily, on the verge of tears, and bolted from the room.
Andy collected himself, finished seeing his other patients, and then climbed into the old school bus before anyone else finished work. Amy went with him. Andy—a tall, strong man—sat down and covered his face with his hands. From a few seats back I overheard their conversation.
“I quit,” he said to her. “It’s time to go home, Amy. This was a terrible mistake.”
He told Amy why the patient had run away. She had complained of chest pains. Though Andy is a lung specialist, he couldn’t find anything wrong with her. He finally realized that the problem wasn’t with the woman’s heart or lungs—it was that her boyfriend regularly punched her in the chest. Andy told her she had to escape this abuse, to have her family take her to another village. Impossible, the woman said. She had no car, no bike, no money, and no family. (No one in the village had a car or a bike.)
Andy realized that there was nothing he could do. No medicine could cure her. And he could not protect her from her boyfriend’s brutality.
Andy saw that poor, ragged woman as precious, maybe even more precious than himself, and that day on the bus in the sweltering heat, he cried. He had come face-to-face with his limitations in a way he never would have at his teaching hospital in Pennsylvania. There he had millions of dollars’ worth of equipment to use whenever he wanted, he had wonderful supporting staff and infrastructure, and he could feel successful and powerful.
But that day in the village, all he had was himself and his limitations.
Andy talked about leaving the island a week early. “What’s the point of being here?” he asked. “We can’t really help these people. We don’t have enough medicine or resources, and even if we did, as soon as we left, it would all go back to what it was. We have nothing to give. They need too much, and we aren’t enough. No one is enough.”
Amy said, “Yeah, Dad, but what about the love of God? We can bring them that.”
“A lot of good that will do. They need water, food, electricity. They don’t need someone to come in and tell them that an invisible God loves them. Where is He, then? They’ll think He’s cruel, abandoning them this way.” Andy was now more angry than sad. The former seminarian questioned the character of God.
Neither of them spoke during the long ride home.
After dinner, I asked them about their earlier conversation. “What,” I asked, “is the best we can give another?”
We finally decided that all we could give was hope—and that the only way to find hope was in God. Our purpose, then, was to show the light of God through our work. Our faith had led us here, and we needed to act on it.
The conversations that ensued between father and daughter brought them together on the big questions of life. In those conversations, Andy never said a word about living humbly and recognizing the value in everyone. That was assumed. His actions spoke for him. He simply lived his faith. And his daughter Amy followed.
Humility Keeps Her Balanced
Parents always say they don’t care what their kids do as long as they’re happy. As the mother of four, I understand this. I am incredibly selfish. If my kids are happy, I sleep better at night and enjoy my days more.
But think about this: Is that really what you and I want for our daughters? Should happiness be the goal toward which they work?
We all pursue happiness. It’s our constitutional right. And happiness is a great state of being. But if you teach your daughter that happiness is her “arrival point,” it could make her miserable. Here’s why.
If she makes happiness her goal, you and she will discover that there are thousands of things that might make her feel good. Perhaps it’s securing a Rhodes scholarship. Or maybe it’s having a baby at fifteen. Or maybe it’s the uninhibited expression of her beliefs to the point of wearin
g T-shirts that say “F—Authority.”
The problem with making happiness her goal is the lack of guardrails. A goal of happiness can become a justification for self-indulgence. It can encourage selfishness. It can be how children become “spoiled.” And, most important, it can actually lead to unhappiness, as there are no limits to a child’s—or an adult’s— “wants,” and these wants never ultimately satisfy a deeper need. So happiness remains out of reach.
The paradox is that happiness is truly found only when it is routinely denied. In my practice, the happiest girls are always the ones who live with humility. The unhappiest girls are the ones who are most self-indulgent in their pursuit of happiness.
If you think about this, it makes perfect sense. Self-indulgence is easy and takes no strength of character. Eating four pies feels good while you’re doing it, but it will leave you feeling sick and make you fat. Watching soap operas rather than doing homework might seem like fun, but it won’t prepare you for life after high school. Having sex whenever you want and with whomever you want might feel good, for a while . . . until you contract a sexually transmitted disease, or get pregnant, or find yourself deeply depressed. (I consider depression in teenage girls an STD, because it is almost always linked to underage sex.)
Humility teaches us rules and self-restraint, that we’re part of a larger community and need to work together for the good of the whole. Humility teaches responsibility, and it teaches us to consider the needs of others. It tells us to look outward rather than focusing obsessively on ourselves, and it reminds us that we aren’t the only ones who count.
The result is that girls with humility experience the real joy and happiness that comes only from strong, healthy relationships with family, friends, and others. We have rules to keep our relationships healthy. And among these rules is denying ourselves so that we can help others.