by Meg Meeker
Mary, now forty-two years old, is the mother of four children. She told me that from the time she can remember until she graduated from college, her father came to her bedroom every night to say good night.
Her father, Brett, was a general practitioner in a small town and Mary remembers their phone ringing constantly. He would routinely leave during the night to help anyone who was sick. Her mother waited long hours in the evening to have supper with him. Mary said that she missed him terribly but deep down admired his commitment to a job he felt was noble. He cared deeply for his patients. But Mary always knew that he loved her and his family.
“I guess that’s why his coming to say good night was so special,” she told me. “I didn’t see my dad as much as I wanted and those few minutes we spent together were private. They were just ours.”
Mary went on to say, “I would just be dozing off when light from the hallway would appear in my room. He would pad over to my bed and sit on the edge. He was big and the side would droop, causing me to roll toward him.
“Sometimes he sat there and we’d talk. Other times if I was too tired I sensed him praying. He never prayed out loud, just in his head. He told me he thanked God for me and that I was special. Then he always leaned over to kiss me before leaving and whispered words in my ear that I thought at the time were peculiar. He’d say, ‘Remember, Mary, your wedding night. It’s very special and so are you.’ That was it.
“You can’t believe how good that made me feel about myself and about my dad. When I was in high school and college I met guys and wondered if they felt like my dad did. If they didn’t, I brushed them off. Dad was a giant in my eyes. What did I do about sex in high school and college? I can tell you that I thought long and hard. And every time I thought about it I heard his words. They never made me feel guilty or bad. They made me feel strong and in charge of myself. And because of them I turned a lot of guys away who wanted sex.”
This is the protection that you alone can give your daughter. It will pull her closer to you. It will give her a sense of authority over her body, her sexuality, and her life. No television actor, pop star, or magazine can give her that. You can. While they pull her toward promiscuity, you must stop them dead in their tracks.
Let me put it this way. If you don’t want your daughter to be sexually active in high school, you need to tell her, you need to teach her. Otherwise, she will be. Popular culture trains our daughters for a life of promiscuity.
Every model for Playboy is someone’s daughter. Don’t let it be yours. Protect her beautiful body as only you can. She may hate it in the short term, but when she is an adult she will thank you. And the thanks will come sooner than you think. Stay in the battle.
Chapter Six
Pragmatism and Grit: Two of Your Greatest Assets
Kelly is on my A-list of incredibly cute patients. She is ten. Freckles plaster her face. And she has bright, fuzzy red hair. But Kelly’s cutest quality is that she bounces. Everything about her bounces: her inflections, her demeanor, her movements.
Her father and mother, Mike and Leslie, are excellent parents: calm, engaging, enthusiastic, and good disciplinarians. When their son (now college-age) was little, they decided they wanted to add a daughter to the family by adopting a girl. They chose Kelly.
However, Kelly is often a tough kid to parent. She is strong-willed and challenges everything Mike and Leslie say. When they correct her, she insists that they don’t understand—and sometimes they think she’s right.
Kelly is one of those kids who began showing signs of hyperactivity while still in diapers. She wasn’t as much defiant as energetic and testy. At school her energy was channeled into her tongue and her heart. She talked to friends constantly, often disrupted class, and was a problem for her teachers. On car rides she talked nonstop. When she was happy, her parents were happy. But as Kelly grew older, she grew testier—so much so that Mike often didn’t even want to be around his own daughter.
One afternoon Mike and Leslie came to my office to talk about Kelly. They hold professional jobs and were immaculately dressed. When I asked, “How are things at home?” Leslie erupted in tears. Mike sat quietly.
“Out of control,” Leslie said through her tears. “Something’s wrong with Kelly. We can’t get through to her; she argues with us all the time. Just about every interaction Mike or I have with her is negative.”
Mike nodded his head. “She’s right. Whenever she acts out we take something away from her, and now we have nothing left to take away. She earned a horse, which we rent for her, and I guess we could take that away, but that’s her only outlet for exercise and relaxation.”
“What have I done wrong?” Leslie cried. “We’ve tried everything we can. Is she acting this way because she resents us, because I work, because she is adopted? I don’t get it. We never had this problem with her brother. I know we parent slightly differently because they are different kids, but come on, should we see a psychiatrist, a counselor? Do you think she has learning problems? Could she have bipolar disorder? Why is our home so tense? Please—tell me where we went wrong.”
Mike watched his wife. His love and concern for Kelly was palpable and he felt equally sorry for Leslie.
Leslie talked for about forty-five minutes while Mike and I listened. She cried; we waited. He nodded in agreement and occasionally offered a comment or two.
Finally he said something that irritated Leslie: “So, Dr. Meeker, what can we do?”
“You don’t understand, do you?” blurted Leslie. “We need to understand what’s wrong. Where have we let her down? Why doesn’t she love us?”
Leslie took Kelly’s behavior extremely personally. She wanted to know why Kelly felt the way she did, to empathize and understand. This is often how women engage problems.
Mike, it was clear, approached the issue differently. I watched him—outlined in his neatly pressed suit, crisp white shirt, and navy tie—as he calculated, reasoned, and figured his way through the problem. He was looking for a solution. While Leslie assumed personal responsibility for Kelly’s problems, Mike didn’t. The problem was just there and had to be solved. Leslie approached the problem with intense feelings. Mike’s response was pragmatic.
“What can we do?” he repeated.
At that moment the three of us fell silent. I must admit that, as a woman, I felt for Kelly and empathized with Leslie’s emotional response. But as we sat quietly, I realized that Mike had the wiser approach. I made a list. I drew clear lines and separated Kelly’s behavior—she had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)—from her person.
“Leslie,” I said, “because of her ADHD, Kelly is wired differently; her motor is running furiously, and she can’t control it. Neither you nor Mike gave her that motor; it’s just there. You and Mike have been great parents, but you can’t change her wiring.”
She seemed relieved for a moment. I continued.
“You know I don’t believe in over-medicating kids with ADHD, but Kelly is someone whose ADHD is severe enough that she could benefit from a small dose of medication. I think you’d see an enormous result.”
“I know, Dr. Meeker, but Mike and I don’t like stimulants. I just really think that we can help her lick this.”
I tried a different tack. “Leslie, let’s say that this is your fault. Your ten-year-old girl is hyperactive, a compulsive talker, and a strong-willed child because you are a bad parent. Could that be true?”
Mike looked up at me with horror. I thought he was going to jump up and choke me.
Leslie, stunned, nodded her head. “Yeah, down deep that’s what I believe. I just screwed up.”
“Mike, do you believe you’re a bad father?”
“No, absolutely not. I’ve tried my best. I love Kelly. She’s just who she is.”
Mike and Leslie were churchgoers and actively involved in mission work, so I recruited the image of God for help. “Okay, Leslie, I know you believe in God. What about Him? He’s a perf
ect father, isn’t He? Isn’t that what you believe?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she answered.
“Well, look at all the messed-up kids He has.”
I think then it dawned on Leslie that even God, the perfect father, had children who misbehaved terribly.
My friend Bonnie—a nurse practitioner, licensed clown, and Episcopal deacon—had made this comment to me several years ago after she found out that her own adopted daughter had become pregnant at age seventeen. Bonnie wanted to start what she called “the worst mothers in America” club. Then, she said, God reminded her that He, too, had a bunch of rebellious children.
Mike reasoned that Kelly needed structure and routine peppered with fun—and that she needed the medication I recommended. While Leslie continued to worry, Mike opted for action, and we agreed to put Kelly on medication.
A month later, Leslie called and said Kelly was doing great—even felt better about herself. She laughed, she felt in control, and she wasn’t getting into trouble at school. Leslie and Mike enjoyed being with her again.
My point is that fathers are often the ones who bring pragmatism and solutions to family discussions. Men see problems differently than women do. Women analyze and want to understand; men want to solve—they want to do something. This often annoys wives and daughters, who can get swept up in thoughts and emotions, and conclude, as Leslie did, that you “just don’t get it, do you?” or even that you’re uncaring or heartless. But that’s only because you’re less interested in talking about a problem than in doing something about it.
For more than twenty years I have watched fathers come to grips with their daughters’ problems, analyze them (sometimes in an almost mechanical way), and solve them. Of course, I’m not saying that all fathers are analytical or pragmatic or better at this than their wives, but it is certainly true in general that mothers and fathers have complementary approaches to problems: fathers reach immediately for solutions while mothers yearn to understand and empathize. Your daughter needs you to be that voice of reason and pragmatism.
Why Your Daughter Needs Your Pragmatism
A girlfriend of mine quipped that there are two types of women in the world: princesses and pioneer women. Princesses believe they deserve a better life and expect others to serve them. Pioneer women expect that any improvement in their lives will come through their own hard work; they are in charge of their own happiness. To most of us, princesses are spoiled—but whenever we teach our daughters that they deserve “all the best that life has to offer,” we help to create princesses. But princesses are often depressed, because they might not ever get the best that life has to offer. Princesses are taught to be self-centered. Their lives are centered on their needs and wants, and they will expect others—parents, teachers, friends, and eventually spouses—to focus on meeting these needs and wants. Princesses use the pronoun “I” so often that their lives become narrow. And their search for the best that life has to offer is hopeless, because there will always be something better just out of reach. We groan at the neighbor’s child who screams “I want!” all the time, but is she any different from the twenty-five-year-old professional who consistently draws conversations back to herself and who thinks of other people as objects to be manipulated for her own ends?
Girls think and feel and wonder about their thoughts and feelings. And because many girls (probably your own daughter) are equipped with the psychological finesse to figure out how they feel and what they want, they are naturally gifted at figuring out how to get what they want.
But here’s where dad comes in. When your daughter daydreams about the sort of girl she wants to be and what she should expect from life, she takes her cues from you. If you teach your daughter—even inadvertently—that other people exist to serve her needs and desires, she will grow to expect that from others. If you teach her that life has limits and that not all her needs or desires can or should be met, she will learn to accept realism, and she will not live expecting—or waiting for—others to be servants to the princess.
Your daughter’s attitude toward herself comes directly from you. Her expectations, her ambitions, and her assessment of her own capabilities all come from what you believe—what you say and what you do. As a father, you have to ask yourself what sort of woman you want your daughter to become.
Every doting father of a four-year-old girl wants her to be his princess. We dress girls up, lavish attention on them, and unabashedly melt when they say “I love you.” Even at fourteen or twenty-four, daughters secure an inviolate corner of their fathers’ hearts that is theirs and theirs alone. A daughter’s needs are foremost in dad’s mind. Her ambitions become dad’s goals. All of this is wonderful and healthy. But be careful.
The damage comes when a loving father indulges a daughter to the point that she expects always to be on the receiving end, and that all her material, physical, or emotional needs are to be taken care of by someone else. What or how much you give her doesn’t matter as much as the way in which you give. I have seen many wealthy girls grow up unspoiled and many poor girls become demanding, selfish grown-ups.
The trick is to teach her that gifts, love, and attention are wonderful, but that she is not the center of the world. You want to teach her to appreciate these things and be humbly thankful for them. You do not want her to feel entitled to and selfishly focused on them.
Princesses take. Princesses want more. Princesses demand. They expect perfection and lack pragmatism. They don’t act—except to tell others what they want.
But pioneer women know that life is the way it is, and they rely on themselves to move forward.
As a dad, whenever your daughter is in a tough situation, all you have to do is ask her this simple question: “So what can you do about it?” And it’s worth asking that question in situations throughout her life.
Inevitably, your daughter will encounter pain. People die and loved ones get cancer. She might not get asked to the prom. She might get pregnant at sixteen. She might develop an eating disorder. She will encounter problems, like you did. Some can be solved, some cannot. But if she is to live a substantive, healthy life, she needs to decide what to do about her problems. Princesses encounter problems too, of course, but they expect others to solve them. When princesses get bad grades, or get pregnant at sixteen, or get kicked out of high school, it’s always because someone else messed up; it’s always someone else’s fault. They expect others—usually those closest to them, especially dad and mom—to play an inordinate role in correcting their problems.
Don’t let your daughter grow up to be a victim of life. Too much of our popular culture teaches us to love victims. So we create people who are helpless, incapable, and terribly needy. But you, as a father, can prevent that. You can teach your daughter that she needs to do, not just to want.
Action helps; action can cure. And dads are experts at analyzing a problem and finding something to do. The action your daughter takes can be anything from making friends, changing schools, or even thinking differently. Action engages the will and gives energy and momentum. Action means that your daughter will know that she, not others, will determine her fate.
I have seen many young women with eating disorders. They cannot begin to recover until they commit themselves to working hard at a programmatic cure. This is true with depression, alcoholism, and many other conditions. As a doctor, I diagnose problems, devise a plan of treatment, and then give instructions to patients. In very much the same way, a dad is a physician to his daughter.
Let me show you how Bill helped Cara with anorexia nervosa. When Cara was eighteen, she came to me—on her own—because she was feeling sad, confused, and dizzy. Worse, her fingers and toes were turning blue. She had no idea that she had an eating disorder. Her brain was so starved that her thoughts had become tangled, almost delusional.
I diagnosed severe anorexia nervosa. She was near requiring hospitalization. Her heart had slowed, her hair was falling out, and her circulation was so poor that she
was literally growing cold (hence the blue fingers and toes).
Her parents, Bill and Cheryl, were terrified. Cheryl cried a lot; Bill stayed quiet. At home he threatened Cara if she didn’t eat. He took days off work to stay with her and force her to eat. Cheryl screamed at Bill for treating Cara this way, and Cara fought with her mother because her dad was so mean. Life at home was tense, unhappy, and depressing.
After a few visits with Cara, I spoke with Cheryl and Bill. He did most of the talking, because Cheryl was in tears. Cheryl couldn’t get past why Cara starved herself, what caused her starvation, or what she and Bill had done to precipitate Cara’s anorexia.
Bill said that he couldn’t begin to understand. He was a wreck. He had said that neither threatening Cara nor rewarding her helped her to eat. They were at the end of their rope.
But Bill wanted a plan. He didn’t want the whole plan. He just wanted the first couple of steps to get started.
Cara went to a residential treatment home and was immediately placed on a very rigid eating schedule. If she didn’t follow it, the tube went up her nose and nutrition was pumped through it all night long. She was taught about anorexia nervosa. Counselors helped her examine her feelings. They asked her to discuss how she related to her parents and friends.
Cara’s counselors always asked her, “What can you do today to talk back to the monster in your head?”
Treating anorexia nervosa often requires interrupting and changing or replacing the ugly, denigrating thoughts inside the sufferer’s mind. It is a continuous, repetitive process: interrupt thoughts, replace them; interrupt them again, find what triggered them, then replace them. With a problem like anorexia nervosa, as with a multitude of other problems girls encounter, understanding isn’t enough. Each girl must be challenged to act. She can’t wait for others, feel sorry for herself, and wallow in the pain of life. In order to find her way out, she must do something.