Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters

by Meg Meeker

  Don’t set your daughter up for that pain. Show her the truth that the most important part of our lives is our relationship with loved ones. Those relationships are the only avenue for deep joy and contentment. When they are good, life is good, and we feel that we need little else. That’s what you want your son-in-law to feel—and if you model that behavior, your daughter will seek a husband who does the same.

  It’s a great strength to live knowing that if you lost every material possession, you would still have a life worth living. That means living without fear. We live frightened of things being taken away, but we don’t need to be afraid. Strong relationships ground us. They complete us. You don’t have to worry about losing material things; your life won’t collapse without them. You can treat them as gifts and focus on the loving relationships that are really important, for they are the greatest gifts.

  If you live this way, your daughter will perceive that she, too, is a gift. You might even tell her that on occasion. She is a gift who has changed your life through her love, compassion, and strength. Teach her that she is enough. She needs to know this so that when she chooses a husband, she will look for another man who considers her a gift, who considers her “enough.” Living with “nothing to hide, nothing to gain, and nothing to lose,” as author Ken Davis puts it, is real freedom. You want your daughter to live freely, without fear. So show her how. Be the man you want her to marry because chances are excellent that when she is mature, she will look for you (albeit subconsciously) in another man. If you haven’t a clue what a good father looks like, look around and find someone who is doing it well. Then watch him, learn from him, mimic him. As you practice, you will change your daughter’s life. She will absorb who you are. And one day, she will turn around and reward you with a son-in-law you can respect.

  Finding Balance for Yourself—and for Her

  Wise fathers know that the difference in their daughters’ lives between exhilaration and disaster, joyful contentment and erosive anxiety, can turn on a single smart or foolish decision. Your three-year-old daughter runs her scooter into the street. Your fourteen-year-old breaks from the group at the theater and heads off alone with her boyfriend. Your nineteen-year-old drives home from a party after just a “few” drinks.

  As a father you have to live with this tension. You want to keep her safe but you want her to be independent. You want her to be bold, but not careless. You want her to love but not to be too needy. While you cannot change her personality or determine all the challenges in her life, you can support her, point her in the right direction, and help her mature. And how your daughter matures will depend on what she sees when she watches you wrestle with the big issues of life, when you show courage amid challenges. Where can she see your courage exercised at home? Everywhere. My sister-in-law watched her physician father go into prisons to perform autopsies on people who had died of AIDS when no other doctor would. I recently heard a father of fifteen-year-old twin girls tell them that they could be okay, even happy again, after their mother died of breast cancer. I saw anguish in his eyes but heard conviction in his voice.

  Your marriage might not be everything you want it to be, but it takes courage to keep it together and to put the needs of your children ahead of what you might—often mistakenly—think would be your own happiness. Courageous men take stock and do what is right. Integrity is not complete without humility. True humility comes from finding that balance between who you are and what the world is. And the great reward is that humble fathers are wonderful to be around. Daughters love humble dads and distance themselves from haughty ones.

  Humility and balance also play a role in knowing the difference between healthy love and suffocating love. You will want to protect her. She needs you to fight for her and to care, to be there for her, to be strong. She wants the world to know that if you mess with her, you mess with her dad. Don’t let her down. Fathers who shrug their shoulders and turn away leave their daughters feeling crushed.

  I know Allison’s father quite well. He is a mild-mannered, successful lawyer who tries hard to be a good father. They have a home by Lake Michigan, where Allison frequently threw bonfire parties at the beach. During her senior year in high school, they had a party that her father welcomed as a way to meet the kids in his daughter’s class. He also believed, as many fathers do, that teens need their space. So after the fire was lit on the beach, he and his wife stayed away and never checked on the kids. They didn’t want to embarrass Allison. They suspected that some of the kids were drinking alcohol, but assumed they couldn’t get into much trouble on the beach.

  The fire died down and kids started to leave. One young man got into his car to drive a few friends home. He was the designated driver and, although he’d had a few drinks, he hadn’t drunk as much as the other kids. On the way home, his car slid out of control and two of the kids in the car were killed. His life, the lives of the dead kids’ parents, and Allison’s parents’ lives were never the same. They were sued and Allison went to jail—all because her father didn’t want to embarrass her. Fathers, you need to interfere.

  Listen to your instincts and err on the side of protecting your daughter. It is a common mistake of fathers to back away from their daughters too fast and too soon. Please, please don’t. You’re not being overprotective or overbearing if you keep her from learning the hard way that drinking too much is dangerous, even life-threatening. Protect her, but do so subtly and wisely. Be there. Be the man of integrity, with reason and with muscles, to keep her pointed in the right direction.

  Recently I spoke with a father (a single dad named Mike) who had just returned from a trip to Mexico. Like many parents, he was worried about senior year spring break. So he took his daughter and some of her eighteen-year-old friends on spring break as his guests. After two nights at the resort, the girls decided, of course, that they wanted to experience the nightlife and asked if they could go to a local dance club for a few hours. Not wanting to seem prudish or “untrusting,” he said they could. He laid a few ground rules. First, they had to stay together. Second, they couldn’t leave the club. Third, only two drinks apiece. Fourth, they had to leave for home at 11:30 p.m. This was their test and he let them know that.

  After dinner, the girls primped and took a taxi into town. Mike took a taxi fifteen minutes behind them. Cautiously, he strolled the narrow streets outside, peeking into the club every once in a while. He waited and he walked. At 11:30 he walked back to the taxi area. No girls. At 11:45 he became concerned and peered into the bar. There they were—all four of them, laughing loudly, with rosy cheeks. His daughter was conversing with a bearded man of about thirty. “What time does the last cab run to the resort?” he asked a cab driver.

  “Twelve, no later,” was the response. Fifteen minutes and they would have no ride home. Did they get it? At 11:55 he walked up to the bar and tapped his daughter on the shoulder. When she turned around she was furious. “Do you know what time it is?” he asked her.

  “We’re coming, we’re coming,” she giggled. “Dad, sorry. You know I don’t wear a watch.”

  She collected her friends and the five of them caught the very last cab out of town back to the resort.

  “I was seeing red!” Mike told me. “I was so mad, so disappointed that I had to wait until the morning to talk to them.

  “So I waited until after breakfast and we were all sitting on the beach. I asked them how the night was. ‘Fabulous, Mr. Trent,’ one of them said. My daughter stayed quiet. She knew I was upset.

  “ ‘Did you stick to two drinks?’ I asked. They all nodded yes. ‘What time did we leave? Does anybody know?’

  “ ‘Yeah, about eleven-thirty, just like you asked us, Mr. Trent.’

  “ ‘See, Dad, we were fine!’ Lizzie said. ‘I was sooooo embarrassed when you came in, Dad. Why did you have to do that?’ she said.

  “ ‘Liz, anyone,’ I asked, ‘do you know what time the last taxi left town?’

  “They looked at me with blank stares.
Silence.

  “ ‘It left at midnight. Midnight. What time did I yank you from the bar?’ I asked.

  “Again, blank stares.

  “ ‘Eleven-thirty?’ one girl asked.

  “ ‘Nope. Eleven fifty-five.’ They said nothing. ‘What would you have done if you had missed the last taxi?’

  “ ‘Dad,’ Liz said. ‘We met these really nice guys in there. They’re from the States. One’s name was Zach and he said he had a car. He offered to take us home with his friend.’

  “I exploded. ‘Are you kidding me?’ I screamed. ‘You were going to let a strange guy you just met in a bar drive you home?’

  “ ‘Dad, you just don’t understand. He was really nice. I mean it.’ ”

  [Warning to all fathers: whenever your daughter says a guy is “really nice,” that means he has a nice smile.]

  “I think the thing that bothered me the most,” Mike told me, “was that these girls really didn’t get what I was saying. I couldn’t convince them why they shouldn’t leave bars with ‘really nice’ guys they just met. Plus, they completely ignored the parameters I gave them. I found out, too, that one of the girls spent the entire evening dancing and drinking with a guy who was married and vacationing at our resort with his wife and kids but told her he was single and there on business.

  “They drank too much; they paid no attention to being responsible or about getting home. And the biggest mistake was that even my own daughter was ready to depend on some stranger to give her a ride. What would have happened if I hadn’t followed them?”

  Mike’s dilemma was all too common. He knew Liz so well and even thought he knew her friends well. Liz is bright, a freshman at an Ivy League school, and never gets into trouble. What did he miss? Just this: the fact that Liz is smart, responsible, and enrolled in a good school doesn’t change her brain development. She has a nineteen-year-old brain, not a twenty-five-year-old one. She walks the tightrope between fun and disaster and can’t catch herself if she teeters to the wrong side. But fortunately for her, she has a dad who trusted his male instincts to protect her. By listening to those instincts, he might have saved her life.

  Would Liz and her friends probably have survived the evening without disaster? Yes. But maybe they wouldn’t have. Her life was too important to Mike to take that chance. And he was right not to take it. I say that as a doctor who has seen too many fathers’ daughters take too many chances. Mike hit just the right balance between trusting and protecting.

  The balance slips when protecting becomes micromanagement. Pediatricians use the term “hyper-parenting” when referring to parents who over-schedule their kids and micromanage them. The intentions of hyper-parents are usually good: they want their daughters to excel and seize a multitude of opportunities. The problem is that kids can feel pressured and suffocated by such parents—and they can turn bitter and unappreciative. So stay balanced, set up protective boundaries, and keep her safe, but give your daughter freedom to choose activities she enjoys, and make sure her days are filled with opportunities for downtime.

  Finally, men with integrity keep their daughters in the human race. Cyber-life exists and it is not going away. But while there’s no need to teach her to fear electronics and media, be smart and don’t let her “unplug” from human company and center her life on cell phones, iPods, mp3 players, and BlackBerries. Balance. I have known fathers to run over iPods and mp3 players with their trucks. And I have known others who encourage their teens to go to summer computer camp for eight weeks at time. Keep your daughter engaged with you as much as possible. Go away together, out to dinner, play golf, or go fishing. Talk to her; hug her. The Internet can stir emotions in her but it can’t console her when she is crying. You can, so be there.

  So what does this have to do with her husband? Everything.

  He, too, needs balance in order to have a healthy marriage with her. If she learns balance from you by watching you struggle to find it on many different levels, she will want it as well. She will watch for it in any boy she dates. If she never learns what balance looks like regarding courage, love, and faith in a man, she could marry a mistake. That mistake might be a man full of bravado, an arrogantly cold heart, and a cynic’s faithlessness—and he could break your daughter’s heart.

  Or it might be a man who “loves her so much” that he needs her to be near him always, to listen to his concerns and advise him about his relationships or his work. He finds her so wise, in fact, that he is afraid to make any decisions without her help. Maybe he is recovering from alcohol addiction or depression. She is “good for him,” he tells her, and his neediness makes her feel wonderful.

  Watch out, fathers. Fellows like this are all around and nice girls love them. They swoop in to care for these needy, broken-winged pigeons, and whammo! She marries him, she gets a job to support him until he is “strong enough” to work, and in short order the weight on her shoulders becomes unbearable.

  Or worse, he might actually hurt her one day. The incident of violence between boys and girls and men and women dating is terrifying for us parents. According to the National Youth Violence Prevention Program, almost all middle and high school students have experienced physical or emotional abuse while dating. Specifically, one in eleven middle and high school students has been hit, slapped, or physically hurt on purpose while dating. Another one in eleven said that they were forced to have sexual intercourse. And an astonishing 96 percent of students report that they have experienced emotional or psychological abuse while dating. Girls are markedly more at risk than boys in every one of these statistics.

  Tara went to a small southern parochial college. She was excited to go because the school had an excellent program for people who wanted to teach the blind and deaf. Several months into her freshman year, she befriended a man in her class who was on a full basketball scholarship. She had grown up in a middle-class suburb; he was a tough inner-city kid. But he was pleasant, funny, and very respectful to her. He told her that she was the most beautiful woman in school. She spent hours listening to him and talking at coffeehouses. Several times he asked her to go on “dates”—to dinner or to the movies. She declined because she wanted to keep their relationship as a friendship. He didn’t like this and became more and more aggressive with her. Tara explained that she didn’t want a boyfriend just then; she wanted to concentrate on her studies. Tension arose between them, but Tara felt sorry for him. He had had a terrible life growing up. He never knew his dad and his mother was in jail (for second-degree murder, she later learned). His siblings were alone and he worried about them constantly. He wanted to finish college and get a good job so that he could support them. Tara admired that. She did not cut off the relationship because she felt she was overreacting to his anger and agitation. “He wouldn’t hurt me; he just really needs me,” she thought. Ironically, she also was afraid to cut the relationship completely because of what he might do. He was big and she feared making him angrier. (Fathers, take note: many, many girls feel this way. They are afraid to break up with a boy for fear that he will harm them.) Finally, she didn’t want to stop the relationship because she thought she could help change the course of his life. (Another warning for dads: this is also extremely common among nice girls. They really believe they can get men to stop drinking, yelling, being mean, and so on.)

  As the school year came to a close, Tara got ready to go home for the summer. When she went to say good-bye to her friend, he was angry with her. Many of the students had left the dorms. Late in the evening while she was getting ready for bed, she heard something at her window. He was there. Her roommate was gone. He forced his way into her room and raped her. There were students next door, but he put a pillow over her mouth so that she couldn’t be heard. Tara got pregnant and the next five years of her life were hell. All because she wanted to be nice to this man and help him.

  Alcoholics and depressives need help. But they can get that from a doctor. Your daughter needs to be protected, and you are her shield. You
need to model a healthy relationship in front of her. Show her what healthy love looks like. A love that is balanced. Then she will know what unhealthy, unbalanced love is. And if it comes into her life, she will turn away before things get out of control. But if they do get out of control, be ready to help her, like Alicia’s dad was when he dealt with Jack.

  If you want her to marry a man with integrity, a man who will try to love her well, a man who will exercise courage with his family, protect her, and embody manly humility rather than arrogant narcissism, then show her integrity. Teach her to love life more than she fears it. Show her the integrity that means you have nothing to hide. Show her the love that puts family before material possessions. Show her strength of character and she will incorporate it into her own persona.

  Integrity feels good. The more she sees it, the longer she lives with it, the more she will expect it. And she’ll look for it in the man she marries.

  Chapter Eight

  Teach Her Who God Is

  Your daughter needs God. And she wants you to be the one to show her who He is, what He is like, and what He thinks about her. She wants to believe that there is more to life than what she sees with her eyes and hears with her ears. She wants to know that there exists someone who is smarter, more capable, and more loving than (even) you. If you are a normal, healthy father, you should be glad that she wants to believe in someone larger, because you know all too well that many times you will fail her. You forget her recital, miss games because of business trips, or lose your temper and say painful things to her. You are just a normal, good-enough dad doing the best you can. You need to have someone behind you, someone your daughter can turn to when you’re not there. You both need a bigger, better father on your side.