by Meg Meeker
Because music stimulates brain development, we play CDs for kids when they’re little and give them iPods when they’re older. Then they graduate to BlackBerries.
Most American households now have a computer for every student or worker in the house, because we depend so much on the Internet and word processing. Many girls have televisions in their bedrooms and older girls have not only televisions, but laptops, cell phones, and sound systems as well. Girls’ bedrooms have become cozy electronic havens enticing them to play, relax, or “connect” with their friends for hours at a time.
Kids spend more time immersed with electronics than ever before. This is the way life is. But it carries some very serious psychological risks. Even though girls think they’re using electronics to connect, when they use a computer, a cell phone, or an iPod, they’re really alone. They’re not face-to-face with anyone. While electronic relationships are real, they are profoundly limited and even dangerous.
Consider your daughter’s cell phone. If she is a normal fourteen-year-old, the moment she leaves school, she hops on a bus and dials her friend. They chat about peculiar and often nonsensical matters. Instead of seeing her friend, her mind retrieves images of her that might accompany her speech. If her girlfriend laughs, she conjures up that image; if they argue, she imagines the scowl in her friend’s eyes. She feels as though they are together, but they aren’t.
Then she goes home and starts instant messaging. A few more girlfriends jump online and they chat. She speaks, but no one hears her voice. There are no verbal inflections, and it’s nearly impossible for her to visualize her friends. She is communicating, but only through misspelled words and mystifying abbreviations. Words, of course, are very powerful. They can stir emotion and they can accompany emotion, but only if they are communicated well—and communicating well doesn’t happen with teenagers using IM.
Now she logs off and bounds to her bedroom to relax or do homework. She puts on her headphones to listen to her iPod. Music filters into her ears. She no longer communicates with anyone at all.
After dinner, she logs on to her e-mail. She sends messages that disappear and then reappear on someone else’s screen. She is communicating but, again, alone.
If your daughter is an average girl, she will spend between six and eight hours a day with electronic tools of some sort. Parents often don’t mind, because if their children are playing with electronics, it frees mom and dad and allows them to spend time away from the kids and finish paying bills, make phone calls, or even just read the newspaper. So while electronics might help you get things done, they also dramatically decrease the time you spend with your children. That alone hurts your relationship with your daughter.
In the meantime, your daughter is making connections that aren’t real flesh-and-blood relationships. E-mail is less real than IM, and IM is less real than cell phones, and cell phones are less real than talking face-to-face.
The majority of American girls love instant messaging. Girls not only speak more words than boys, they type more. In IM, words can be dressed up with question marks, exclamation points, and smiley faces. IM language can be cute, entertaining, and fun for kids to use, but it’s also far removed from real human contact. You might find that after a while your daughter will have difficulty talking with you in a car, room, or restaurant, because being face-to-face is powerful and frightening, and she’s too used to the anonymity of electronics. When she sees your face, there is no escaping your feelings or your thoughts. Real life becomes over-stimulating to her senses. Voices are loud. Touch is foreign. Eyes pierce and crush her hopes. You are a distant and frightening figure.
Don’t let this happen. There’s no need to banish electronics, but make sure that time online is balanced with time with you. Phone calls aren’t good enough. You need to be together. This is critical to her healthy emotional, intellectual, and physical development. You need to recognize that your daughter is being trained to relate very differently from the way you were taught. It’s a cliché that men have greater difficulty with intimacy than women. I’m not so sure that’s true any longer—at least not with fathers and daughters. You spend hours in face-to-face conversations; she spends hours in chat rooms. You can recognize what’s real. She can’t always see it.
Since you are competing with e-conversations, e-songs, and e-relationships, steal her away from the screen as often as you can. Remember, when all is said and experienced, you are a better communicator than cell phones, e-mail, or chat rooms. They can’t comfort her when she’s in the hospital. They can’t walk her down the aisle toward her future husband. You will.
Aside from stealing time away from you, e-communications pose another danger to your daughter. They encourage a lack of truthfulness. IM has taken on a life of its own because of this phenomenon. Specifically, kids lie with regularity in a way they wouldn’t do face-to-face. They don’t do it because they’re bad kids, but because it’s fun. They use a lot of foul language for the same reason. So girls say things to boys over IM that they would never say to them in person. Some have “cyber-sex” with one or more friends, even friends in their class they’ve only spoken a few words to. Computer screens loose inhibitions.
Most girls hate bad language, but they embrace it on IM because bad language, half-truths, outright lies, pretending to be another person, and verbal pornography are all part of the IM world, which, to young girls, seems fun and harmless. But you know better, and you know that what starts on a computer screen can end in trouble.
So keep her grounded in reality, be truthful with her, expect truthfulness from her, and don’t let computers come between you.
Surviving Stress
No one likes to seek out stressful situations, but surviving stressful times together creates powerful bonds. If there is stress in your life—and whose life doesn’t have stress?—use it to bond with your daughter by bringing her with you. A problem to solve, a project to complete together (even simple things, like pitching a tent while camping or tinkering with a broken engine) can be great. Watch what happened between Elliott and Hillary.
When Elliott was seventy years old, he retired from his thriving practice of general surgery. He didn’t like retirement. He was neither a golfer nor a fisherman. He didn’t like tinkering around the house. So, in his boredom, at age seventy, he asked his forty-six-year-old daughter Hillary, also a physician, to accompany him on a two-week medical trip to Nicaragua. She agreed.
When the two of them arrived in Nicaragua, Elliott was beaming. Hillary was nervous about dirty toilets, undrinkable water, and annoying bugs, but Elliott was oblivious to them. She worried about how he would deal with the heat, how he might get sick with a tropical disease, or how he might break an arm or a leg and have to be evacuated—somehow—to the United States. But Elliott didn’t worry at all.
After a few days of collecting supplies and traveling deep into the countryside, they and their team set up a clinic where they could evaluate patients. If any needed surgery, they’d drive them to the nearest hospital and perform the operation.
One woman had a tumor the size of a grapefruit in her uterus. Two young men had inguinal hernias; another had a testicular mass. Elliott loved using his broken Spanish and diagnosing his patients. He was exhilarated.
That was before he saw the “hospital.” Hillary and a nurse well versed in anesthesia accompanied him. As they drove up the dirt road to the hospital, Elliott gasped. The building was abandoned. There was no electricity, though at least there was running water. The bus driver politely ushered him through a doorless entryway into an eight-by-eleven-foot room with a single window. A steel operating table sat in the middle of the room. A large lamp hovered above it. It had no bulb and its glass casing was shattered. Elliott began sweating.
In the doorway, the first patient—a young man with a hernia—waited.
Hillary saw her father’s ashen face. She took a deep breath and said, “Come on, Dad, you can do this. Hernias are easy. That’s what you’ve al
ways told me. We can get this done.” She gestured to the nurse, who began setting up her station of medicines and portable oxygen.
“It’s filthy. What about infection? This poor guy will die of an infection.”
“No, Dad. We’ll take it one step at a time. I’ve got IV meds, IV fluid, and some pain meds. I’ll take care of all that. You just operate.”
Hillary motioned to the young boy to wait a few more minutes while they got everything prepared. She wiped the table and pulled the sterile instruments, gowns, and drapes from her trunk. She felt herself trembling. The room was hot and humid.
But they proceeded. Elliott repaired his first patient’s hernia. Then he fixed another. Then he removed the woman’s tumor and the man’s testicular mass. Every few minutes he wiped his sweating brow on his sleeve. It broke sterile code, but he had no choice. He had to see. There was no air conditioning, and several times Elliott thought he would pass out. Hillary watched him and watched his patients. After three days of surgery and twelve patients—half of whom developed infections or had uncontrollable pain—Elliott had had enough.
He sat with the rest of the team at dinner, choking down canned green beans and warm potatoes. Clean water was running low.
“I’m done,” he announced. “I’m sorry. I just can’t do this anymore. I can’t operate well. My patients are getting infections and I’m doing them more harm than good.”
Elliott was a Texan, six-feet-two. He began to cry.
But the team told him not to quit. Hillary in particular encouraged her father, saying that although she wasn’t a surgeon, she knew enough about surgery to assist him, especially when he felt tired and needed to sit down.
So Elliott, operating side by side with his daughter, finished the two-week medical trip. By the end, he was emotionally and physically exhausted. On the plane back to the United States he was too tired to talk.
Hillary will tell you now, since her father’s death, that that trip made their relationship extraordinarily close. As a kid, she had given her parents trouble. But she knew her father was a good man, a very good man, and, especially after their work together in Nicaragua, she felt privileged to have lived her life with him. She had seen him stretching himself to the utmost to help others. She had helped him—and he had wanted her there at his side. “He knew me and he loved me. What more could I ask for in a dad?”
Can you connect with your daughter? Absolutely. Keep it simple. Make it part of your everyday life. Have her help you with chores, or take her out to the theater, or go on a mission trip with her, but whatever you do, focus on her. Tune in to her, listen to her, and don’t let work and its preoccupations distract you from your daughter. At the end of the day, she’s more important than anything else.
Afterword
Every day is a challenge. The daily grind of work is tough. And what keeps us going is the hope that at the end of the day, life will be a little better, happier, calmer, and more joyful, that our anxiety might cease, that our internal ache for “something more” might be assuaged.
Many days we are disappointed. We find ourselves grasping for that elusive “something” that will make us feel more complete. But the more we search for it, the more distant it becomes, because what we’re searching for is sitting right there. It’s not your job or your hobbies. It’s not more money or more sex. It’s your family—your children, your spouse—and God. They are the real center of our lives. Men who figure this out find what they’re looking for. Men who don’t are never truly happy and satisfied.
The problem is that it’s very easy for us to lose perspective. There are a million distractions and temptations. They pull at us and can lead us astray.
We adults are not alone in this; our children, too, are easily led astray. Every day, your daughter faces similar temptations. Every day, she will need your guidance and example to understand why life is a great gift and how she should use it.
Reading this book would not be worth the time it took unless you put its ideas into action. So here are some final tips to guide your action plan.
Realize Who You Are to Her
When she is a baby, her eyes will search for your face. Her ears will listen for your voice and everything inside her will need to answer only one question, “Daddy, are you here?” If you are there, her body will grow better. Her IQ will start to rise, her development will track where it is supposed to, but more important, she will realize that life is good because you love her. You are her introduction to love; you are love itself.
When she goes to kindergarten she will think about you and she might even talk about you. If another classmate makes a hurtful remark, your daughter will boast to the bully that he’d better be careful because you, her hero, will come over to his house and beat him up. To her, you can do anything, and, most especially, you can protect her.
In elementary school, her challenges and her world expand, but her question for you will be the same: “Daddy, are you still there for me?” When she is thirteen and wearing lipstick, or fifteen and competing in a spelling contest, or seventeen and living at a friend’s house because she can’t stand you, one question alone will haunt her: “Dad, are you there for me?” She needs to know that the answer is always yes. The more you leave her wondering, the harder she will push for an answer—and she might go to extremes to try to force it from you.
And when she has her first child, or is diagnosed with breast cancer at thirty, or her husband walks out on her and her kids, the question will remain: “Dad, please, dad, are you there?”
If she knows that you are there, dependable and full of love for her, you will have taught her this great lesson: Life is good. Good men help make it so.
Open Your Eyes to Her World (it’s different from yours)
Being a father isn’t easy. You will face a series of roadblocks, and most of them will come from the culture into which she’s born, rather than from anything you’ve done.
First and foremost, school will pull her away from you. Is school a bad thing? Of course not, but some of her experiences at school can work against your relationship with her. She will hear things you don’t want her to hear. She will hear derogatory remarks about things you believe. She might even hear criticism of you. She will be taught sex education, which can harm her, and when that happens, she might feel embarrassed and hide from you. Her friends and peers might try to pull her away from you. This is life in the twenty-first century: what’s a dad to do?
A lot. A whole lot. You might not be able to single-handedly change popular culture or reform school curricula, but what you say and do, the example you set, and the leadership you provide can absolutely keep your daughter on the right track—or put her back on it. Your influence is that important. And even if you feel that it’s too late, that she’s too far gone from you, run to find her. It doesn’t matter how old you are or how old she is. She is still your daughter. You are still her father.
Fight for Her Body
By far the greatest danger to your daughter comes from the aggressive marketing of sexuality that, unchecked, can give her a horribly skewed sense of self. In elementary school she will be encouraged to be sexy, to watch sex on television or DVDs. Music, clothing, toys, video games, and magazines she spies while shopping will be soaked with sex. Why are these images and messages so devastating? Because from the time she is seven, sex (whatever that means to her) will be on her young mind. And if she starts having sex during her teen years, she puts herself at tremendous health risk. Truthfully, I would prefer that my teen patients (and my own kids) smoke during their teen years rather than have sex. Think about it. If a sixteen-year-old girl smokes until she’s twenty and then stops, her lungs and her cardiovascular system will recover and she can be completely healthy for the rest of her life. If she is sexually active during these same years, on the other hand, she stands a reasonable chance of contracting a sexually transmitted disease. Some she may recover from. Others she may not. Once she contracts herpes—either type 1 or ty
pe 2—she’s got it for life. Or she may become repeatedly infected with HPV and develop cervical cancer. And then there’s the real possibility of fertility problems caused by an infection in her reproductive organs. Many sexually transmitted infections do not show any symptoms until it’s too late.
Don’t let this happen to your daughter, please. Protect her mind, protect her body. Remember, setting rules has nothing to do with trust—particularly during the teen years. Setting rules and being vigilant about protecting her is a matter of her anatomy and emotions, and your parental responsibility. Her brain is not fully developed. Scientists now know so much more about the teen brain than we did a decade ago, and what we’ve learned makes parental authority crucial. We know that regardless of a girl’s personality, intelligence, or grade point average, she does not have the intellectual maturity of an adult, and she can be easily seduced into trouble. But you can keep her out of it. So meet her boyfriends. Don’t let her wander alone at night with them. Err on the side of being overprotective and you’ll hit it just right, because even if you feel more unreasonable than her friends’ parents, remember, they’ve got the problem of being too naïve. Compared to them, you might appear strict, but you’ll be less likely to have problems with your children in the future. Protect her and defend her, and your daughter will know that you love her.
Fight for Her Mind
She will diet, think about carbs and breasts, small waists and emaciated arms. She will wonder whether muscle is good or bad. You won’t, but she will. She might even be obsessive in thinking about her body. These thoughts endanger her sense of self-worth. You need to be aware that they’re in her head, and you need to help her fight them. You need to teach her that she is valuable because she is human, that she is beautiful as she is, that much of what she sees on TV, in the movies, and in magazines is a lie and an illusion. Engage your daughter in this conversation and you’ll be amazed how well it works, and how much it will enhance your relationship with her. You are a warrior in her eyes. You of all people know how to fight, because you are her dad—so get into the battle and help her.