Transcript of Interview with Dr. Meg Meeker about Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com
Listen Now to the audio version of the show.
Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters is available at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1004691/Strong-Fathers-Strong-Daughters-10-Secrets-Every-Father-Should-Know/
———————————
Chris Cash: This is the Catholic Spotlight, the podcast where we talk about what is new, cool and exciting in the Catholic marketplace. I am your host, Chris Cash, Director of e-Commerce from CatholicCompany.com, your source for all your Catholic needs. Today in the spotlight, we have something real exciting for you folks. We are doing Dr. Meg Meeker today, she has an excellent book out called Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters. She also just had a book come out on…what was the name of that Dr. Meeker?
Dr. Meg Meeker: Boys should be Boys.
Chris Cash: Boys should be Boys. We are not going to be talking about that one today, but maybe we will be able to have you back on sometime in the near future to talk about that one as well. But today we want to talk about daughters, and this interview is really special to me because I have three very young daughters. My wife actually heard you Dr. Meeker on another show and said, “Chris, you got to get that book.” I said, “I will do you one up, I will get Dr. Meeker on the show and actually talk to her.”
Dr. Meg Meeker: That is great.
Chris Cash: Anyway, I am very glad to have you on and have a chance to talk to you about the book. Can you tell our audience a little bit more about yourself and what brought you to write this book?
Dr. Meg Meeker: Sure. My husband and I have been married for 27 years and we share a medical practice, he is a pediatrician as well and an internist. We had raised four kids, three daughters who are no older; 24, 22 and 20, and then we have a son who is 16.
Chris Cash: So your family kind of mirrors mine. You got the three and one.
Dr. Meg Meeker: The three and one. So a lot of it sort of was drawn from my personal experience, but I have spent over 20 some years just listening to the hearts of kids. I have an unusual practice and I see a lot of teenagers, as a pediatrician I see kids up to about 20. I listen to a lot of daughter in particular because they gravitate towards what makes them a woman and I have seen so many changes over the 20 years that I have been doing this, the increase pressures on kids and the difficulties dealing with divorce, dealing with school issues and media pressures. So I have seen a lot of disturbing trends in kids, in girls, I have seen eating disorders and I have seen some depressions. I have seen a whole host of problems. As I have listened and I had researched what it is that is causing the problems and what can we do to help the problems.
What I have found over and over was that the girls who had a solid relationship with their dad or who has access to their dad. Perhaps they were divorced, but dad realized she was going through some troubles and we recruited him to really step up to the plate and help. Girls who has dad involved on a real level, on a real deep level, were the girls who either stayed out of trouble or who came out of their difficulties much quicker than girls who did not. I was really intrigued by that, I had seen that work in our own family, my husband is very close to our daughters and our son. I saw that he had a profound influence on their life that was very different from mine as a mother, which was disturbing for me as a mom because we moms like to think we have it all and we can do it all and we are better at raising our daughters.
Chris Cash: Of course you are, you are necessary as well, we know that.
Dr. Meg Meeker: Exactly, of course. But as we women, we think we understand our daughters and dad is not going to understand daughters when they are 13, 15, 18. So, we kind of tend to push the dads out of the way. As a pediatrician, as a mom, as a researcher and as a speaker, I say, “Mothers, please do not do that because daughters need something very unique from their dads that we cannot give.” I really believe those are life changing, they are integral to the psychological, spiritual and physical health of our daughters regardless of the age. So I wrote this book to really highlight that and to say, “Men, we need you. We need you in ways that you do not realize. We need in ways that we have sort of duped you into believing that we do not need you. So, come on back.” This really is a book about championing dads and daughter’s lives.
Chris Cash: So, what was your inspiration then as far as getting started with this project? Were you just sitting on this information and you decided I really got to put this down into a book format?
Dr. Meg Meeker: It really evolved, and I knew that there was an important connection all along. But I saw it growing because I saw the incidents of depression in girls increasing over the 20 years I have been doing this. I saw girls who are sexually active at earlier and earlier ages with multiple partners, and this was just very disturbing to me. I found that the girls that had a solid relationship with their dad were much less likely to be sexually involved. That was a huge issue for me.
We are living in a culture that sexualizes our girls at such an early age. Through my research, listening to girls and watching, I realize that the girls who had dads, who were really involved with the lives on a day-to-day basis, were much less likely to buckle under the pressure of being sexualized very early. As a mom, watching the pressure that my daughter were going through, it has bothered me so much that girls by the time they are six or seven on they are given skimpy clothes.
Chris Cash: Not in our household.
Dr. Meg Meeker: Yes, I know, even not in our household.
Chris Cash: But I can certainly tell you, there are certain stores where my wife will not shop for our girl’s clothing. You are right, even at six and seven, the clothing can be scandalous.
Dr. Meg Meeker: It is everywhere. The pressure begins to mount as daughters get older because their friends are going to be wearing skimpy clothes to prom and their friends are going to be going to school looking terrible – really seductive in 6th, 7th and 8th grade, even sometimes 4th and 5th grade, and your daughter will start to feel like the odd girl out. Then you begin to struggle with, “What is wrong with my daughter? My daughter, I do not want her to feel odd, she needs to be accepted by her peers.” The pressure just really intensifies as daughters get older.
Our daughters did fine with it and there are different ways that we handle it. They came through the teen years and early adult years very, very strong and very, very healthy. But for all of these pressures against daughters and all the ills that can befall them on all different levels in life, the bottom line for me is the girls who had dads who are really connected to them and the dads who understood who they were in their girl’s live really were the kids that did extremely well. Dads, when they became more involved in their daughter’s life, their lives became richer and they were happier. It is a simple profound truth that first it is our relationship with God, then it is our relationship with our family. If you square away those two things, life is really pretty good. But we often go backwards, we tended to teach them, “Make sure you get a good career and make sure your sports are okay, make sure you are this or this, and then work on your family and your faith.” Well, nothing works in that orders. So, to really focus on the pivotal relationship of a daughter with her dad.
What I did then is I said I need dads to understand who they are from their daughter’s perspective. So what tried to do in the book was to take behind the eye of his daughter because if every dad could see who he is from his daughter’s perspective and if he could see how she sees him, who he is in her eyes, his life would never be the same because he is so different behind her eyes than he perceives he is. So then I took the 10 most important parts of his character, the 10 most important ways that a daughter sees him, the needs that she has from her dad, and then I wrote a chapter about each one.
For instance, my first chapter, “you are the most important man in her life.” Most dads do not realize that. Most dads believe it is a boyfriend, it is going to be your husband, it is going to be a coach or somebody, but dad is just sort of in the background to let her alone. Let me tell you what I mean by that. A daughter’s first exposure to maleness and to male love, to male trust, to male voice, to male touch is through her dad. If the girl, even a six month of girl or a one year old, two year old, three year old had a positive experience with her dad, he becomes sort of a doorway for all her other relationships to men including to God because God is male, Christ is male. If she learns to trust her dad and to receive love from her dad, that will change every relationship, every interaction she has with a male, even a boy, for the rest of her life, even as an older person. A dad really sort of presses a template over her heart for how she is going to perceive and relate to males for the rest of their life, and that is an enormous responsibility that can go positive but it also could go negative, too.
An interesting thing way as I talked or interviewed many, many women for the book, I was very intrigued to find that there were no lukewarm responses that women had in response to their dad. When I said, “Are you willing to talk about your dad?” This is 30, 40, 50 year old women, they either could not gush enough about their dad or they really could not talk about it because it was very, very painful. When you ask them if they want to talk about their mothers, “Sure, my mother is great, but my mother kind of drives me crazy.” It was not that way with their dads, it was intense on either end. So dad has a huge piece of the girl’s heart from the time she is born, and she takes that piece of her heart to her grave.
It is interesting, women can divorce a husband and sister will leave a brother, and a wife can loose her husband, he can die, but a daughter always has her dad with him. She can never severe that relationship, and I tell this to mother who are going through a divorce. You can leave your husband or your husband can leave you, but your daughter can never leave him. So, you need to honor that, your relationship with him, as you go through this divorce. So, the dad is the most important man because he becomes the doorway and the template for relating to other men for the rest of her life, that is including God, and that is no exaggeration. That is the enormity of the father-daughter relationship, that every dad needs to understand, develops in a daughter’s heart from the very moment she is born. I really believe that dads could sort of wrap their minds around that and their hearts around that regardless of the age of a father’s daughter, that will really give them a different perspective to relate to his daughter perhaps on a different level and then hopefully a better level.
Chris Cash: Now, you based this book on a lot of research, were most of the research done by you, yourself or did you have other studies that went along with the research you did personally?
Dr. Meg Meeker: Most of it was based on research that I collected through professional researches. I went to the best medical journals that I know. I went to psychiatry journals, I went to sociology journals, medical journals, and I collected and sifted through a lot of data. The way I started this, I said, “Okay, we know that girls are facing inordinate pressures during the early adolescent years, the teen years and the later elementary school years. So what I want to find out is what is it operating in a girl’s life that is going to keep her on the good path? What is going to keep her moving forward, staying emotionally sound, her feet on the ground, not buckling to a lot of peer pressure?” I believe if I can teach parents how to give that to their kids as a pediatrician who loves kids that is the best thing I can do for kids.
What I have found over and over and over was that the kids who had a strong connection to their parents, a strong faith – and a wrote a whole chapter about that, that one of the secrets to raising a healthy daughter that a dad needs to give his daughter, he needs to model a strong faith in Christ, in the God of the old testament and new testament. That girls who have that and have a sense of moral bearing, a spiritual foundation and they have a strong faith, those are the girls who also they feel a connection to God who are going to fair very well in life. So, staying connected to parents and staying connected to God.
That came through medical research, I did not go through religious research. I went through medical research, that in and of itself is really intriguing. You are not going to read that in Time Magazine of Newsweek or USA Today because in our secular media, they do not want us to believe in God. So, what I was trying to do was say, “What is it in a girl’s life that is going to help her really fly in life?” So I went through hundreds and hundreds of medical papers, and many of them, many of the truths of course, resonated with my own personal experience with my own patients. So I took the medical research, and then what I did in the book is I have weaved stories of real kids that I have met and talked to with real dads in their lives. I weaved those stories around the research to sort of bring the research to life so that any dad reading it could go, “Alright, I get it. I think I could do that. I have heard my daughter say that. Sometimes I have felt that discouraged and did not know what to do. So now I get it.” So I really took other people’s excellent research and really just tried to make it come alive with some real stories, real kids in my practice and hopefully it works.
Chris Cash: One thing that I am sure some of your secular detractors might throw back at you is to say, “What is your criteria for a successful daughter? Why is a daughter who has these characteristics better than one that does not?” Could you go over some of your characteristics that you would say are important or successful in raising a daughter?
Dr. Meg Meeker: Sure. For me, I love it when people ask me questions like that because the foundation of all of my writing really is science and literature because in medical school and all through our residency training and medical practice, we are trained to measure truth, to measure scientific truth, to say. To say what is it working in somebody’s life that is reproducible that will reproduce a measurably good outcome over and over and over? For kids what I will say is, from just a science standpoint, a girl that reaches 18 or 20 who has not been involved in drugs, who has gotten through high school and has done pretty well in high school, who has avoided major difficulties like depression and eating disorders, who has not been sexually active, those are measurable behaviors that will keep girls in a category we call low risk. They will keep them because all of those behaviors; sex, drugs, alcohol, eating disorders, those are high risk behaviors. Those are behaviors that are going to get girls into a lot of trouble.
So even if you just start with the basics, you kind of keep morality and faith out of the picture, and you say from a scientific standpoint, if any parent can get their daughter to 18 to get them through high school so that they can go onto college or get a good job; they can avoid drug, sex of alcohol, then that is a desirable goal. That is a good goal. Every parent should have that goal for their daughter because that means that they are emotionally and physically sound because all of those have physical behavior risks associated with them. Sex is very dangerous for a 15 year old girl just from a physical standpoint, from an emotional standpoint. So, I started there.
But I also know that parents want more than just the basics for their kids. Most parents want a girl who not just skirts trouble and stays away from high risk, not just one who get through high school and graduates and see they are okay. Most parents want more for their kids. What I say to parents is, “Girls when they are very young, and boys also, they are born with a sense of a moral code.” We adults can say, “Well, there really is not a right and a wrong, it is not right for us to reach morality to our kids and it is not right for us to preach God to our kids because we want our kids to choose.” Well, the truth is a five year old kid knows what is a good and a bad thing, they know what is right and they know what is wrong, it is intuitive. So, I call parents to build on a child’s intuition because it is crazy makings for a kid to say if your child knows right from wrong, it is not healthy for them for you to come along and say, “Well that is not necessarily true. It is really okay if you want to hit Sally in kindergarten because maybe she deserved it and I know your teacher does not like it, but you cannot fudge with the kid.” So, you can start working on character issues and moral issues at an early age, and a good parent will want to do that.
I guess I am going to jump way head then, is it fair for me to say as an author and as a pediatrician and a scientist and somebody who have listened to a lot of kids, it is good for a parent to instill a faith in God and kids. A lot of people would say, “That is a real moral judgment and that is a religious issue and you should not push it on kids.” I can show you data that says girls who have a strong faith in God fair much better in the early adult years than girls who do not. They are less likely to become depressed and less likely to engage in high risk behaviors, they are healthier physically, they are psychologically healthier, and that is the scientific data. Girls from the time they are young and as they grow older, they want to know what is right and wrong. They want to know their dad’s moral code is, they want to know if their dad is telling the truth. They want to see what his life, his integrity is all about because read their dads all the time. In other words, girls want their character shaped and strengthened, and girls want virtues, they want humility. I wrote a whole chapter on why a dad needs to teach her daughter humility – because humility changes a girl’s perception of herself and her world around her, and it allows her to serve. Girls who serve other people are psychologically healthier than girls who are focused only on themselves.
So a long way, a long answer to a great question is – yes, from a science standpoint, I can show that character building in girls is good, and it is more than just teaching the basics of staying away from high risk behaviors. But girls who have a moral code who live with a sense of what virtue, what living is all about, are happier and physically healthier, and I say that as a pediatrician.
Chris Cash: Good answer. That is the short answer, right?
Dr. Meg Meeker: That is the short answer. Sorry, you can slice and dice it at your will. Obviously, I am very passionate about my topic which is kids. I am very, very passionate about this topic because it works, I have lived it, I have seen it. Many times people come to me and they say, “You should put your girls on stage. You should have your girls talk about the book.” What I am saying, it really works. You can keep your daughters from being sexually active in high school and college. There is a way to do it. I am living it and I am seeing it with a lot of my patients. Now the world does not want you to know that, but that is the cool thing about it, too.
Chris Cash: Well the world would say why should not they be sexually active?
Dr. Meg Meeker: Exactly. Okay, we can just vaccinate them up and out the wazzu and we can hope for damage control, but physically it is just bad, bad, bad news.
(Commercial)
Chris Cash: We are back on the spotlight with Dr. Meg Meeker talking about Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters and why fathers should be a strong influence in their daughter’s lives. This is a very passionate topic obviously for Dr. Meeker and myself. One of the topics you talk about in the book is the one mistake that fathers make, the primary cause of their girls hooking up. My girls are not quite to that age yet, but can you enlighten me so that I am ready?
Dr. Meg Meeker: Sure. Many times dad can have a pretty close relationship with the daughters while they are cute, fun and not too sassy. They are five, six, seven, eight years old and they are really pretty fun. But then when the hormones really kick in and adolescent starts to rear its head and girls put their hand on their hip and tell their dad a thing or two, and basically what their body language say, “Dad, go away,” dads take it very personally and feel, “What happened to my cute little girl? Where did she go?” Sometimes they feel like this monster has just appeared in their home, and they feel that now what they need to do because the daughter is telling them to is to just sort of fade into the background because she does not want her dad, she bristles when he tries to hug her. One dad said hugging my 13 year old is like hugging a telephone pole, and I said keep hugging her anyway. What dads tend to do is they retreat when they need to advance.
Now what does it mean to advance? It means shifting how you relate to your daughter but continue to relate even more than you did before. We know that study show us girls who are more likely to end up in the backseat of a boy’s car or behind the movie theater with a boyfriend or some guy they hook up with are girls who are craving male affection, male attention and affirmation. It is not as much of a sexual thing for them as it is for guys that age. We know that girls that have more physical attention and affection from their father are…
Chris Cash: …appropriate though.
Dr. Meg Meeker: Very appropriate of course, and I kind of go into that in the book as well. But important it is that girls who feel that they are affirmed by their dad, that they are adored by their dad, they feel very close to their dad, although it is different when they were younger, those are the girls who are much less likely to seek male attention elsewhere. That is what sexual activity for girls in the teen years is all about, is male attention and affection, that is it.
Interestingly, the number one way to increase a girl’s self-esteem is physical affection from her father. Dad says, “Okay, I get that, but my daughter does not want me anywhere near her.” So what I encourage dads to do is say even though she projects to you and shows you that she does not want you around or near you, deep down she really does, and she needs it. This is a need girls have. So I encourage dads, do not touch your daughters in public because they usually do not like that. Some girls are fine with it, they do not mind, it depends on the daughter, some daughter like physical affection than others. But when they are in private, when they are at home and she is pretty relaxed, touch her on the top of her head, touch her on her shoulders and just leave it there. That is enough. Hug her is she lets you, that is wonderful. Never make comments about her appearance. Men talk differently to their sons and sometimes they talk to their daughters the way they would do to their son. They would make comments that they think are cute about their daughter but are really very hurtful.
Chris Cash: With boys, insults are a good thing, with girls…
Dr. Meg Meeker: …they are not. A dad might comment, “You are getting so pudgy and that is so cute.” You never say that to a girl. Never comment on her weight, never comment on specific body parts. Dad will say, “What a cure butt you have.” Well, that can be devastating to a girl. You just do not do that. So to handle her with care and to just to be very respectful, your touch be very respectful and your speech towards her. Do not over emphasize her looks because it can backfire, “You look so beautiful, you look so beautiful.” A very sensitive girl may think, “That is what I need to do to get my dad’s attention, so I am going to constantly look beautiful.” Then in her mind she is going to figure out what that is, and that could end up being devastating for her.
So it is very tricky stuff. The mind of adolescent can be very, very tricky. So I just think for dads to kind of keep it simple, keep your touch very respectful, your speech very respectful, but make it honest and sincere and really make a strong effort to step up your desire to be involved and stay connected with her, to be interested. Ask her questions and listen to her. Often dads are much better listeners than mothers are because mothers try to compete for the platform. They try to compete for what they are going to say. They want to teach their girl, they want to correct her, they interrupt. Dads do not necessarily want to talk as much as a mother, they tend to listen better. So those are extremely important ways that a dad needs to really advance during those teen years, not make the mistake of backing out of his daughter’s life and believing very incorrectly that she needs him less and desires him less, though that is what he is going to be led to believe because of her body language and the way she talks. But those are the years, 13, 14, 15, 16 when she needs that presence and touch and his ear more than ever, and that is what is ultimately going to change what she is like when she is 18 and 20 than anything that he ever did when she was 5 and 6. It is very, very important not to make the mistake of retreating during those teen years.
Chris Cash: Now, what advice would you have for someone who is in this situation of…for instance, my father died when my sister was four. So there was no chance of having a father figure in her life beyond the age of four. What do you have in terms of advice for somebody who is in that situation or in a situation where there is something such as a bitter divorce where there just is not even a chance of having substantial contact with the father?
Dr. Meg Meeker: Sure. That is another excellent question because we have just millions of single moms out there, either they are widowed or divorced. Mothers who are trying to rear kids all on their own struggle with tremendous amount of guilt, and a lot of the guilt comes from the fact that they are trying to be dad n addition to mom. What I say to mothers is you cannot be dad, you cannot be dad, you can only be mom. Square that away with yourself and release yourself of the burden of feeling guilty because you cannot be everything to your children. At the same time, recognize that a father brings something to kids that you cannot bring. God can compensate for that, that is why He calls himself Father. So I encourage mothers to through prayer ask God to really help and fill in the hole.
But also, once a mother can recognize that there are things that she cannot bring, to look around her and to recruit a healthy, positive male influence wherever it can be available, sometimes an uncle; grandfathers are wonderful. Sometimes a good step dad can be terrific, takes a lot of extra work on his part because he has to overcome over the dynamics of being the step dad not the biologic dad, and that has a lot of problems. Perhaps a teacher, a coach, a priest, a pastor, somebody who is a kind person and is a man of great integrity who can spend a little time with daughters, even come over for dinner periodically, drive her to basketball games, take her on fieldtrips, anything to pull a man to a daughter’s life so that she can at least see what a good man looks like and how a good man talks to her mother, how a good man would talk to her. Older brothers can be wonderful. A daughter, she is always on a lookout for what maleness looks like and what masculinity looks like as opposed to what mom looks like.
So she needs that visual picture, she needs some interaction. She needs to see how a man talks to her in positive ways and negative way. If there is absolutely no man available, I would encourage mothers to – church is a wonderful place for that to introduce her to God the Father, and that she cannot see Him but God the Father is real and He has perfect love for her, and it is different from moms love. For a single mom not to approach rearing her kids like “maleness does not matter,” when we do that everybody loses. I think that it really frees single mothers up when they realize that they just cannot be it all and do it all, to recruit help and to ask for that help. Many, many men out there when they are asked for a little bit of help, they rise to the occasion. I see it all the time. Grandparents and grandfathers can be wonderful resources for single moms. Borrow a grandfather, if you have a good friend who has a retired grandfather, just invite them over for dinner or tell them you got a 16 year old daughter and she needs some encouragement. Many people are willing if we just step up and ask them for help.
Chris Cash: Well, Dr. Meeker, it has been a pure pleasure to have a chance to talk to you. I am looking forward to hopefully have a chance to talk to you all about the Boys book again very soon. Any final comments you have for our listeners before we head off?
Dr. Meg Meeker: Well, it has been a delightful time with you. Also, to every dad out there listening, be encouraged, it is never too late. I do not care if you are 80 and your daughter is 60, it is never too late for a dad to improve his relationship his daughter. Everybody wins and every dad should know, regardless of your history, every daughter wants more from her dad, she wants to be closer to her dad. As I said before, she will take you to her grave, and what an honor and privilege that is as a dad. So, just to be encouraged, and I just hope in any small way I can help a dad become closer to his daughter, really live a more joyful life for himself.
Chris Cash: Be sure to go out and pick up a copy of Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters by Dr. Meg Meeker, you will not be sorry, whether you are a father, a mother or a daughter looking for some guidance, maybe some things you might have missed out on and why you are the way you are when you think about things.
Meg, thank you very much. All of you listeners out there, please go over to Podcast Alley and vote for us this month. Leave us some reviews on iTunes, it really helps to get the word our about our show and certainly share this show around with your friends. God bless Dr. Meeker.
Dr. Meg Meeker: Well, God bless you. Thanks so much and I look forward to doing it again sometime.
———————————
Transcript of Interview with Dr. Meg Meeker about Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com
Listen Now to the audio version of the show.
Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters is available at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1004691/Strong-Fathers-Strong-Daughters-10-Secrets-Every-Father-Should-Know/