by Meg Meeker
Never let popular culture steal your daughter from you. Teach her the centrality of family, the importance of humility, and the rewards of helping others. Teach her to look beyond herself.
Fight for Her Soul
And then there’s faith. Your daughter will wonder and ask about death and the supernatural. She will want to ask questions. Something inside her will prompt her to know if God is real, and if He is, what He’s like. So help her. Don’t back out. Just as you teach her to ride a bike, to know right from wrong, to stay away from drugs, teach her about God. She is a spiritual being and she wants answers to her questions. More than that, it is a simple fact that faith is good for her. This is demonstrable in study after study. So dive in. Get her to church or temple, teach her to pray, open the Old Testament and the New and see what’s there. Understanding God is the most important intellectual and spiritual journey anyone makes. Don’t leave her out of it.
Fight for Your Relationship with Her
What your daughter wants most from you is your time. Don’t be anxious about spending time with her. Many fathers think they need to entertain their daughters to make the time seem special. This is particularly true of divorced fathers. But your daughter doesn’t need—or even want—special events or outings. She just needs to be with you, next to you doing chores, washing the car, living life. So just live it with her. Ask her to rake leaves with you, go grocery shopping, or change the oil. And let her know that you need her help. If she is fifteen and wants to go to the mall on a Saturday afternoon, either go with her and make it an outing, or don’t let her go. Instead, make her stay home and help you around the house. The bottom line is: she needs more time with you than she does with her friends. So be with her.
Your daughter looks to you for guidance, whether the issue is what instrument or sport to play, what college to attend, or what to do about sex, drinking, and drugs. If she feels close to you, she’s much more likely to make good decisions. If she doesn’t feel close to you, all bets are off.
So keep her connected: talk to her, spend time with her, and enjoy your time with her, because she is growing every day. You can bring extraordinary richness to your daughter’s life and she can bring immeasurable rewards to yours.
One day, when she is grown, something between the two of you will shift. If you have done your job well, she will choose another good man to love her, fight for her, and be intimately connected to her. But he will never replace you in her heart, because you were there first. And that’s the ultimate reward for being a good dad.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to extend many thanks to the wonderful people who helped me make this book great. First, I would like to thank Doug and Judy for the extraordinary way you live your lives. Your inspiration is infectious and your faith exemplary.
I would like to also thank the wonderful folks at Regnery. Thank you, Marji Ross, for your encouragement and example of how a strong woman lives. To Karen Anderson, thank you for your enthusiasm, wit, and for helping launch my writing career. To my editor, Harry Crocker, thank you for being so wise, patient, and such a good man. To Paula Currall and Kate Morse, thank you for your expertise in final editing. To Angela Phelps, thank you for your enthusiasm and thoroughness. And thanks to my terrific research assistant, Jill Pardini.
Finally, I thank my great friend Anne Mann for your dedication, amazing patience, and love.
Notes
Chapter One: You Are the Most Important Man in Her Life
1 “Guidelines for comprehensive sexuality education,” The Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, 2004, found at: http://www.siecus.org/pubs/guidelines/guidelines.pdf, 51-66.
2 “Sex on TV,” Kaiser Family Foundation, (2005) found at: http://www.kaiserfamilyfoundation.org/entmedia/upload/sex-on-TV-4-Executive-Summary.pdf.
3 Ibid.
4 D. T. Fleming et al., “Herpes Virus Type 2 in the United States, 1976 to 1994,” New England Journal of Medicine 337 (1997): 1105-60.
5 Ibid., 5.
6 Surveillance Summary, Morbidity Mortality Weekly Review 53 (May 21, 2004).
7 Margaret J. Blythe et al., “Incidence and Correlates of Unwanted Sex in Relationships of Middle & Late Adolescent Women,” Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine 160 (2006): 591-95.
8 Meg Meeker, Epidemic: How Teen Sex Is Killing Our Kids (Washington, DC: LifeLine Press, 2002), 154-55.
9 Ibid.
10 Surveillance Summary, Morbidity Mortality Weekly Review 53: 17.
11 American Social Health Association, Sexually Transmitted Diseases in America: How Many Cases and at What Cost? (Menlo Park, CA: Kaiser Family Foundation, 1998).
12 J. M. Walboomers et al., “Human Papillomavirus Is a Necessary Cause of Invasive Cervical Cancer Worldwide,” Journal of Pathology 189 (1999): 12-19.
13 Bosch et al., “Effect of oral contraceptives on risk of cervical cancer in women with the human papillomavirus infection: the IARC multicentric case-control study,” International Agency of Research on Cancer.
14 Fleming et al., “Herpes Virus Type 2 in the United States, 1976 to 1994.”
15 http://medinstitute.org/includes/downloads/herpes.pdf.
16 Surveillance Summary, Morbidity Mortality Weekly Review 53: 8-16.
17 Denise Halfors, “Which Comes First in Adolescence: Sex and Drugs or Depression?” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 29 (2005): 3.
18 Surveillance Summary, Morbidity Mortality Weekly Review 53: 9.
