Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters 10 Secrets Every Father Should Know

Chapter One You Are the Most Important Man in Her Life Men, good men: We need you. Wemothers, daughters, and sistersneed your help to raise healthy young women. We need every ounce of masculine courage and wit you own, because fathers, more than anyone else, set the course for a daughter's life. Your daughter needs the best of who you are: your strength, your courage, your intelligence, and your fearlessness. She needs your empathy, assertiveness, and self-confidence. She needs you. Our daughters need the support that only fathers can provideand if you are willing to guide your daughter, to stand between her and a toxic culture, to take her to a healthier place, your rewards will be unmatched. You will experience the love and adoration that can come only from a daughter. You will feel a pride, satisfaction, and joy that you can know nowhere else. After more than twenty years of listening to daughtersand doling out antibiotics, antidepressants, and stimulants to girls who have gone without a father's loveI know just how important fathers are. I have listened hour after hour to young girls describe how they vomit in junior high bathrooms to keep their weight down. I have listened to fourteen-year-old girls tell me they have to provide fellatiowhich disgusts themin order to keep their boyfriends. I've watched girls drop off varsity tennis teams, flunk out of school, and carve initials or tattoo cult figures onto their bodiesall to see if their dads will notice. And I have watched daughters talk to fathers. When you come in the room, they change. Everything about them changes: their eyes, their mouths, their gestures, their body language. Daughters are never lukewarm in the presence of their fathers. They might take their mothers for granted, but not you. They light upor they cry. They watch you intensely. They hang on your words. They hope for your attention, and they wait for it in frustrationor in despair. They need a gesture of approval, a nod of encouragement, or even simple eye contact to let them know you care and are willing to help. When she's in your company, your daughter tries harder to excel. When you teach her, she learns more rapidly. When you guide her, she gains confidence. If you fully understood just how profoundly you can influence your daughter's life, you would be terrified, overwhelmed, or both. Boyfriends, brothers, even husbands can't shape her character the way you do. You will influence her entire life because she gives you an authority she gives no other man. Many fathers (particularly of teen girls) assume they have little influence over their daughterscertainly less influence than their daughters' peers or pop cultureand think their daughters need to figure out life on their own. But your daughter faces a world markedly different from the one you did growing up: it's less friendly, morally unmoored, and even outright dangerous. After age six, "little girl" clothes are hard to find. Many outfits are cut to make her look like a seductive thirteen- or fourteen-year-old girl trying to attract older boys. She will enter puberty earlier than girls did a generation or two ago (and boys will be watching as she grows breasts even as young as age nine). She will see sexual innuendo or scenes of overt sexual behavior in magazines or on television before she is ten years old, whether you approve or not. She will learn about HIV and AIDS in elementary school and will also probably learn why and how it is transmitted. When my son was in the fourth grade at a small parochial school, the teacher gave his class a science assignment. Each student was to write a report on any one of the infectious diseases from a list she gave them. My sMeeker, Meg is the author of 'Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters 10 Secrets Every Father Should Know', published 2007 under ISBN 9780345499394 and ISBN 0345499395.