48 Things I Learned from Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters by Meg Meeker, M.D.
Meg Meeker, M.D., has spent the past twenty years practicing pediatric and adolescent medicine and counseling teens and parents. This book explains the role of father in having raising strong daughters in a Godly way in today’s society. If you are a first time dad (or even 2nd or third), READ THIS BOOK!
1. What you say in a sentence, communicate with a smile, or do with regard to family rules has infinite importance for your daughter. (p. 4)
2. Protecting her and teaching her about God, sex, and humility doesn’t require a degree in psychology. It just means being a dad. (p. 6)
3. Don’t let your daughter have a TV, or a computer, in her room. Save TV time for family time when you or your wife can decide what to watch. (p. 18)
4. 40.9% of girls fourteen to seventeen years old experience unwanted sex, primarily because they fear that their boyfriends will be angry. (p. 20)
5. 46.7% of students (girls and boys) will be sexually active before high school ends. (p. 20)
6. Authority is not a threat to your relationship with your daughter – it is what will bring you closer to your daughter, and what will make her respect you more. (p. 33)
7. Your daughter needs your guideposts of right and wrong, of proper and improper behavior. (p. 34)
8. She’ll want to know what you think her life’s purpose is: whether you believe she should indulge her own passions of devote herself to helping others. (p. 34)
9. If you don’t accept the authority that is naturally yours, if you don’t set high standards, if you don’t act to protect your daughter, if you don’t live a life of moral principle, your daughter will suffer. (p. 36)
10. If you don’t show her the high road now, she won’t find it later. (p. 42)
11. And that means not just setting and enforcing rules, but leading by example. (p. 42)
12. Make a plan, Have courage under fire, Be the Leader, and Don’t cave, persevere. (p. 47-48)
13. Instead of saying, “I love you because you’re so beautiful,” tell her that you love her because there is no one else in the world like her. (p. 52)
14. Reflect on her character, praise her best attributes, talk about her sensitivity, compassion, or courage. Your daughter will draw a picture in her mind of how you see her, and that’s the person she’ll want to be. (p. 51)
15. Listening is tough, particularly when the worlds don’t make sense and the ideas seem superfluous. But listen anyway. Sit down. Look her in the eye. Don’t let your mind wander. And you’ll be rewarded with your daughter’s trust, love, and affection. (p. 57)
16. Daughters often say the most meaningful conversations of their lives were one-on-one with their dads. (p. 58)
17. Let her know that nothing she can do, even running away, getting pregnant, tattooing her ankle, or piercing her tongue, can make you stop loving her. Say that if you need to. (p. 60)
18. The purpose of your time with her is to help her walk away feeling better about who she is. (p. 70)
19. I can guarantee you one thing: if you listen to your daughter attentively for ten minutes every day, by the end of the month you’ll have a completely new relationship with her. (p. 72)
20. Equally important, they (your ‘fences’) train her to build boundaries for herself and teach her that such boundaries are necessary. (p. 73)
21. Let her know that your standards are hers, and that she’s right to uphold them regardless of what her friends do. Guide her and help her reject harmful behaviors. Make it a habit and she will too. (p. 73)
22. The importance of words:
a. Don’t comment frequently on how she looks
b. Don’t comment on your own need to diet
c. Don’t make derogatory comments about her body
d. Don’t’ comment frequently about her clothes.
e. Don’t constantly focus on the importance of exercise.
f. Don’t make her feel she needs to do things to get your attention.
23. Think about the kind of dad you want to be. Sure, it will take hard work. But love isn’t just about feeling good. It’s about doing what you don’t want to do, over and over again, if it needs to be done, for the sake of someone else. Love is really about self-sacrifice. (p. 76)
24. But genuine humility is the starting point for every other virtue. Humility means having a proper perspective on ourselves, of seeing ourselves as we really are. It also means knowing that every person has equal worth. (p. 77)
25. It [humility] helps us in the real world. Because we want our daughter to excel at everything they do, to be prettier, smarter, better than everyone else, we can confuse our priorities – and theirs.
26. Here is your chance to teach her one of life’s greatest lessons: people are valuable because they’re human, not because of what they do. (p. 80)
27. Talent, intellect, and beauty are wonderful things to have, but they will n ever make her life more meaningful or give her more significance as a woman. Only humility will. (p. 81)
28. God has filled your daughter with unimaginable gifts. Humility teaches her that these are in fact “gifts” for which she should be grateful, not proud. (p. 83)
29. Humility teaches us rules and self-restraint, that we’re part of a larger community and need to work together for the good of the whole. Humility teaches responsibility, and it teaches us to consider the needs of others. It tells us to look outward rather than focusing obsessively on ourselves, and it reminds us that we aren’t the only ones who count. (p. 87)
30. By far and away the most destructive lesson popular culture imbeds in our little girls’ minds is that they deserve more. (p. 89)
31. Do you want the center of the family’s life to be the children? Should it be you, or you and your wife, or God? (p. 91)
32. If you teach your daughter to be good rather than simply happy, she’ll become both. Teaching your daughter humility is wonderful gift. And it can be taught only by example. (p. 82)
33. You daughter needs you to hug her often. If you’re gentle, respectful, and loving, that’s what she will expect from boys. (p. 96)
34. When she is nine or ten, she will hear about oral sex, and learn how HIV and other STDs spread. Her friends will show her teen magazines. She’ll see Cosmo and Victoria’s Secret catalogs, full of women posing seductively in sheer bras, thongs, and stockings with garters. (p. 97)
35. You have to be your daughter’s protector and fight a culture that lies to her about sex and denies her right to modesty. (p. 98)
36. You need to decide what you want for your daughter and implement a plan to protect her. If you don’t, the testosterone-charged boys at her school will implement quite a different plan. (p. 116)
37. Model plan from page 116
a. Teach self-respect early
b. When she dates, sweep the garage
38. Popular culture trains our daughters for a life of promiscuity. Every model for Playboy is someone’s daughter. Don’t let it be yours. (p. 121)
39. If you hid things, so will her husband. You need to put your family first. And that means before your career as well. (p. 159)
40. Men, of course, are trained from the day the enter school to be career-oriented, and most men measure their career success and even their happiness in terms of money. We all like to believe that having more will make us happier. (p. 164)
41. Show her the truth that the most important part of our lives is our relationships with loved ones. Those relationships are the only avenue for deep joy and contentment. (p. 165)
42. Show her the love that puts family before material possessions. (p. 175)
43. You daughter needs a faith in God, because life will inevitably take her to a place where neither you nor anyone else can help. (p. 186)
44. Part of your job as her father is to teach her how to fail well. (p. 187)
45. Save your energy for the bigger issues that you absolutely need to focus on: honesty, integrity, courage, and humility. (p. 207)
46. You cannot normalize the bizarre and aberrant; you cannot allow your daughter to risk her future by not confronting her on issues of alcohol, sex, and drugs just because that ‘s the easy thing to do. (p. 209)
47. Your daughter needs to know your standards, because everyone else is trying to sell her theirs. (p. 209)
48. You don’t want your daughter heading off to school with the lace of her red bra peeking out from her unbuttoned white shirt. But our toxic popular culture will tell her that’s the thing to do. So you need to teach her otherwise, gently but firmly. Don’t make her feel bad about her desire to be attractive. Just affirm that modesty is attractive too – and more self-respecting. (p. 210)
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