The World According To Meeker

By Patrick Sullivan | April 1, 2017

She’s a best-selling author and hosts one of the world’s top parenting podcasts. She was name-checked by Donald Trump in the lead-up to the presidential election. And she’s a practicing pediatrician right here in Traverse City.

Dr. Meg Meeker might not be a household name to some, but she’s cultivated lots of noterity since she published her first book in 2004. She writes from a conservative perspective about topics such as teen sex and parenting.

She’s got a new book coming out next month called "Hero – Being the Strong Father Your Children Need." Northern Express sat down to talk to Meeker about how she traded her experience as a doctor to become a national figure.

Northern Express: What is your background and how did you end up in Traverse City
Dr. Meg Meeker: My husband and I went to medical school together in the ‘80s. He is an internist and a pediatrician and I’m straight pediatrician, and when we finished our training we knew we wanted to work together and we were living outside of Boston and at that time that wasn’t a good climate for opening a private practice where we could be in control. There were a lot of huge groups and HMOs. So my husband had always come to Lake Leelanau as a kid vacationing, because he’s from Ohio. And he said, “You know? There’s an opportunity to come and look at a private practice in Traverse City.” I grew up outside of Boston and I’d never even been to Michigan; I didn’t know anything north of Ann Arbor. So we came and looked and we found an opportunity to set up a private practice. So in 1990, I came here thinking, “We’ll be here a year, this will be great, and then we’ll go back to New England,” and we never went back. So that’s how that happened. Really because we wanted to work together. 

Express: And it turned out to be a good place to raise your family.
Meeker: Yeah, yeah, it was great. We started out at the Milliken Medical building, doing pediatrics upstairs and he did internal medicine downstairs, and we had small kids. And we grew and grew and eventually, now we have seven doctors, two of whom are straight pediatricians and the others are double-boarded, internal medicine and pediatrics.

Express: And then around 2004 you decided to write a book and you chose to focus on the dangers of teenage sex. What made you want to write a book and what prompted you to take on that subject?
Meeker: Well, I’ll tell you what. I never really set out to write or anything like that, but our girls were young in the ‘90s, late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and I just didn’t like the over-sexualization of kids that I was seeing in the media. You know, little kids. And I thought, this isn’t okay. Somebody’s got to speak out against that, that sex isn’t for kids and back off. So I just started to do a lot of medical research on what the dangers of it were. I said, “Why isn’t anybody telling kids this?” And so that’s sort of morphed into a book, and that sort of threw me into the national spotlight, and I just kept on writing. I sort of turned away from that subject and just started writing more general parenting books.

Express: You’ve got three daughters and one son. Do you think your perspective would be much different if you had three sons and one daughter?
Meeker: You know, no one has asked me that question. I would love to say, “I hope so.” But I would honestly sort of say, it probably would have come later, because here’s what I feel: I think that the pressure on boys is equal to the pressure on girls, but what I see in the media is the over-sexualization of girls through clothing. Like if you pick out clothing for girls from the time that they’re six years old and older, it’s very different. You know, you get midriffs, you get the low-riding pants, and you get the little bikinis. And you don’t see that in boys’ clothing as much. It’s easily recognizable in girls. So it probably would have come but it would have come later.

Express: I understand that although you take a Catholic perspective, your position on teenage sex is based on health, not religion?
Meeker: Very much so, yes. Because what I do as a physician, I’m trained to sort of look at what the medical research shows and then just bring the medical research out. And my belief has always been, the parents are in charge of their kids. So my role is to give information and knowledge to parents and then let them go. And I know that some pediatricians will sort of come in and say, “I think you should do this; I think you should that,” and sort of treat the kids like the parents don’t know what they’re talking about. But I tend not to do that. I tend to really support parents in their job as a parent and then just give information. And then whatever they decide is their decision. I honor that. For instance, I see a lot of parents who chose not to immunize their kids. Now, a lot of pediatricians will say, “We’re not going to do that.” But I say, “You know what, you’re the parents. Now I can tell you what the research shows and why it’s good for you to immunize your kids, but if you chose as a parent not to do that, I honor your decision as a parent.” So that’s kind of my approach.

Express: When you take your message directly to teens – like you’ve talked to students at Interlochen Center for the Arts – how do they receive your message
Meeker: Very well. I will tell you something very odd. I love talking to teenagers about sex and it is fun. From what I’ve watched of how the kids respond, they enjoy it. And here’s kind of my approach: My approach is never to go in and say, “Sex is bad. You shouldn’t have sex. Sex is terrible. What’s wrong with you kids? Wait until you’re older.” I say, “Look, here is the thing,” and I said this at Interlochen because there are a number of students who are struggling with their sexual identity, this kind of thing. I said, “You feel a lot of pressure to sort of stamp yourself as this or this or this. But I want you to sort of back off from that, give yourself time, and look at yourself as Rachel or Johnathan or Jose whatever, and take a deep breath and give yourself time, don’t feel the pressure.” And then I said, “And I will tell you, no matter what you say, if you’re 15 or 16, and your body is wired for sexual activity, for say, 60 years, so you die at age 76, what you chose to do, the decisions you make in the next five to 10 years are going to have a big impact on the rest of the 50 years, so here’s what I need you to know, and here’s how I want you to take charge…” And I do a lot of the same things with the kids: I give them information and I say, “No matter who you are and what you say your orientation is, it’s not healthy for you from a psychological standpoint and from a physical standpoint to engage in a lot of partners now at 16, so here’s my recommendation now that you wait.”

Express: What is your position on homosexuality; what do you tell teens about that?
Meeker:  As a physician, my job is to take care of every teen I encounter- whether in my practice or outside my practice. So, I treat gay teens exactly how I treat straight teens. I tell them that being sexually active with multiple partners is dangerous- emotionally and physically. As I talk with teens about sex, I try hard to talk to them about the emotional issues attached to it. I have found that kids engage in sex for many different reasons so I always try to help them focus on positive aspects of their relationships- like intimacy for instance. I try to talk to them on a deeper level than just how many partners they have, etc. I ask probing questions to help them think through important behaviors like sex. The bottom line is this: I care about every teen who comes through my door.

Express: Your biggest book so far was "Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters." Where did the inspiration for that come from?
Meeker: Well, my publisher just said there’s never been a father-daughter book out there and I said, “Oh, that would be fun. I’ll write about fathers and daughters.” I really wrote that because one of the things I’ve seen over the years is that daughters who have fathers who are regularly engaged with them tended to do better. Because I’ve taken care of kids with eating disorders and anxiety and depression, all sorts of things – unloved teenagers. And I started to do some research, and I was really discouraged that there wasn’t much research on dads out there. It was like seven-to-one was the ratio of research done on mothers’ impact on their kids but not on fathers and their impact on their kids. And I thought, well, what’s with that? Because fathers are very important. And I just wrote the book and kind of forgot about it and a few months went by and I started to get a lot of letters and emails from dads saying, “Thank you for saying something nice about us.” And I thought, “Woe.” What I found was a lot of fathers – good dads – felt sort of pushed to the side, they felt kind of put down. A lot of divorced dads felt they’d been estranged from their kids, their daughters, so I thought this is a real problem, because dads are really important in their kid’s lives. So that’s how I got involved in “dad writing.” I didn’t chose it. It just sort of happened.

Express: Despite becoming a national figure on parenting, I understand you’re still a practicing pediatrician in Traverse City. With everything you’ve got going on, why do you keep that up?
Meeker: Because I love my patients. I can’t give them up. That’s it. That’s the heart and soul of what I do, being in a closed room with a hurting kid and helping him and helping his parents. And so, many times, I’ve thought, I can’t do this anymore. I don’t have time. But I just really love my patients. And their parents. Like that boy – I can’t walk away. I have also the luxury, because my primary job is writing and speaking, of being able to spend more time with my patients, and I like that. But I’m in a very unique position.

Express: I see that you wrote a column last May for Breitbart News about how Donald Trump was a good father to Ivanka Trump and what that means about his relationship with women [Meeker even got a personal thank you from Trump on his Facebook page]. Since that time, we’ve learned more about Trump’s relationships with women. Have you reconsidered your position?
Meeker: Well, okay, here’s the thing: Nobody really put out my take. My take was this: I had a book, my "Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters" book, and we wrote a devotional, a Christian devotional, to accompany the book, and that came out in May of last year. And we were doing PR and I had written an article, and this is when the firestorm was going. And I was trying to say, regardless of what you say about Obama, or regardless of what you say about Trump, here’s the good things you can say. It appears to me that Obama was a very good dad. I think that. I don’t know the man. It appears to me that Trump was a good father, because regardless of what you think about him politically, he appears to be a good father. I was writing at that time about fathers and daughters. And then what happened is, the article ran and I got on Fox News about something and they said, “Oh, so you support Donald Trump for president?” And I said, “Well, I didn’t say that.” I said, “From all rights it looks like he was a good father.” I was trying to pull it out of the political firestorm and just talk about something above it, but I really wasn’t allowed to go there. So that was that. And then that all really died down and went away. Most people who do what I’m doing try not to go political because politics and medicine are not a good mix, so I always try to stay away.

Express: Tell us about your podcast. You record that in Nashville?
Meeker: I go to Nashville because, I don’t know if you know who Dave Ramsey is, he has a radio program called the Dave Ramsey Show. So here’s how I get looped into a lot of sort of funny stuff: When my father-daughter book came out 10 years ago, he read the book and he has an enormous radio show. So he went on the air and told all of his listeners to read this book. I went down and I did an interview and we became friends and he essentially said to me, “Come and record all your podcasts here. I have great producers. I have great people.” So I go to Nashville and I use his studio out of his kindness and I record probably six or eight podcasts at a time. And our podcast is huge – it’s global. We have done probably 25, it’s about a year old, we’re number one in parenting and we’ve had over 150,000 downloads and we’re in over 140 countries. It’s phenomenal. Because again, I talk to parents as parents. I talk to the parent’s heart. And I find that if you just sort of stay there, all parents want their kids to do well. All parents want to be close to their kid. All parents want their kids to be safe. All parents want to be the best parents that they can be. My job is to help the parent parent their child as well as they can.