Fathers, Your Daughters Need You

My father remembers when my sisters—his two daughters—were small and loved wearing “colorful, sparkly things.” The sheer delight they took in their silly, clashing outfits made of crowns and tutus and necklaces touched him then and stays with him now, some 30 years later.

“They knew nothing of good taste. They sometimes made themselves look ridiculous,” Michael told The Epoch Times. “But they had the unadulterated joy of being a princess. I felt like it was my job—an easy job—to affirm them in that sense of worth.”

He added, “I think fathers can do that for their daughters, not just when they are dressed in crazy costumes, but always, and especially when life gets hard, as it certainly will at some point.”

This admiration and quiet affirmation is one of the most important gifts a father can bestow on his daughter.

“Little girls who are admired by their fathers take more risks, they are more adventurous, they have more confidence out in the world,” Erica Komisar, a psychoanalyst, parenting coach, and author, said in an interview with The Epoch Times. “As a father, you have a lot of power in your admiration.”

Girls who grow up without the steady, affirming presence of a father suffer many adverse effects. It’s a tragic and tired litany at this point, the statistics related to fatherlessness: Women who grow up in a home without a father are seven times more likely to become pregnant as a teen, twice as likely to drop out of school, and twice as likely to suffer from obesity.

“The research is overwhelming,” Ray Guarendi, a clinical psychologist, parenting expert, and author, told The Epoch Times. “A loving, committed mother and father in a relationship is the best way to raise a kid.”

This arrangement leads to better outcomes on all sorts of measures, according to Guarendi, including less depression, anxiety, drug use, and alcoholism, as well as better educational achievement, self-image, and social relationships.

A Father’s Example

As we’re coming to understand better with more time and research, involved fathers give their daughters something irreplaceable that sets them up for successful lives.

Among a father’s most important roles is the way he models healthy masculine behavior and healthy male–female relationships for his daughters.

“A dad can show his daughters how a good man treats his wife,” Guarendi said. “You can take it a step further: only dads can show a daughter how a guy, a good guy, treats women.” The father’s caring, respectful, loving, and protective demeanor toward the little girl and her mother drafts important blueprints in the girl’s mind and heart. Not only does she feel safe and secure, but she also develops healthy expectations for later relationships.

Addressing himself directly to fathers, Dr. William Sears, a pediatrician and author of many parenting books, said in an interview with The Epoch Times: “Model manhood. You’re modeling the husband you want them to pick.”

If your daughter ends up saying, “I want to marry a man like the one Mom married,” that’s a success, according to Sears.

In a healthy family, a little girl’s first love is her father. Komisar explained that fathers become the love objects—the recipients of a girl’s interest in and idea of maleness—at about age 3. This is an important step in the little girl’s development as she begins to separate from her mother. This initial movement from mother to father becomes, in Komisar’s words, “a model for future trusting, loving, intimate romantic relationships.”

But Dad doesn’t provide only a model of male–female relationships. He also plays an important role in teaching children—both girls and boys—how to regulate certain emotions and behaviors.

“[Fathers] help to regulate aggression, excitement, risk-taking behaviors, [and] impulsivity, and, on the positive side, they encourage things like calculated risk-taking,” Komisar said. “They encourage separation, they encourage resilience.”

This dimension of the father’s influence contrasts and balances with the mother’s role as empathetic nurturer. Babies and children need to be soothed, but they also need rough-and-tumble play, which fathers provide. The physical play often initiated by fathers is crucial to child development—it teaches the rudiments of adaptability, resilience, and problem-solving.

“There’s something about that father relationship that helps [little girls] to feel that they can spread their wings out in the world and kind of fly,” Komisar said.

She went on to explain that dads produce a lot of a hormone called vasopressin.

“Mothers and fathers both produce vasopressin, but fathers produce more of it. We call it the protective aggressive hormone, which fuels a lot of the ways that fathers play with children,” she said.

Fathers and mothers both produce oxytocin, the bonding hormone, as well—but in mothers it leads to sensitive empathic nurturing, while in fathers it leads to playful tactile stimulation, which is important for child development and resilience.

So fathers help excite their offspring in a healthy way while boosting their confidence and resilience—but they also help prevent that rambunctiousness from getting out of hand. This is where the regulation of aggression and risk-taking comes into play.

The Cost of Fatherlessness

A lesson from the African savanna also applies in our living rooms. Researchers from the University of Exeter found that when older male elephants were removed from the herd, the adolescents grew more aggressive and fearful toward non-elephant targets such as vehicles, livestock, and other species. Conversely, the presence of mature males tended to calm and stabilize everyone in the social group. (The study was conducted on all-male groups of elephants, but the core principle stands regardless.) Similarly, nothing can replace the steadying, calming influence of a reliable male figure in a social group or family.

For all these reasons and more, a missing or abusive father leaves a hole in a little girl’s life. However, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be filled by a substitute father figure. Fatherhood is much more than just biological parenthood. An upstanding, trustworthy man can become a father figure to a girl through his love and commitment to her well-being.

“If the father can’t or doesn’t want to be involved, then you need to find a father figure for your daughter,” Komisar said, “so she grows up with a loving, benevolent, consistent, dependable, responsible, reliable, admiring, sensitive, empathic father.”

Guarendi agreed: “She needs to see what a good man looks like. If she doesn’t see her own dad doing this, and she has an image of men through her dad, who’s a flawed guy, she at least can look at this big brother, or she can look at this uncle, or this grandpa, and say how different, how much more admirable.”

It’s a real mistake, according to Komisar, for a father (or father figure) to think that his daughter doesn’t need him because she’s female. Her father’s involvement can take many forms. Fathers shouldn’t hesitate to jump in and take part, even if little girl play doesn’t come naturally to him.

“Sitting and having a tea party with your daughter is a very lovely thing for fathers to do. Just going out and kicking a soccer ball is [as well],” she said. “Not enough involvement is probably one of the biggest mistakes [a father can make].”

Fostering Happy, Healthy ‘Daddy’s Girls’

How can fathers avoid this mistake? Cultivate a close, affectionate, respectful relationship with the daughter from the very beginning. Sears recommended daddy-daughter dates.

“My one daughter showed me a picture she looks at every day of me putting a nice rose on her dress before we had a daddy-daughter date,” Sears recalled.

The time Sears put in when his daughters were little created a deep bond and delightful memories. It shows little girls that their fathers love them and want to spend time with them. To this day, Sears goes dancing with his daughters every week.

Guarendi also advocates for clearly demonstrating your affection as a father. Affection, protection, and discipline form a powerful triple bond in the father-daughter relationship. Ultimately, all these factors provide young girls with a sense of security and stability that only a father can provide.

According to Guarendi, daughters need to know that they can approach their father and talk to him about anything without fear that he will yell, lose patience, or stop loving her. This doesn’t mean that a father has no standards, or that he doesn’t discipline misbehavior. But it does mean that he’s always ready to listen. He is, in Sears’s words, “always on call” for his daughters, no matter what.

In addition to this confidence in her ability to speak to her father, a daughter should be assured of another fact: There’s nothing she can do to make her father stop loving her.

According to Guarendi, fathers should tell their daughters: “I will always protect you. I will be here and protect you emotionally, spiritually, physically. You may not want that all the time, but I want you to look at me as the one person in your life that you can count on.”

A Daughter Is a Gift

What greater joy can there be for a man than this: to be the one on whom others can rely, even in the darkest and most storm-tossed times? Despite his flaws, a father gets a couple of decades to be his daughter’s hero. He can be her pillar of strength. That’s what most men’s hearts long for.

Thus far, we’ve discussed mainly what daughters receive from their fathers. But, of course, fathers receive so much from their daughters, too. When Michael reflected on the decades he got to spend with his girls, he summed it up by saying that all the glowing memories “tend to blur in memory into an endless string of gift.”

Daughters are a gift, a joy, and a privilege for their dads. There’s a special purity and simplicity in the love between a dad and his daughter.

It’s crucial that men rediscover the gift of fathering daughters. In that vocation, men have more power for good than perhaps they realize.

“Especially nowadays, the depression, anxiety, and all the family stuff is highest in history, especially among young ladies and girls,” Sears said. “We need fathers to step up to the plate and hit home runs for their daughters. Don’t be a distant dad.”

As Michael said after years of parenting: “Only fathers can give their daughters the love of a father. It’s that simple. … The love of a father, or the lack thereof, sets the tone, perhaps for life, of his daughter’s perception of the masculine nature.”

This is a man’s challenge and his privilege.