The father-daughter chasm

It is sad and true that enriching relationships between dads and daughters are "astonishingly rare". So wrote the journalist Victoria Secunda in 1991 in her book Women and Their Fathers.

In an article The Atlantic, Isabel Woodford explains, "Secunda had interviewed 150 daughters and 75 dads and found that most of the relationships they described were marked by “too much distance.” Two decades later, the psychologist Peggy Drexler wrote in her 2011 book Our Fathers, Ourselves, which drew on interviews with dozens of women, that daughters were prone to using the refrain 'I love my dad, but …' "

Evidence of a dad-daughter divide crops up in more recent research on families, too. Fathers and daughters are more likely to become estranged than other pairs within the nuclear family. According to a 2022 study of national longitudinal data, roughly 28 percent of women in the U.S. are estranged from their dad; that’s only slightly higher than the 24 percent of sons estranged from their father but significantly higher than the 6.3 percent of children of any gender estranged from their mother. Even in cases where contact isn’t completely cut off, father-daughter relationships tend to be less close than other familial bonds. In a 2010 study, adult daughters reported feeling less comfortable discussing personal issues with their father than they did with their mother, and relying on their dad for “instrumental support” rather than emotional care. Linda Nielsen, a professor at Wake Forest University who has studied father-daughter relationships for much of her career and written five books on the topic, has called it the weakest parent-child relationship. Of course, plenty of women have a close and loving relationship with their father. But the research is clear: Many do not.

This tension hurts both fathers and daughters. Women’s bond with their dad may be linked to the quality of their mental health and romantic relationships, Nielsen wrote in Father-Daughter Relationships. And, as one 2023 study shows, parents (and especially fathers) who were in regular contact with their adult kids were, on average, more satisfied with their lives. Dads and daughters who grow apart speak of immense pain. Each craves closeness, but neither side seems sure how to get there.

This 2022 study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, underscores the matter by finding that "26 percent of respondents report estrangement from fathers." For mothers, it's 6%. Fathers and daughters have a lot of work to do.

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