lil - I never would have expected the papers to have caught anyone's attention, but I suppose I haven't considered the community. For context, my daughter is 8 and lives with her mother a couple of hours away. My relationship with her mother (my ex-wife) is quite stable and she has re-married. I started with 'Turning Points of Closeness in the Father/Daughter Relationship' as it was the primary paper recommended to me and makes references to a great number others. I came away from this one with their primary finding, on both sides of the relationship, in my mind - 'the participation in activities together.' They weighed pretty heavily on sports, but i was buoyed by several of the daughter's comments about travel, something I do considerably more than sports. Much of the rest of the paper felt a few years off for me - middle school, university, marriage - but still interesting. I then switched over to 'The relationship between fatherly affirmation and a woman's self-esteem, fear of intimacy, comfort with womanhood and comfort with sexuality' because while my daughter isn't necessarily at these points in her life, they are something very important to me for her future state. My interaction with those women closest to me marks this one high on the list. That said, the major of the paper's results sort of went over my head. In the end, they proved the critical bits (to me?) of their hypothesis, in that, yep, father's count on the self-esteem and fear of intimacy scales. I've printed off and still need to read 'Divorced Fathers and Their Daughters: A Review of Recent Research'. I think I came onto this one from the references in the first paper. There were a couple of others I was interested in, but they are behind pay-walls and I haven't decided if I want to pony up just yet. Anyway... thanks for the interest... hope it wasn't too horrible a wall of text...
Thanks for these. I read the first one just now and will read the others as well. I agree with the assertion that the father daughter dyad is an important one and is under-appreciated. I treasure it. My daughter is 5.
It's amazing watching her grow up, isn't it? My daughter has introduced my partner and me to bird-watching! We laugh that we've got an old people hobby together, but my daughter was so enthralled by the bird exhibit in the Field Museum (and she's always said she likes birds) that we couldn't help but encourage. It's so amazing to see her personality form and to be able to converse with her on actual mostly-adult subjects.
I've just started into the 3rd paper, and it's a heartbreaking list of findings upon findings... "Whereas only 10% of college students with married parents wondered if their father loved them, more than 30% of those with divorced parents felt this way." "Receiving too little fathering also leads to more troubled, more unstable romantic relationships later in the daughter's life." I'll be going over this one for a bit... so many references, I might be at the precipice of quite the rabbit hole...
Oh, by far. I reflect on these statistics and compare them to myself, my partner and my sister. I and my partner came from phenomenally similar, un-divorced households, but our parents were not those to share emotions. I wonder just how much these statistics reflect our own status versus those of divorced parents... All this said, I'm looking at this 3rd paper as an interesting reflection of our state of divorce, wherein a vast majority of the time the mother is the de-facto custodian, leaving the father in the challenging position to make sure they are spending time with the children. But speaking of rabbit holes...