What Every Dad Should Know about Raising Little Girls

How Fathers Mold Their Daughters

Daughters learn from their fathers much of how they treat and respond to men. Dr. Linda Nielsen, author of the book Embracing Your Father: Building the Relationship You Want with Your Dad, has identified several specific areas in which fathers typically have an equal or greater effect on their daughters' lives than mothers:

• Creating a loving, trusting relationship with a man
• Expressing anger comfortably and appropriately—especially with men
• Dealing well with people in authority
• Being self-confident and self-reliant
• Maintaining good mental health (e.g., the absence of clinical depression, eating disorders, or chronic anxiety)

Dr. Nielsen's claims correspond with the findings of Dr. Barry Ellis, a psychologist at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. After interviews and observation involving several hundred girls over many years in both the US and New Zealand, Ellis found that the absence of a biological father correlated significantly with young girls' sexual behavior, including the incidence of teenage pregnancy. While a father's absence doesn't directly cause a girl to act out sexually, it does appear to contribute to such behavior more significantly, according to Ellis's data, than temperament, personality, and even socio-cultural and economic factors.

In a related study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Ellis found that the age of puberty in girls corresponded significantly with the presence of the biological father: girls who interacted infrequently with their fathers entered puberty earlier than those whose fathers were consistently present. While a few theories involving pheromones have been formulated to explain this phenomenon, the bottom line is that fathers do significantly affect their daughters' social and sexual identity—even at the biochemical level.

Getting Involved

An exasperated Freud famously asked, "What do women want?" For a father, knowing how his daughter would answer the question (and the answer may change daily) is a strong indicator of the quality of his influence in her life. One measurement is the self-directed questionnaire "How Well Am I Doing as My Daughter's Father?" from the national organization Dads and Daughters. Dads answer 30 questions, the first five of which are as follows:

• I can name her three best friends
• I know my daughter's goals
• I'm physically active with my daughter
• I make dinner for my family
• I comment on my wife/partner's weight