The Father-Daughter Divide

Growing up, Melissa Shultz sometimes felt like she had two fathers. One version of her dad, she told me, was playful and quick to laugh. He was a compelling storyteller who helped shape her career as a writer, and he gave great bear hugs. He often bought her small gifts: a pink “princess” phone when she was a teen, toys for her sons when she became a mom. Some of their most intimate moments came when she cut his hair; it was, she said, “a way to be close without talking.” He was there for her in hard times, too. When her engagement ended, he helped pack her things and drove her home.

But she told me their relationship could also be turbulent. The other version of her father was “dark” and would “get so angry” that he seemed to lose control. He would freeze her out for months at a time if she challenged him. He’d call her names, even in front of her own kids. He died when she was in her 30s, and she grieved intensely, though she doubted whether they ever fully understood each other. Now in her 60s, Shultz told me she still mourns the relationship.

Shultz’s story may sound familiar to some other fathers and daughters. In the 1990s, the journalist Victoria Secunda wrote in her book Women and Their Fathers that “enriching attachments” between dads and daughters were “astonishingly rare.” 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.

At the root of the modern father-daughter divide seems to be a mismatch in expectations. Fathers, generally speaking, have for generations been less involved than mothers in their kids’ (and especially their daughters’) lives. But lots of children today expect more: more emotional support and more egalitarian treatment. Many fathers, though, appear to have struggled to adjust to their daughters’ expectations. The result isn’t a relationship that has suddenly ruptured so much as one that has failed to fully adapt.

While reporting this article, I spoke with a dozen college-educated women, most of whom told me that their bond with their father lacked depth: Their conversations stayed superficial and could feel awkward, and their dad hardly ever showed vulnerability. Several said they feared their father’s anger. Others told me they rarely hugged. Few regularly had one-on-one time with their dad.

According to some researchers, that lack of quality time together—particularly in childhood—is an acute factor straining father-daughter bonds. “Parenting time is closely related to the quality of your relationship with that parent,” Nielsen told me, and lots of fathers and daughters just don’t get enough of it. Women with kids younger than 6 spend, on average, about an hour more each day caring for their children than men do, according to the 2024 American Time Use Survey. And when dads do care for their kids, they have traditionally been found to devote more time to their boys: One 2012 study that looked at kids ages 8 and up found that in brother-sister pairs, sons spent more time with their dad than daughters did.

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As kids reach high school, the discrepancy in how much time dads spend with their sons versus their daughters balloons. The 2012 study found that by age 17, girls were averaging less than 30 minutes a week one-on-one with their dad, while boys got more than an hour; fathers and teen daughters hung out less than any other familial combination. Part of the time gap seems to stem from the fact that teen boys tend to want to spend more time with their dad, and teen girls largely gravitate toward their mom. But Will Glennon, a writer who interviewed hundreds of fathers for his 1995 book, Fathering, told me that many dads also distance themselves from their adolescent daughters. Most of the fathers he spoke with were uncomfortable watching their girls go through puberty. That stage felt volatile, and the dads had “no idea” what their daughters were dealing with—so they withdrew. This was a reaction that Glennon said he understood: He’d also struggled when his daughter was a teen.

For the nearly one-third of American children whose parents divorce, the time deficit can be especially profound. Only a third of those separations result in equal joint custody, and mothers are more likely to become the primary caregiver. Partly for this reason, 21 percent of U.S. children don’t live with their biological father, according to the Census Bureau. Of course, parental separation touches sons, too, but it can be particularly ruinous for father-daughter relationships. One 20-year study measured the quality of relationships between fathers and their adult children post-divorce and found that three times more daughters than sons felt that the bond had significantly deteriorated. Candace McCullough, a family therapist in Maryland, told me that in her practice, divorce and affairs are among the most serious factors harming father-daughter relationships.

For much of history, until women married they largely relied on their father for material support. The bond between them tended to be based on a sense of mutual duty, and daughters were expected to be deferential. That changed over the course of the 20th century. As more women attained higher education and achieved financial independence, the traditional basis for father-daughter relationships eroded.

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Today, children generally desire more closeness with both of their parents well into adulthood. But while many moms are prepared to provide the intimacy their children crave, the shake-up has caught lots of fathers off guard, Joshua Coleman, a psychologist specializing in family relationships, told me. He said that, based on his clinical experience, many fathers are ill-equipped to meet their kids’—and especially their daughters’—needs. “What generates closeness is another person’s vulnerability,” Coleman explained, and dads may not be ready for that. Niobe Way, an NYU professor who has extensively researched men and boys, told me that the disconnect may be rooted partly in how many modern fathers were brought up “in a context that was just so repressive” and “hypermasculine.” Daughters, she said, are generally “more free to express their feelings.”

Nearly all of the women I interviewed described a painful discordance with their dad. (Most asked to be identified by their first name only, to speak candidly about the relationship.) “I’m just like, ‘Show your emotions,’” Claire, a 43-year-old educator living in France, told me. Her mother died by suicide 20 years ago, she said, and she longs to talk about her with her father. She wonders whether he thinks about her mom. “I’ve never asked him,” she said. And he hasn’t asked her, either. Louise, a former doctor in her 40s living in England, also rarely sees her dad engage emotionally. He’ll “shut things down” if she tries to discuss his personal life. Min, a 29-year-old who grew up in South Korea but now lives in London, also told me that her dad rarely asks about her life; she’s unsure if he even knows how old she is or where she works. He instead focuses on supporting her with practical matters, such as whether she needs help transporting her luggage for a trip or whether she’s eaten. “He’s quite patriarchal; he’s very male-orientated,” she said, which she attributes in part to South Korean culture. She told me that their differences can lead to “cultural clashes”—a feeling many immigrant daughters may relate to.

Glennon told me that the dads he spoke with also felt disconnected from their adult daughters. He believes women cope with the lack of depth by brushing their father off—saying, “No, I can’t talk, I’ve got things to do.” That can leave dads confused and hurt, fueling the cycle.

For Nielsen, dad-daughter tension has an obvious solution: more quality time together. She acknowledged that communication styles can differ by gender, but she emphasized that, regardless of those differences, the more attention fathers and daughters devote to each other, the better the bond tends to be.

More fathers do seem to be changing their lifestyle to make time for their kids, daughters included. Modern dads, on average, do three times more child care than fathers in 1965 did. Some are fighting for better joint-custody laws. A growing number are forgoing paid work to stay at home. Nielsen told me that men are no less instinctively nurturing or empathetic than women; many lament the time they spend away from their kids.

Several of the daughters I spoke with were also carving out time for their father. They told me about planning annual daughter-dad road trips and going to counseling together. Shadi Shahnavaz, who has led several fathers and adult daughters in joint therapy sessions, told me that, in her experience, theirs are some of the quickest relationships to remedy.

Even between daughters and fathers whose dynamic has become intensely strained, Nielsen has argued that relationships can—and do—recover. For Melissa Shultz, healing came posthumously. In the decades since her father’s death, her anger toward him has softened. She still mourns what she “never had,” she told me, but she has come to empathize with him. “He had a lot of pain as a child, with his parents.”

For Joshua Coleman, who spent years estranged from his adult daughter, reconciliation came sooner. To rebuild trust, he told me, he learned to stop defending himself; he came to understand that demanding that his daughter respect his authority only drove her away. He saw a need to become more egalitarian and “soft.” When she was open to seeing him again, he let her set the pace. Slowly, he says, they found their way, not just to civility, but to something rarer: genuine closeness.

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