What Girl Dads Should Know

by Alexander Tidd

My four-year-old son asked me yesterday if dinosaurs could swim. We were lying on his bedroom floor building a Lego spaceship that had somehow morphed into an underwater research station, because that's how his mind works—pure associative chaos that I'm privileged to witness. I answered his question. He told me about a dream he had. We built in comfortable silence for a while.

I recently read The Atlantic's recent piece on the father-daughter divide, causing some reflection on my part. Did you know 28 percent of American women are estranged from their fathers? I didn’t. By age seventeen, girls average less than thirty minutes per week one-on-one with their dads, just half what boys typically get. This adds up to the weakest parent-child relationship combination, one researcher calls it.

It’s hard not to wonder if I might I have screwed this up if I’d had a daughter instead of a son.

The Uncomfortable Math

The research is brutal in its clarity. Fathers traditionally spend more time with sons than daughters. We're more comfortable with boys. We understand their world because it was ours. When adolescence hits and daughters start navigating puberty and emotional complexity, many dads take a step back and defer to mom. We don't know what to do with the volatility, so we back away and default to "instrumental support." Help with luggage. Asking if they've eaten. Never asking how they actually are.

I'd like to think I'd be different. That my generation of fathers, raised with at least some permission to have feelings, would navigate a daughter's emotional landscape better than our fathers did. But the data suggests otherwise. The estrangement rates haven't improved. The time deficits persist. Whatever progress we've made in involved fatherhood seems to benefit sons more than daughters.

The Atlantic piece describes daughters desperate for emotional vulnerability from fathers who simply can't provide it. Conversations stay superficial, and dads often shut down discussion of their personal lives. Women in their forties still wonder if their father even knows where they work or how old they are. Not because these men are cruel or indifferent, but because they're operating from a playbook that never included emotional intimacy with daughters.

What Boys Get (And What They're Missing)

With my son, emotional connection feels easier. When he's upset, I have a better idea of how to comfort him because I remember being a small boy who was upset. When he wants to roughhouse, I am down. When he's obsessed with construction vehicles or dinosaurs or whatever captures his imagination this week, I can follow him there without much effort.

But here's what the father-daughter research reveals that applies equally to sons: vulnerability is what generates closeness. Not shared interests or even quality time, necessarily. Vulnerability. The willingness to be seen as fully human, with doubts and fears and emotions that aren't just anger or pride.

If I'm not practicing that with my son now, if I'm defaulting to the same instrumental support, the same emotional distance that strains father-daughter relationships, I'm setting us up for the same painful discordance those women described. The same "I love my dad, but..." that became a generational refrain.

The difference is that with a son, I might get away with it longer. Boys are socialized to accept emotional distance from fathers as normal. We call it masculine bonding. We frame it as respect. But it's still distance, still a relationship built on duty and shared activities rather than genuine emotional intimacy.

The Real Lesson for All Fathers

What strikes me most about the father-daughter divide isn't that it's uniquely terrible for daughters, though the statistics suggest it is. It's that the same dynamics that destroy father-daughter relationships damage father-son relationships too. We just don't notice as much because sons are trained not to expect emotional vulnerability from their fathers.

The Atlantic piece describes fathers who can't discuss their feelings, who shut down conversations about their personal lives, who show up with practical help but never emotional support.

My son will eventually be a teenager. If I haven't figured out how to be emotionally present by then, if I withdraw when things get complicated or uncomfortable, I'll lose him the same way those fathers lost their daughters. Maybe not legally estranged, but functionally distant.

The advantage I have is that the estrangement happens more slowly. More quietly. Sons are less likely to name it, less likely to demand more, more willing to accept whatever version of fatherhood we're capable of providing. Which means we can coast on inadequacy longer before the bill comes due.

If I had a daughter, I'd be forced to confront my emotional limitations immediately. The research makes clear that girls expect more vulnerability, more emotional engagement, more actual intimacy. They're "more free to express their feelings," as one researcher put it, which means they're also more free to recognize when their father can't reciprocate.

With my son, I have the illusion that what I'm doing is enough. That building Lego spaceships and answering questions about dinosaurs and roughhousing before bedtime constitutes a close relationship. And maybe for now it does. He's four. His needs are simpler.

But in ten years? Fifteen? When he's navigating the complexity of adolescence and early adulthood and needs a father who can actually be emotionally present rather than just instrumentally supportive?

The father-daughter divide isn't really about daughters, but fathers who were raised in emotional poverty and never learned how to be vulnerable with anyone, let alone their children. It seems daughters just notice it sooner and demand better. Sons often don't realize what they're missing until it's too late.

Reading how those women mourned relationships with fathers who couldn't show up emotionally, I recognized the warning. The time deficit starts early. By age seventeen, it's often too late. Which means the work has to happen now, while he's still asking about dinosaurs and building imaginary underwater research stations and assuming I'll always be available for whatever weird conversational tangent his brain generates.

He deserves a father who can be vulnerable. Who can talk about feelings without shutting down. Who won't withdraw when things get complicated or uncomfortable. Not because he's a boy or because boys need that less than girls—they don't—but because that's what actual intimacy requires.

Twenty-eight percent of daughters estranged from their fathers. That's the visible cost of emotional distance. How many father-son relationships are functionally estranged but nobody notices because we've normalized masculine emotional repression?

I don't know if I would have been a good father to a daughter. But I’ll try to do my best with my son.