Father - daughter relationship
Why is there often hostility and resentment?
"I was daddy's nock until I was about twelve years old. He called me his princess. We were very close to each other and I knew I was your favourite. But now we are no longer talking to each other and he spends all his time criticising me"!
I feel it many times a year from haunted daughters, angry daughters, confused daughters about the way things have changed, daughters who want to be loved.
The relations between father and daughter are delicate and sometimes block each other. Something seems to happen when a daughter arrives at her twelfth or thirteenth birthday, something that none of them understands enough.
I feel sad for both. On the one hand, the poor daughter does not understand what she may have done wrong. She is facing the difficult task of growing up, facing friends and boys, the cycle, courses and sports and Facebook and a body that continues to change.... It's a full-time job and she is doing her best, but it seems that somehow she has become a disappointment for her father, criticized by him for her clothes (too sexy), her friends (too much), her interests (too few, her ambitions (too vague).
Daughters are not the only ones fighting. Fathers have to endure their own disillusionment with a daughter who once seemed perfect, but now turns out to have limits, who makes mistakes, who sometimes can be superficial and even cruel. Fathers have to endure when, in an appropriate way, she begins to discuss, letting fathers feel they are not more important, that their advice is seemingly stupid and wrong now, that being protective is not absolutely necessary and that a pampering would be quite out of place. Rejection hurts.
I think it's important for fathers to take their "punishment": it's not as personal as you might think. Daughters don't stop needing their fathers, but they need them differently. They need fathers to be there, strong but also listen and trust. They need them to understand that things are changing, that things must change and they need their fathers to be happy with it. Above all they need them to realize that not always everything revolves around them.
