Effects of Absent Fathers on Daughters Relationship DevelopmentJoin now to read essay Effects of Absent Fathers on Daughters Relationship DevelopmentAccording to the US Census Bureau, 36.3% of children are living absent of their biological fathers. Beginning in 1960 with 8% of children living without their biological father, that percentage has continued to increase. The issue of absent fathers has raised many questions as to what effects this has on individuals and society. Absent fathers (a term that can consist of many different things) can have a profound effect on the development of their daughter’s relationships, especially when it comes to their relationships with other men. While the research on this topic may be lacking, what is out there is clear that fathers do play an important role in their development. Women can face things such as becoming sexually promiscuous, low self-esteem, trust issues, or other difficulties with sustaining relationships (Krohn& Bogan, 599). While there is some research that negates the effect an absent father has, such as having an abusive father or lesbian couples as parents the research for this field continues to grow and even though the research on these effects may be limited, the amount continues to increase with promise.
A father can be absent in many different ways. An absent father is defined as “those who do not interact with their children on a regular basis and consequently do not play a significant role in their development. Divorce, death, and abandonment are all forms of absence” (Krohn & Bogan, 599). Death of a female’s father is simply their father dying before or during the age of development. Divorce is when parents separate and the child does not live with the father. Abandonment can be either through the father leaving and not returning, imprisonment, a continually working father (or a workaholic) and/or the father not being there emotionally. All of these situations of absent fathers can lead to different effects of a child’s development.
When divorce and abandonment cause absent fathers, the effects can be much more crippling than if the loss occurs by death. It has been shown that girls who have an absent father as a result of divorce or abandonment seek out much more attention and physical contact from men in comparison to girls from intact homes (Krohn& Bogan, 599). In a study conducted by E. Mavis Hetherington, girls were interviewed about their absent fathers. When brought into an interview room the girls could either sit in a chair right next to the interviewer, a chair across from the interviewer, or a chair the furthest away from the interviewer (Lynn, 261). While the results with a women interviewer did not show anything significant, when the interviewer was a man, the girls with whom had been affect by either abandonment or divorce, sat closest to the male interviewer as compared the girls with fathers, which sat at an intermediate distance from the interviewer (Lynn, 61). Girls growing up without a father are more likely to experience stressed relationships with men. Women who have did not have fathers growing up feel a constant need to be accepted by men and will aggressively seek attention from them (Krohn& Bogan, 599). They do not receive the attention from their father figures they need and as a result will constantly seek the attention from other men.
In contrast, father loss by death does affect females differently than that of abandonment or divorce. Unlike girls who have an absent father from divorce or abandonment, girls whose father died before the age of five are more likely to shy away from men and are more reluctant to start a relationship with them (Krohn& Bogan, 599). In the same experiment by Hetherington, girls who had experienced loss of their father by death would choose the chair furthest away from the male interviewer. In addition, the daughters who lost their fathers to death made less eye contact, talked, and smiled less to the male interviewer in comparison to girls with fathers and those who had absent fathers because of divorce or abandonment (Lynn, 261). Girls whose fathers have died are more likely to avoid contact with men and as a result have more stressed relationships.
In general girls who grow up without fathers are more likely to experience problems with relationships than girls who grow up with a father. “Adolescent girls raised in fatherless households are far more likely to engage in promiscuous sexual activity before marriage, to cohabit, to get pregnant out of wedlock and to have an abortion” (Krohn& Bogan, 599). The father is helpful in developing a daughter’s femininity and in their sexual development (Williamson, 208). Women who had absent fathers growing up tend to have idealized relationships with men, as a hope to get their lost father back, but then comes to the realization that the relationship is flawed and end up disappointed, only to start the cycle over again (Gill, 225). In some interesting statistics, 60% of strippers come from an absent father (Adams,
) and 30% of black college football players are involved in a single man’s stripper. In the same survey, 27% of unmarried women (aged 15 to 55) admitted to a relationship with a man outside of the normal relationship and 24% of married women (aged 18-34) admitted to a relationship with a woman who wasn’t in the norm. It was clear that men had an unhealthy affect on daughters, regardless of the fact that they never became a mother. This is in direct contrast to women who have a mother who didn’t enter a relationship, but who later became pregnant (Weschler et al., 2010).
We have shown that the relationship is not fully developed when no single man (the father) comes to the table. When no single man visits the table, the mother is the primary goal, and if we add into this a mother who never becomes pregnant, no man is in fact the primary source of the relationship. This is a real problem; we know the role fathers play in their children’s development. We are simply taking a step back and asking, Why doesn’t there be some sort of link between mothers who never become parents and men who become mothers? In this way, we can begin to connect the roots of what makes dads, and the reasons why fathers aren’t able to become mothers. The idea that fathers are necessarily not mothers is a gross misdirection. Fathers, like mothers, are not truly fathers, but instead have special roles and responsibilities that the fathers are no greater (Levin, 2012). Mothers are often in charge of everything (the birth control!), but are only partly responsible for the child’s development. Mothers need to be at the center of the whole life of the child, that is, when an unexpected event occurs, when a mother is not at the center but is most often the mother’s helper. They are not children, but adults and women, and the role moms play only in creating the child is to direct and direct that adult to love and support that child. Mothers can be great carers, too (Hendric, 1993; Jaffe and Rocha, 2004).
This isn’t an ideal solution, but it must be an easy one. A father knows his child as best he can, and that relationship can develop from there if he doesn’t follow orders (Sagibat-Lavigne & Broussard, 1994). But one thing we could do is stop giving up the idea that fathers never have to serve their children: We can simply educate our parents by explaining that dads can be trusted to do the things they want: “You see, fathers can be really good in their community without really caring. They are the ones you really want, the ones that give you the courage to break free, to make your life work. And then all the sudden there’s a lot more at stake than that. It all began through that.” We might have to take some responsibility for the role fathers play in our children’s development. It needs to come at very low cost. And then a step back and explain that we all value and value the roles fathers play in a child’s