'I really feel I mucked it up': When dads and daughters disconnect
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They can teach practical skills too, like using a hammer and nail, changing a tyre and a light bulb, and setting up a tent. Mothers can of course also teach these skills, and do; the point is, they’re skills fathers routinely offer their sons, that they should replicate with their daughters. “You need to teach her the same sort of things that are important for your son,” parenting expert Maggie Dent says.
Briony Scott, principal of private Sydney girls’ school Wenona and mother of three adult daughters, is one of a dozen experts who recommend a regular father-daughter get-together, such as breakfast every second week, as a way of building a solid, independent bond. “You build the relationship as part of the ritual, and when life gets tough, as it invariably will, and they start to withdraw, you say, ‘Well, every second Friday, we are having breakfast.’ You keep the connection open,” she says. This also gives teen girls the top two requests they say they have of their fathers: firstly, to be afforded more time, and secondly, to really “be there” more.
Take 15-year-old Annie, whose father is an anaesthetist, a fact she announces without a hint of pride. “I’m in bed every night when he comes home from work, [and] we’ve got to be quiet on Saturdays because he needs to catch up on sleep, so I really only get to see him on Sundays.” She characterises her relationship with her father as more cordial than warm. She stops, and you can see she almost feels bad revealing this to her peers, sitting around a classroom table in a group interview, so she quickly explains that she wants for nothing. Family holidays are overseas. She has been skiing, on and off, since she was a tot. She was one of the first in her friendship group to get the new iPhone. But along the way, she feels as though she’s missed out, too. “We just don’t spend much time together,” she says.
Annie’s remarks are replicated dozens and dozens and dozens of times.
“Be there more,” Bronte says.
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