Daughters With A Close Bond To Their Fathers Are More Resilient And Less Likely To Feel Lonely

Mike Buchanan, J4MB: A piece by Greg Hurst, Social Affairs Editor, in today’s Times:

Every daddy’s girl knows that being the apple of his eye has its benefits in terms of access to his wallet. Now research has shown that daughters with a close bond to their fathers are also more resilient and less likely to feel lonely.
Girls who have a strong emotional attachment to their father are more confident when they start school and more likely to perform well in class, the study suggests. It adds to evidence of the crucial role fathers play in enabling daughters to cope with adversity, especially early in life. [J4MB emphasis]
Girls’ relationships with their mothers, however, had no discernable impact on their experiences of loneliness. The way boys reacted to loneliness was also unrelated to their closeness to either parent.
The US study analysed data from a national study of early childcare involving almost 700 families. Researchers considered the relevance to children’s psychological wellbeing of attachment theory, or the deep emotional bond between a child and parent.
Resident fathers and mothers were asked to report on their relationships and conflicts with their children, who were asked at three intervals during primary school about their feelings of loneliness.

The authors, from Ohio State University’s department of human sciences, concluded that the strength of bonds between daughters and their fathers could play a crucial role around the ages of five or six, when children interacted with peers beyond the family home but before they formed lasting friendships.
The paper, published in the Journal of Family Psychology, concluded: “The more slowly father-child closeness declined, the more quickly girls’ loneliness declined. These findings highlight the role of father-child relationships in child loneliness for girls.”
The researchers said that the impact of bonds between fathers and daughters declined once girls began to form close friendships and could be followed by more disagreements or arguments, but the benefit of such relationships did not disappear entirely.
Jia Yan, the lead author, said: “This is a time when children are becoming more independent, developing relationships with friends and spending more time outside the home, so they become less close with their parents and have more conflict as their need for autonomy increases.”
Xin Feng, a co-author, added: “In our society, mothers tend to be responsible for everyday care and stability for their children. Fathers have more freedom to interact with their children in different ways, to challenge them and have a wider range of emotional contact. That may be one reason why fathers had more impact on their daughters.”
The authors added that while the link between parental relationships and child adjustment had been consistently studied, less had been understood about their impact on loneliness.
The findings come amid growing political interest in Britain on ways in which loneliness and social isolation can be reduced.
At the start of the year Theresa May announced the appointment of a minister to develop a government strategy on loneliness. The role was given to Tracey Crouch, minister for sport and civil society, which includes the charity sector. The move was aimed predominantly at tackling loneliness among older people living alone but it is also intended to support younger people who suffer loneliness, particularly new mothers and younger disabled adults.
Ministers are also under pressure to improve the wellbeing of teenagers after research published yesterday by the University of York and the Children’s Society found that more than one in five girls aged 14 had self-harmed in the past year.
In June a survey by The Times found that incidents of self-harm in secondary schools had more than doubled since 2012, with more than 70,000 instances last year alone.