Issues that affect a daughter's relationship with her dad.

I was ill-equipped to address many of the issues I had to deal with as a father. I had read books and listened to programmes about parenting, but many of them turned out, in my experience, to be just academic.

On many occasions, I felt a sense of bewilderment, frustration, and even despair. My attitude was not a healthy one and things were not getting any better for me.

Many dads and daughters have had similar issues in their relationships.

In the process of writing my first book, I interviewed daughters from different age ranges, different cultures, religious affiliations , and economic backgrounds in the city of London.

I learnt a lot from those conversations.

Let us take a brief look at what they said to me:

“Dad was always making demands. He never listened

As dads, we are often quick to give out instructions, directions, and answers with no patience to listen to the entire story.

We judge the act of listening as laborious and a non-essential because we assume we know the answers from the very first time our daughters open their mouth to speak.

Our daughters want us to listen and walk with them through the journey of their concerns.

It may come across as “too long” and a “waste of time”, but we affirm our daughters by listening.

It is not a walk in the park. I have had to make a lot of adjustments to ensure I have good conversations with my own daughter.

Listening is work but the rewards are worth our efforts. I am still a work in progress in this area.

“Dad’s jealousy issues with my mum greatly affected me.”

Jealousy is a mist that clouds our judgments. Hearing a daughter say this was a primary concern in her relationship with her dad, made me reflect.

Dads, our actions , decisions are the “handwriting on the walls” of our daughter’s minds. Our voice tone, reactions to our wives coming home late, online activities can birth a sense of fear and insecurity in the hearts of our daughters.

There is a healthy jealousy that cares for the welfare of our wives and partners, however that becomes manipulation and controlling when we demand to know everything and everyone they do life with.

Dads, we are losing the ladies in our lives. Jealousy is too much a price to pay for our own insecurities.

“Dad worked very long hours”

As dads, It is always a joy in our hearts to see our households happy and in a good place. We throw ourselves at everything to give our families the best in life. We want our families to be comfortable and lacking nothing, and this is oftentimes at the expense of our own comfort.

Dads, we need to reappraise our priorities to ensure we have a healthy balance between work and life at home. Work is an essential element of the male psyche but that is not all to being a dad. We are not alive to just make a living but to pursue purpose for ourselves and our homes.

While our families appreciate our decisions to look after them, we must not allow work to become the excuse for our consistent absence in their world.We will need to make some sacrifice. We will sometimes have to prioritise our daughters and our homes over our schedules.

Our daughters are proud we are working dads. They are proud that we can financially care and support the home to the best of our means. But they want us present in their life journeys.

“My dad, needed to know that parenting was more than just sitting down and watching TV”

Guilty as charged. Many of us, and this goes for most dads, are the sole “ hoarders” of the television remote controls, anytime we are home.

Hours, minutes and even days pass us by, as we spend our time watching and switching from television channels . While we enjoy the pleasures and comfort of our choices, our daughters by our actions are often side-lined and isolated from us.

Everything has its place. There is a time to watch television but not at the expense of our daughters. We must listen, learn, and incorporate their world into our choices. We can be creative: watch films together, learn and play games together as a family and much more.

“My dad was very forceful and inflexible. He did not make any rooms for me in his thought process”

This was my attitude for a long period of time. I was short-sighted and arrogant to admit that I knew very little about certain subject matters.

I am not out of the woods yet, but I am not where I use to be years ago. To be a dad, we must be willing to make room for the decisions our daughters arrive at. They cannot always be wrong. Trust me. They can’t. No daughter has in her, the ability to be 100% wrong at all times.

Our daughters grow in confidence, when we are open and wise to say yes to their ideas even when we know they are not the very best. We must allow them the room and space to reflect and reevaluate their decisions as often as they choose.

They are not our identical clones. They have their unique personality, and it is our duty to help them grow and gain confidence as individuals in life.

We are privileged to have them in our lives, and that may not always be joyful but there is so much joy knowing we were part of their growing up, and they were part of our growing up also.

As a wise dad, I have had to admit to my daughter I was wrong several times. They learn the need for, and importance of wise counsel. They also learn first-hand how to resolve differences appropriately, depending on the issues, and persons involved.

We are not always right, that should make them confident.

Below are some of the quotes from the daughters I interviewed in London about the issues that affected their relationships with their dads.

I hope we can all reflect on them:

“That if I upset him or seem to not want to tell him; it is not because I don’t love him”

“That when he assumes, I don’t know something; it hurts my feelings”

“That even though my opinions differed from his, I needed him to acknowledge that I had given them the same degree of thoughts as him”

“His cultural background was very different from the one he was raising me in”

“He left mum and that meant to me abandonment”

“My dad wanted to do “boy stuff” with my brothers while he sent me to help my mum”

“Dad was very strict with the clothes I wore”

“There was a physical and emotional distance between us. He was away abroad for a very long time”

“Dad had to work long working hours on his job”

“We were very similar in our personality, and this resulted in multiple clashes and disagreements with him”

We must always remember that every pain requires attention.