Does Being a Daddy’s Girl Harm the Mother-Daughter Bond?
After the tragic death of Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna in January 2020, #GirlDad started to trend in honor of their close relationship. It is heart-warming to see a father being emotionally supportive of his daughter, and daughters certainly need their father’s love, attention, and emotional support. Emotionally attentive fathers teach their daughters that they have a right to be heard and respected by men, and how to find their equal place in the world. When a daughter experiences her father listening to her, believing her, and treating her as his equal, she develops a felt sense of what it is like to be heard by men as their equal, which sets the tone for all her relationships with men. But this learning is not only gained from how fathers treat their daughters. It also comes from how fathers treat other women, especially their daughter’s mother.
In my work with mothers and daughters I frequently hear stories of daughters feeling angry at their mother because they believe that their mother is jealous of, and resentful of, the attention and affection they get from their father. And sometimes the daughter is correct, the mother is jealous of the daughter’s closeness to her father and the affection and attention the father lavishes on his daughter. But blaming and shaming the mother for feeling jealous of the attention her daughter receives from her father will only cause more harm to the mother-daughter bond. This dynamic deserves to be unpacked, so that the mother and daughter understand what is really going on underneath the father’s attentiveness to his daughter. To illustrate how I unpack this dynamic with my clients, I will tell Susanna’s story (not her real name), who came for help with her relationship with her mother because she felt that her mother was jealous of how close she was with her father.
Susanna was a young woman in her mid-twenties, and she told me that she was a “Daddy’s Girl” right from when she was young. She said that she loved spending time with her dad, and that her mother had encouraged her bond with her father until Susanna went to college. Susanna said that something changed for her mother when Susanna left for college, describing how her mother had become increasingly resentful of the time she spent with her dad. Her mother’s anger had recently exploded into a huge argument at a family gathering. Susanna said that she loves spending time with her father because he’s so easy to talk to, but she also yearned to feel connected to her mom. Susanna wanted me to help her find a way to communicate to her mother that she didn’t have to compete with her father for her attention.
The trouble is Susanna’s mother was correct, she did have to compete with Susanna for her husband’s attention, because Susanna’s father gave much more of his love and attention to his daughter than his wife. When I asked Susanna to describe her parents’ marriage, she said that it wasn’t a good one. She said that she could understand why her father was silent because her mother nagged him all the time.
The Mother-Daughter Attachment Model I use in my work with mothers and daughters does not blame, shame, or pathologize women’s attachment behaviors. (Read “The Mother-Daughter Puzzle” for more information.) Instead it looks for reasons as to why a mother has reverted to ‘nagging’ behaviors in order to be heard. It looks at the family dynamics, and the generational family system to understand how women are silenced and emotionally neglected, and how this makes women angry, resentful, jealous, and revert to ‘nagging’ behaviors. The Mother-Daughter Attachment Model taught Susanna to understand her mother more fully, to see the connection between her emotionally barren marriage, her so-called nagging behaviors, and her anger and jealousy towards Susanna.
As Susanna learned to “Stand in her mother’s shoes”, an exercise in the Mother-Daughter Attachment Model, and understand how unheard and invisible her mother was in her marriage, she started to see why her mother was so angry. She started to see that her mother’s jealousy towards her was a normal human response and completely understandable. She saw that her mother’s anger towards her was because Susanna’s relationship with her father was an uncomfortable mirror for her mother, in which she saw what she desired but did not receive from her husband. And Susanna realized that even though her father’s attention was lovely, whenever she saw her father ignore her mother, it made her doubt her bond with her father. It made her wonder why she got all his love, and why her mother didn’t. It made her fearful that maybe her father could withdraw his love from her, just like he had done from his wife.
Susanna’s father’s behavior in being attentive to his daughter and neglectful of his wife set Susanna and her mother up for conflict. It set Susanna and her mother up to compete for his attention. It also sowed seeds of doubt in Susanna’s mind about whether she was truly entitled to be heard and supported by the men in her life. Even though Susanna experienced her father’s listening ear and respect, whenever he dismissed Susanna’s mother’s, he imprinted in Susanna’s mind the possibility that you cannot always expect men to listen to you and treat you with respect. Susanna’s father’s inconsistent behavior towards the women in his life, women that Susanna said he professed to love, created an emotional reality in which Susanna and her mother were not entirely sure that they had a right to be heard by the men they loved.
In any family where the mother is silenced, emotionally neglected, and treated as the inferior gender, the daughter learns to question whether she has the right to be heard, supported, and respected by the men in her life.
Reprinted with permission from my blog for the American Counseling Association.