The Absent Father Effect on Daughters: Father Desire, Father Wounds

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Morrison DR, Coiro MJ. Parental conflict and marital disruption: Do children benefit when high-conflict marriages are dissolved? J. Marriage Fam. 1999; 61:626–637. [ Google Scholar] Hao L, Xie G. The complexity and endogeneity of family structure in explaining children’s misbehavior. Soc. Sci. Res. 2002; 31:1–28. [ Google Scholar] The same goes for limits – while some moms are more strict than others, you need to create rules that you will enforce, regardless of your parenting style.

A sixth strategy is to use a natural experiment to estimate the effect of divorce on child well-being. The logic behind this strategy is to find an event or condition that strongly predicts father absence but is otherwise unrelated to the offspring outcome of interest. The natural experiment may be an individual-level variable or an aggregate-level measure.But workaholic dads who work for as long as 12 hours every day and only see their kids in the morning (if at all) are, essentially, absent. Winner of the Internationl Association for Jungian Studies (IAJS) Book Award for Best Clinical Book 2021 of twin studies are a variation of the SFE model. These studies, pioneered by D’Onofrio and colleagues (2006, 2007), compare the offspring of identical (MZ) twins, fraternal (DZ) twins, and regular siblings in cases in which one sibling or twin divorces and the other does not. These analyses control for family differences that are common to both siblings; however, they do not control for within-sibling differences that lead one sibling to divorce and another to be stably married. Twin studies go one step further, by comparing MZ twins (who share identical genetic information) and DZ twins (who have half of their genes identical), allowing researchers to determine the role of genetics in accounting for the effect of divorce.

use the term “father absence” to refer to children who live apart from their biological father because of divorce, separation from a cohabiting union, or nonmarital birth. We use the terms “divorce” and “separation” to talk about change in children’s coresidence with their biological fathers. The body of knowledge about the causal effects of father absence on child well-being has grown during the early twenty-first century as researchers have increasingly adopted innovative methodological approaches to isolate causal effects. We reviewed 47 such articles and find that, on the whole, articles that take one of the more rigorous approaches to handling the problems of omitted variable bias and reverse causality continue to document negative effects of father absence on child well-being, though these effects are stronger during certain stages of the life course and for certain outcomes. Cherlin AJ, Furstenberg FF, Chase-Lansdale PL, Robins PK, Morrison DR, Tietler JO. Longitudinal studies of effects of divorce on children in Great Britain and the United States. Science. 1991; 252:1386–1389. [ PubMed] [ Google Scholar] The absence of a father can also cause teenage boys to search for a father figure elsewhere – and they often find it in gangs and other criminal groups, where they see the leader as the paternal figure. Recognizing an absent fatherThe best fathers don’t know selfishness either! I remember my own father spent hours teaching me how to ride a bike, always took me to the fair, and made mud pies with me. Some researchers have found that having a positive relationship with the father, who is a supportive and encouraging presence in their child’s life, helps the social development and self-esteem of children.