Girls that are supported by their fathers value themselves and are not vulnerable to everyone else’s values and demands. Confident girls know how to make good judgments and choices about the pressures and influences they encounter. They are not likely to measure themselves against the images of the fashion industry. Fathers can show her that the way she cares makes a difference and that inner beauty is important. Fathers need to avoid making negative comments about their daughter’s appearance. Anorexia occurs because daughters feel driven to perfection and feel that food intake is one way they can control what is happening in their life.

All fathers worry about their girls. But we need to trust that they are doing a great job of growing up and we need to learn to trust their natural strengths and evolving maturity.

Fathers of teenage daughters will naturally feel some protectiveness and jealousy. If this is moderate, it will work quite well. It doesn’t hurt for boyfriends to be moderately terrified! Some clear safety limits can be set, appropriate for the daughter’s age and stage.  STEVE BIDDULPH

Without any of that a daughter can ache with questions. She has no dress rehearsals for heterosexual friendship and love – a handicap from which many women, their emotional histories littered with shattered hops, never recover. Without a father’s dependable involvement a woman is in some way forever incomplete, and “men” are so much theory.

A daughter needs a loving, available, predictable father figure who can be counted on, whether divorced or at home. She needs his best paternal intentions, even if his efforts occasionally fall short. She needs his maturity and limit setting and sexual oppositeness, so that she can function with confidence in the wider world of adult love and work.

For when a father gives his daughter an emotional visa to strike out on her own, he is always with her. Such a daughter has her encouraging, understanding daddy in her head, cherishing her  – not simply as a women but as a whole, unique human being with unlimited possibilities. VICTORIA SECUNDA “Women and Their Fathers