Name: Joe Kelly
Background: In “Dads and Daughters: How to Inspire, Understand and Support Your Daughter When She’s Growing Up So Fast” (Broadway Books, $23.95), Joe Kelly advises fathers on how to be more involved with their daughters in healthy ways. Kelly is executive director of Dads and Daughters, a national non-profit education and advocacy group (www.dadsanddaughters.org). He lives in Duluth, Minn.
Q. Do fathers sometimes tend to leave the parenting of their daughters to the mothers?
A. There is a tendency to do that, and I think it’s a mistake. There are some hurdles we have to overcome, as fathers of daughters. One hurdle is, we grew up as boys. So we have to educate ourselves to understand the different developmental and cultural issues for girls. Some are the same for boys and girls; some are different. So we have to try to be aware. We can turn to the women in our lives for perspective. They can say, “Well, when I was that age, I did that too. And looking back on it, here’s why.”
Another big hurdle is that fathers are still viewed as second-class parents, not as important as mothers. And we also deal with the hurdle of contradictory stereotypes. One is the father as a dolt who doesn’t know how to do anything, and the other is the Bill Cosby, father-knows-best stereotype. Neither one is reality.
Q. What can a father do for a daughter that a mother can’t?
A. The influence that a father has on a daughter is just as important as the influence a mother has, but it’s different in some ways. The primary way it’s different is that we set the standard for what she’ll expect from boys now and from men later. For what she will expect from a life partner, as an adult.
We particularly have an influence in a larger cultural context. Our daughters are bombarded with so many corrosive messages that tell her that how she looks is more important than who she is. That she has to act in a sexual or seductive way to get a guy to notice her.
As the first man in her life, we can counter those messages. We can pay attention to her voice and her heart and her brains and her physicality.
Q. How do you show her those things are important?
A. By listening. By focusing our attention on what she has to say, what she’s interested in. By being physically active with her, playing sports, goofing around with her, being physically affectionate. By commenting on things about her that intrigue us that don’t have anything to do with how she looks.
Q. This is one of the main ideas behind the Dads and Daughters organization?
A. Dads and Daughters was started by a man named Michael Kieschnick. He says when his daughter was 9, she came up to him one day and said, “Daddy, do you think I look fat?” And it just rocked him. Nobody had ever talked about that stuff around their house. Her mother didn’t talk about her weight. It was never an issue. And he thought, “Where is this coming from?”
As he reflected about it and talked to other fathers, what he realized what it boiled down to was, she was essentially saying, “Daddy, you’re always telling me it’s what’s inside that counts. But I go outside the house and I’m at school or I watch television and everybody tells me it’s how I look that counts. Who’s right?”
Q. It’s tricky, because in some situations, looks do matter. We might not like it, but it’s true.
A. Looks do matter. It affects how I feel when I get dressed up and put on a tie. But you’ve got to keep it in perspective. It can’t be the be-all and end-all.
A few weeks ago I was giving a workshop in a very affluent community, where, when I talked about this, I got a lot of resistance. These were people who invested a great deal of time, energy and money trying to look a certain way. They were very defensive.
One woman raised her hand and said, “Why shouldn’t my daughter look as good as she possibly can look?”
And I said, “Why isn’t the question, `Why can’t my daughter look in a way that makes her feel as good as she possibly can?'” That may seem like a subtle difference, but it’s not.
The reason we have our bodies is to do stuff. What’s important to me, and what I think should be important to my children, isn’t “How do I look?” It’s “Is my body fit? Can I do the things I want to do with it?”
Q. What are fathers missing, if they don’t get to know their daughters?
A. Having a daughter is a chance to deeply know a female in a non-sexual way. I think it opens many a guy’s eyes to sexism in the world. I’ve heard many men say, “This stuff with the objectification of women–pornography, for example–I’ve seen it affect my mother, my sister, my wife. But once I had a daughter, I had a viscerally different feeling about it.”
What I hear from many guys is that the love they feel from their daughters is the most unconditional love they’ve ever experienced. That is a life-changing experience. You have to be there. And you have to be willing to deal with occasional rejection. But you have to recognize that no matter what, your job is to hang in there and prove your trustworthiness to her.
One guy I talked to said, “There’s something about my marriage that has an element of being a contract. But with my daughter it’s not. She just calls it like she sees it, and she tells me things nobody else would ever tell me. I know that’s going to pass, but for now, it’s so valuable.” He said having a teenage daughter is like having an oracle in your life.
