There are no sweeter words for a daughter to hear than, “Daddy’s little girl.” Those words can put a smile on any girl’s face as it touches her very essence of who she is. These words cultivate her, comfort her, and make her feel like she’s the most special human being on God’s earth. Every daughter should experience the love of her father, but this is not the reality. In the world we live in, she’ll be fortunate to develop a meaningful bond with her father. Most likely she’ll have a “complicated” relationship with her dad and won’t realize the impending danger facing her in future relationships with boys and men because of this. Sad, but true, and it’s not her fault.

Dads, for the most part, have kneeled on the sidelines and watched their daughters grow into womanhood without really teaching them the intimate details of the game of love, sex, relationships, or even marriage. The seeds of fear, ignorance, and indifference kept dad in the dark.

When daughters grow up in homes where the father is emotionally absent they feel less confident, less secure, and less beautiful. They grow up feeling they have no voice or no choice to pursue their God-given destiny. It’s a feeling of powerlessness that speaks to their subconscious mind that they are unworthy. If a daughter is rejected love from her father, she learns to love rejection. Being rejected is love to her and love is being rejected. This might sound strange, but think about it. When a daughter is rejected love, she’s learning that rejection is her love language. So the more she is rejected love by her father, then by boys and men, the more she pursues love from them. Once she discovers that her thirst for love can’t be quenched through the opposite sex and once she realizes her father failed her emotionally, she looks for empowerment from within. Enter feminism, the “F-word.”

Feminism is the belief that a patriarchal system was methodically designed for girls and women to live beneath their means. The term patriarchal comes from patriarch, which comes from pater or father. This feminism strongly suggests that fathers are the problem, not the solution. Well, I happen to agree that dads are both the problem and solution for feminism. When dads are indifferent towards their daughters, they create women who seek to be what their dads weren’t — men. These women grow up to prove their worth by performance, promiscuity, and power. However, when dads are emotionally engaged with their daughters they don’t seek to prove themselves through feminism. They already know who they are and can simply be feminine. Femininity is attractive! Feminism is foul. Dads who create good relationships with their daughters teach them that their identity is not based on how they perform or what they look like, but who God created them to be.

The father daughter relationship determines so much of how girls and women see the world around them. I feel so passionately about this topic that I wrote a game plan for dads to help navigate the future of their daughters called Game Over: A Father Unfolds The Untold Game of Relationships, Sex, & Marriage. As the father of a daughter and the author of this book, I recommend it to all dads with daughters and wives. Make American Girls Feminine Again! Game Over. Go to willierichjr.com for further details.