Linda Nielsen is a Council on Contemporary Families Expert, as well as a professor of Educational and Adolescent Psychology at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Most of Nielsen’s research centers around the relationship between fathers and daughters. Nielsen’s research gained national attention when Pantene—the shampoo brand—reached out to her in hopes of creating a Super Bowl ad that was inspired by her research and centered around the importance of father-daughter relationships. Nielsen answered a few questions for us about her research, her own family, and any advice that she has:

Q: First, a challenge: what’s one single thing you “know” with certainty, after years of research into modern families?

LN: After writing books and articles about fathers and daughters for nearly three decades, the one single thing I know about father-daughter relationships is that most fathers and daughters would both like to have a more communicative, more comfortable, more personal relationship with one another. Both would like to spend more one on one time together without other family members involved – especially during the daughter’s teenage years when society generally discourages anything more than dad being involved in his daughters’ athletic or academic life – or being her banking machine.

Q: What does your family–both family-of-origin and family-of-choice–look like, and how does that fit with what you know about American families today? Are there points of dissonance?

LN: I grew up during the 1950s when most of the parenting time in families was allotted to mothers – especially when the children were female. So although I had what was then considered a “good”, loving and supportive relationship with both of my parents, my relationship with my dad was much less communicative and less personal than my relationship with my mom. Fortunately fathers nowadays are allowed and encouraged to be much more involved with their children – especially with their daughters and with their infant children. As a result, more fathers and daughters are benefiting from having a more meaningful relationships with one another when the parents are living together. Sadly, however, fewer daughters than ever before in our nation’s history are getting to spend the first 18 years of their lives living in the same home with their fathers. That’s a tremendous obstacle and disadvantage for both of them.

Q: How would you encourage a scholar of family life to work to get their research into public life, affecting policy, and challenging assumptions about “average families”?

LN: I would encourage social scientists to pay more attention to specific ways to strengthen father-daughter relationships in families where the parents are no longer living together. The ‘average’ daughter no longer has the benefit of living with her father throughout her childhood and adolescence due to our divorce and out-of-wedlock birth rates. And there is a lot of maternal ‘gatekeeping’ where mothers intentionally or inadvertently undermine or restrict father-daughter relationships. Given these realities, we social scientists need to do a better job educating the public about the importance of father-daughter relationships – especially when the parents have separated and especially during the daughter’s infant and toddler years. We also need to show daughters how to be “equal opportunity” daughters who give their fathers the same time and the same chances they give their mothers to build a close, meaningful relationship.

For more information about father-daughter relationships:  Dr. Linda Nielsen.