To Dad, with love; for daughters, fathers are source of affection, comfort and advice

Ebony, June, 1990

TO DAD, With Love

"NOTHING is dearer to a father than a daughter," the ancient Greek playwright Euripides once wrote. "Sons have spirits of higher pitch, but they are not given to fondness."

Some 20 centuries after Euripides made this observation, fathers and daughters continue to experience a very special, relationship. It is not necessarily more important than that of father and son, but it is certainly one that requires sensitivity. The bond between father and daughter is intricate and compelling.

Without a doubt, a father's influence on his daughter's life is powerful. He is the man who will mold her personal values and set the standard of expectations for the other men who will cross her path--the boyfriends, professionals, co-workers, friends, and husbands. And he is the man to whom she can go for comfort, advice and love.

Virginia Governor L. Douglas Wilder, the father of two daughters and a son, says that "the father/daughter relationship is indeed special." Agreeing with the governor are the Rev. William V. Guy, father of actress Jasmine Guy; Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the NAACP, and Fred Turner, father of Miss America Debbye Turner. All of these proud fathers say they enjoy special and close relationships with their daughters.

During the past several years, Governor Wilder has been frequently accompanied by his daughters, Lynn, an artist in New York City, and Loren, a management trainee with the U.S. Postal Service in Crystal City, Va., to the various social affairs he must attend, including elegant dinners at the White House.

"Boys really want to show you they can mirror what you are or cold be," he says. "Obviously, that is not how girls think. Girls are much better at taking instruction on right and wrong. My daughters often come to me and say, 'Dad, you used to tell me this or that, and you were right!'"

One major difference in his relationship with his daughters, says Gov. Wilder, is their sensitivity to fatherly approval. "If I frown the wrong way, they are sensitive to that," he says. "My son and I are very close, too, but I don't have to be careful about what I say for fear that it will bring tears to his eyes. With my daughters, sometimes they get tears in their eyes and I don't even know what brought them about."

Fred Turner, a veterans job counselor with the TExas Employment Commission in Austin, says that he hasn't caused his daughter, the reigning Miss America Debbye Turner, to cry in recent years. But both father and daughter shared tears of joy when she was crowned Miss America las year.

"We have a great relationship," he says. "In addition to being father and daughter, we are good friends. She seeks me out for advice and I seek her out for advice. Simply because her mother and I felt it necessary to dissolve our marriage didn't mean that we were dissolving our family. We didn't allow our relationship to detrimentally affect our daughters." Turner says he is also close to his daughter, Suzette, who is an environmental engineer in Tulsa, Okla.

One common dilemma that these and other fathers knowledge is walking that tightrope between being protective of one's daughter and being indulgent, between supportive and actually spoiling her. "I'm very close to my daughters," says Gov. Wilder. "I like to be close but not smothering. I want to be supportive, but I encourage their independence."

NAACP Executive Director Benjamin Hooks says he felt the say way while rearing his daughter, Patricia Gray Hooks, who is now a reading specialist in Cincinnati. "I was always there for my daughter," he says, "but I always emphasize that you can be somebody in your own right rather than ride the coattails of a public-figure father."

The Rev. William V. Guy, pastor of Atlanta's historic Friendship Baptist Church and father of actress Jasmine Guy and her sister, Monica, an Atlanta television news producer, says he still finds himself being protective of his daughters, though they both are independent career women. The Morehouse College instructor says his daughters call and visit him frequently, and still assume he's going to pick up the tab when they go out to dinner.

"There is indeed a special bond between father and daughter, though it is a difficult relationship to define," says Rev. Guy. "There is a particular kind of protectiveness when you hold a baby daughter for the first time. You have to balance that protectiveness with helping them develop their own wings to fly. But no matter how much they accomplish on their own, they are still daddy's little girls."