TORONTO - Dads need to be more involved with their daughters, especially during the teen years, an awareness session on eating disorders was told Friday.
"Fathers can work a little harder to relate to their daughters,'' said Dr. Margo Maine, a clinical psychologist who specializes in the treatment of eating disorders.
While fathers today are more involved in raising children than dads of past generations, she said there is still a disconnect when it comes to girls, especially when they hit puberty.
Maine was speaking at the Sheena's Place Awareness Breakfast, presented by Scotiabank. She is the author of "Father Hunger: Fathers, Daughters and the Pursuit of Thinness'' and an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut.
Most dads see their role as the logical guy who solves problems, she said.
"Fathers do a lot of lecturing and trying to solve their children's problems, but with (eating disorders) logic doesn't work. Love does.''
Maine's words resonated with many in the audience of about 500 well-heeled Torontonians -- mostly women.
One of those was Kate Lum, the volunteer co-ordinator for Sheena's Place, a not-for-profit organization that offers programs and services to individuals and families affected by eating disorders.
When Lum was eight, her parents were divorced and emotional access to her father was limited by her parents' anger over the divorce.
Lum remembered equating being thin with absolute self-control, which is something she aspired to as her mother often told her that her father lacked it.
As a teenager, she would go on eating binges. These were followed by feelings of guilt and then intense workouts to burn calories.
"Anorexia is like a bad friend that proposes itself as a solution to so many things,'' said Lum, who spent her early 20s battling the eating disorder.
While she was attending university she tried to broach the subject with her father on one of their rare lunch dates, where she never ate anything, and then again over the phone.
"He reacted without sympathy,'' Lum said. "He didn't know how to help me. I don't know he knew what to do.''
"He may have had a sense of it being a form of self-indulgent, spoiled-young-thing, mental illness,'' she said noting that both her mother and father were psychologists.
"I think, unfortunately, in order to talk to a parent with the feeling of safety you would have had some sort of feeling of safety before.''
While fathers usually do well with sons as they often share similar interests, dads have a harder time with daughters, especially when they hit adolescence, Maine said.
"`How do I express affection now that this little girl is becoming a young women,' is a question many fathers have,'' she said. "It's not so easy to put a 13-year-old to bed. How do you hug her? Her budding sexuality makes dad uneasy.''
This distancing in the father-daughter relationship can manifest itself in many ways, Maine said, adding that sometimes this can make daughters more vulnerable to eating disorders.
She said it can be as simple as the daughter seeing dad take a lingering look at a thin, athletic woman. The daughter could think the way to regain her father's attention is to replicate the thin body.
"When fathers support and take notice of all the roles women play -- dressing children, cooking meals, working outside the home -- girls see that women are valuable. That means self-doubt won't turn into a body issue.''
