Paternal Attachment and Self-Esteem in Adolescent Daughters: A Narrative Inquiry

Abstract Book of the 7th International Conference on Research in Psychology

Year: 2026

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Paternal Attachment and Self-Esteem in Adolescent Daughters: A Narrative Inquiry

Alitza Broodryk

ABSTRACT:

A well-documented gender gap in self-esteem first emerges during adolescence and persists across the lifespan, with women and girls consistently reporting lower self-esteem than their male counterparts. While research indicates that a daughter’s relationship with her father uniquely influences her self-esteem, and that father-daughter attachment holds distinct characteristics from other parent-child dyads, the dynamics of this relationship remain underexplored. Existing studies are predominantly quantitative and mixed-gender in design, and rarely illuminate daughters’ particular experiences. Socio-cultural norms appear to shape both how fathers and daughters perceive and enact their respective roles, and how daughters internalise their sense of self-worth within these relational dynamics. This study asks: how do daughters retrospectively narrate their adolescent experiences of paternal attachment in relation to their developing self-esteem? Participants are women aged 18 to 23, assigned female at birth, who had contact with their father or father figure up to the age of 17. A qualitative narrative inquiry approach is employed (Riessman,2008), using narrative analysis to explore how participants’ stories are shaped by, and make meaning of, their experiences and relational and socio-cultural contexts. The research expands the clinical conceptualisation of female self-esteem development and the role of paternal relationships and socio-cultural norms in shaping it, and offers a methodological framework for exploring attachment experiences among other marginalised groups, including LGBTQ+ individuals and neurodivergent individuals.

Keywords: Adolescence; Attachment; Father-Daughter Relationship; Narrative Inquiry; Self-Esteem