lil - I never would have expected the papers to have caught anyone's attention, but I suppose I haven't considered the community.

For context, my daughter is 8 and lives with her mother a couple of hours away. My relationship with her mother (my ex-wife) is quite stable and she has re-married.

I started with 'Turning Points of Closeness in the Father/Daughter Relationship' as it was the primary paper recommended to me and makes references to a great number others. I came away from this one with their primary finding, on both sides of the relationship, in my mind - 'the participation in activities together.' They weighed pretty heavily on sports, but i was buoyed by several of the daughter's comments about travel, something I do considerably more than sports. Much of the rest of the paper felt a few years off for me - middle school, university, marriage - but still interesting.

I then switched over to 'The relationship between fatherly affirmation and a woman's self-esteem, fear of intimacy, comfort with womanhood and comfort with sexuality' because while my daughter isn't necessarily at these points in her life, they are something very important to me for her future state. My interaction with those women closest to me marks this one high on the list. That said, the major of the paper's results sort of went over my head. In the end, they proved the critical bits (to me?) of their hypothesis, in that, yep, father's count on the self-esteem and fear of intimacy scales.

I've printed off and still need to read 'Divorced Fathers and Their Daughters: A Review of Recent Research'. I think I came onto this one from the references in the first paper. There were a couple of others I was interested in, but they are behind pay-walls and I haven't decided if I want to pony up just yet.

Anyway... thanks for the interest... hope it wasn't too horrible a wall of text...