As an adult, do you still feel a special connection between father and daughter, mother and son?

I am a lot closer to my mom than I am my dad. My dad and I have not been close since I was a very little girl. There have been things said and done by him that have brought us to where we are today, which is not even on speaking terms (his choice). I tried to forgive what has happened and work on our relationship, and for a bit we were working on it, but then he decided he wanted to say and do more things to hurt me. When I confronted him about those things, he decided he would rather just not talking to me anymore, so that’s that.

Both my parents are dead now,but I was very close with my mother.She was a beautiful person inside and out.My dad and I were at odds alot while I was growing up.(I’m suprised he didn’t ground me for life-XD) but as I grew up,we also became close and I could talk to him freely without mincing any words.He was straightforward with me as well.I loved them both very much :)

My dad died when I was 17, but I remember loving him more. I have a lot more memories with my mom now, of course, but I do think my dad and I would’ve had a lot more fun, based on how he was, his personality, etc. My mom has been sickly most of her life.

My parents have both passed away and I miss them both very much but I was a daddy’s girl to the very end. I adored my father.

Yes, my familial ties are just as strong as they ever were.

To me, Dad is the one that I’m less happy to disappoint. He is the standard that I have always aspired to.
I’d say that I have a stronger connection with my mother. We’re very similar (from personality down to the dental history, which is weird), and she had the most screen time during my childhood. Dad was and remains the primary breadwinner; it’s a fine thing for a man to be and I do not hold it against him, but it meant that he didn’t go through the day-to-day with us—though he was always there when we needed him. As a result, I’m more open with Mom.

A neat side effect of that, though, is that doing things with Dad, even if it was just going to the hardware store, always felt like a special occasion. It helps that he was also the MC for family activities. He was the one that took us camping, or bike-riding, or star-gazing, or to San Francisco for the day.

My parents are both dead now too and I am very much appriciating the relationship with my daughter who is almost 23. I was not nearly as close to my mother at 23 as my daughter and I are.
We like each other as people and both of us like being friends.
We talked for over an hour today about all sorts of things and I let her know often how much I am liking her adult self and our blossoming adult relationship. :-)

I am a spitting image of my dad, though I have a few qualities of my mom,
they’re both great people and I’m fortunate to have such loving- supportive- genuine
people in my life.

I’m purposely estranged from my bio-dad.. that’s a whole mess of bullshit I don’t need in my life. My mom, well.. let’s just say we live on separate continents and that it’s the best thing that ever happened to our relationship.

In a nutshell, I haven’t been close to my parents since I was little and young enough to see them through rose-colored glasses. Really, it’s no wonder I have such a hard time letting people get close to me, emotionally. I’ve been doing my own thing for so long.

I never had a connection with my mom. I was much closer with my dad. Sadly he’s dead now.

To my father, I am indifferent. I met him twice though he lived within 20 minutes of me my entire life, and had no contact with him or from him except for a visit when I was four and a final meeting before he died when I was twelve. My mother provided more than enough for me and for most of my life I didn’t waste a thought on him. He just wasn’t anything and I didn’t sense a void. My mother left him when I was two, and she did everyone a solid on that one.

My mother was my everything. Our relationship is always changing. We’ve gotten closer in what we reveal to each other, but the instinct to push buttons and butt heads is still strong and pops up regularly. We’re still working things out. I know she cares, but we’re different, and have been for a long time. We love each other, but it’s a work in progress. It’s been better in the last several years. Her cancer made me more forgiving if I’m being honest.

Being an only child I’m very close to both my parents. But I’ve got to say I’m closer to my mom (that’s mum for you guys in the UK and those of you down under). We are so much alike it’s scary. Except for genitals. My dad and I are much more alike there.

We have always had a very close family. i love both my children the same. so does my wife. but, there is something about a daughter being closer to her dad and a son being closer to his mother. its just a bond that is hard to explain.

Wife and i may our favorites. its not because of favortism, its that bond i was talking about.

@john65pennington Yes, this daddy’s girl agrees. Mothers and daughters sometimes have complicated issues, complicated relationships. There is a bond between a father and daughter that is, well, it just is what it is and I am very grateful to have had that kind of bond and relationship with my father.

Judging from the small sample of myself and my sister, I don’t see any correlation between gender and preferred parent. Who my sister and I are each closest with has changed a lot over the course of our lives and is sometimes the same parent and sometimes different. There have been times when my sister is closer with mom and times when she’s closer with dad. The same goes for me, though I’ve been closer with my father most of my life.

I was close to both till I hit my teenage years. Then I grew apart from my mom. My dad and I remained close till he died. I don’t know if it had as much to do with their sex as much as it did with their personalities. My mom didn’t trust people meant what they said. That was very tiring. My dad liked to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, so I always felt I had his trust.
He also passed away when I was 19 and my mom is still living, so its hard to say if he would’ve continued the same relationship with me.
My mom still doesn’t trust, so our relationship has remained the same for all these years.
My siblings say I am like my mom. But my husband says, I’m nothing like her. He loves my mom but he knows I’m not paronoid about everything people say.
I only distrust, distrustful people who have proven themselves to be distrustful. My mom believes people lie to her all the time over the smallest things.

I did a flipflop at some point, probably around high school. My parents were on and off again with each other, so my dad’s home varied between ours and other places. When I was younger, I definitely favored my dad. He was nice and fun to spend time with, seeing him on the weekends. My mom was the mean one, worked a ton, and was generally tired or busy a lot. As I grew up, I began to really appreciate my mom’s values a bit more than my dad’s. And she became the go-to person for my troubles. She always had advice and gave me my privacy otherwise. He’s not irresponsible or a deadbeat, my mom eventually married him. But he’s a bit more old fashioned than I can handle.

Now, I love them equally, but for very very different parts of them. I can go to my mom with problems with my relationships (friend or other) and moral dilemmas. We’ve bonded over emotional things. My dad is a nerd, like me, and also likes to debate, like me. So we have a lot of things to talk about and argue friendly about. But I can’t go to him with problems as easily. Just as I can’t explain my political frustrations with my mom as she wants to hear nothing about it. Each relationship balances the other almost perfectly for me now.

I think becoming a parent opens your eyes as to what your parents did for you, and for me this coincided with my mum getting Alzheimer’s. I’m having to take on a much bigger role in her life, and we are probably closer now than we’ve ever been. I feel so much love for my mum for everything she did for me, and especially when, newly widowed, she put up with my frankly despicable teenage behaviour, and was still waiting, full of love, for when I came out the other side.

Sadly, I know that the Alzheimer’s will progressively hollow out her personality, leaving little more than a shell (it’s a terrible, terrible illness). Hopefully, I’ll still be able to love her as much as she deserves.

My dad died thirty years ago when I was fourteen, and I’m forever a child when I think about him. I simply have no idea what it’s like to be an adult with a father. He was a star, and I still miss him, especially at big family occasions – the birth of my first daughter was bittersweet as I would have given anything for him to hold her. He would have been a fantastic granddad.

I didn’t meet my biological father until I was 18 and went looking for him. We had a friendly relationship after that, but he was definitely never my ‘dad’. Sadly, he passed away about 15 years ago, now. My mother and I were very close when I was little, but grew further and further apart as I grew up and realized what a terrible job she’d done protecting me from the sexual abuse I’d experienced throughout my childhood, at the hands of her brother. Between that, and the fact that she’s got Borderline Personality Disorder, I no longer have a relationship with her at all.

Interestingly, the parent I’ve remained closest to is my step-father. He was my mother’s best friend at the time she became pregnant with me, and married her when I was four years old. They were divorced by the time I was eight. He has absolutely no blood or legal ties to me… and yet, he walked me down the aisle at my wedding, is my children’s ‘granddad’, and is, as he has always been, my Dad. He’s a fantastic human being.

My family is becoming more fragmented with time. I’m not close to my father at all. We don’t speak. I’m very close to my mother as a result of the other relationship-breakdowns. I’m trying to be less emotionally dependent there.

I have always been a daddy’s girl and that hasn’t changed since I have become an adult. My dad and I have a similar sense of humour, similar tastes and we enjoy each others company. If anything, we have become closer as I have got older because we can now speak on an adlt level.

My parents are both dead and I still feel close to both of them.

When I was a child, I was very close with my father.

I haven’t been able to contact him for about 13 years now.
I don’t have a single positive memory of my mother, past or present.

Yes, of course.

My father doesn’t know how to be close to anyone. In his life he is the most and only important person. I tried desperately to get to know him better when I was 15 to 17 and I ended up just frustrated. He has never called me or asked about me. There was one time he really noticed me. I had my hair done and I was wearing makeup and he actually paid me a compliment. It was very strange.

I had a complicated relationship with my mother. She was very abusive at certain points in my childhood but she was also the most important person in my life. We were intellectual equals. We could talk about very deep things as long as they were impersonal. I could never talk to her about any rough spots from my childhood so often it felt like there was a giant elephant in the room. I was close to her but I wish I could have been closer. Her death precluded that although I doubt I could ever have been as close as I wanted to be.