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Family Dynamics
Daddy-Come-Lately: Is It Possible to Parent in Reverse?
Many fathers try to connect with their young adult when it's almost too late.
Posted May 5, 2025 Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
Key points
- Fathers frequently regret the distance that has set in between them and their adult children over the years.
- An urgent, last-minute push for closeness with young adults often backfires, creating tension and conflict.
- Building warmer bonds with adult children as the clock ticks requires patience, humility, and perseverance.
In two previous posts, I have told the stories of fathers whose desire to preserve their long-standing closeness with their young adults was making it hard for them to let go and allow their children to chart their own independent pathways.
But I have met with countless fathers who have a difficult time letting go of their children for the opposite reason—an absence of closeness over the years, and a sudden desire to “make up for lost time” and establish a connection at the relative last minute, developmentally speaking.
Many men, for example, have focused more on being breadwinners than caregivers when it comes to family life. Their commitment to their work has made it difficult for them to spend time with their children. Often, this prioritizing is, indeed, anchored in wanting to be an involved father—after all, a good dad provides for his family’s needs.
But men may also use their work—and/or other activities—to avoid the responsibilities of childcare, along with the relational challenges that are a crucial constituent of a healthy and intimate father-child bond, the emotional highs and lows that are an inevitable part of parenthood.
For whatever reasons, though, many dads find that their lives are completely out of balance by the time their children are ready to leave home. The awareness of their offspring’s impending or actual departure can throw them into a panic, as they realize that the clock has been ticking all along and that the opportunity for a tighter paternal tie-in is quickly evaporating.
Timothy's Experience
Timothy was one such individual. A successful lawyer, he had regularly clocked 50- to 60-hour weeks for his firm, starting before his twin daughters were born and continuing on through their childhood and adolescence. His weekends were consumed with work and his favorite hobby, golf, leaving little time for family life. His wife, Charise, also an attorney, had agreed to focus on childrearing and put her career on hold once they had children, while Timothy became the primary source of family income.
Toward the end of high school, one of their daughters, Jessalyn, announced to her parents that she was gay and expressed an interest in introducing her new girlfriend to them. Charise was not particularly surprised when Jessalyn came out, as they had been having numerous mother-daughter conversations over the past year regarding Jessalyn’s evolving sexual preference.
But with Timothy having had little engagement with Jessalyn over the years, her disclosure hit him like a ton of bricks. He became terribly agitated and desperately tried to convince his wife and daughters, along with himself, that this was “just a phase” and that Jessalyn would grow out of it.
In an effort to make his wish a reality, he decided that it was high time to become a more involved father. He began attempting to spark frequent, in-depth conversations with Jessalyn at awkward and inopportune moments, conversations that Jessalyn quickly spurned because they seemed to be coming out of the blue, and because Timothy had never built much of a communicative platform with either of his daughters. “He never seemed to be very interested in who I am, so he’s certainly not in a position to tell me who I should become,” she (legitimately) complained to me during a family therapy session.
Of course, Timothy’s abrupt motivation to catch up on long-neglected fatherly contact angered not only Jessalyn but also her sister, Giulia, who felt neglected by Timothy’s pursuit of contact with Jessalyn rather than her. And Charise, who had grown comfortable with her role as the primary caregiver and emotional anchor for Jessalyn and Giulia, was irritated by Timothy’s unanticipated shift and felt that he was attempting to usurp or overstep the role that she was so familiar and content with.
So the family life that had been relatively frictionless (and somewhat fatherless, as well) for so long began to boil over with long-buried resentments.
My work with Timothy centered around helping him realize that he couldn’t turn back the clock and go from 0 to 100 when it came to building a relationship with either of his daughters. I also helped to educate him when it came to issues related to gender identity and sexual orientation, discouraging him from engaging in a form of conversion therapy and trying to “talk her [Jessalyn] out of being gay.”
These were painful conversations, requiring Timothy to come to terms with the regrets he had for having been so invested in his profession (and golf) that he had not taken the time to become better acquainted with his daughters. But his grief for the past eventually enabled him to slowly make some fundamental changes when it came to having a better relationship with both of his daughters in the present, one that would enable Jessalyn and Giulia to voyage forth from home with the support and acceptance of both their mother and their father.
When a man becomes Dad, it is not simply a matter of biology—psychological and emotional forces need to be at work, as well. This holds true at the beginning and at the end of childrearing, along with all of the years in between.
