Recently I've been reading "Father Loss" by Elyce Wakerman. This book is a must for every girl/woman who has lost her father through death, divorce or desertion.

A girl's self-esteem is developed by the relationship she has with her father in her early years. If something interrupts that development, she becomes like a ship on the open seas without a rudder or a captain without a compass.

If you are a girl/woman who lost your father between the tender ages of 1-5, while you were growing up, did you

1. feel you were missing something but unable to put your finger on it?

2. feel "different" than the other girls in your school whose parents were still together?

3. look at other girls and wonder "What do they have that I don't?"

4. feel the boys (in Junior High and High School) treated you differently (disrespectfully) than other girls?

It has been proven that girls who were raised without fathers have a much more difficult life than those whose fathers were consistently in their lives.

Girls raised without fathers either through divorce or desertion, are more flirtatious, (sometimes) tend to be tomboys (to get closer to boys) because they crave male attention, something absent in their lives. (Girls who lost their fathers through death and their mothers never remarried are not in this behavior group).

In her puberty years, she begins to look for the tender love she never had from her father. She wants affection, cuddling, and affirmation that she is feminine, pretty, and adorable wheras the boy thinks she wants what he wants. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The affirmation that she is feminine, pretty, and adorable should naturally come first from her father. If she doesn't receive it in the early years, she goes into the world pretty much unarmed...doesn't have the required affirmation of self needed to find or get what she wants from life. Actually, many aren't even aware of what they want. They only know HUNGER...for something they don't know. You know that feeling of being hungry and don't know what you're craving? so you eat this, then that, then you grab up something else, eat, eat, eat, until you're almost sick and you're still not satisfied. That's how it is with fatherless girls. They know something is missing, but they haven't a clue what it is.

They can know what's missing, though. They can know by educating themselves. As long as there are divorce, death, and desertion, there will be young girls who will be deprived of what God intended them to have.

If you are in this category, I urge you to go to Amazon.com and find this book. I promise, it will help immensely. Even if you are a Grandma, you will benefit from this book.