The latest issue of The Journal of Communication and Religion (November 2008, Volume 31, Number 2) contains an excellent analysis of the importance of opposite-sex parent relationships. The common sense conclusion is backed up with social science data and affirmed by a peer-reviewed scholarly article: girls need a dad, and boys need a mom.
Not surprisingly, the study also found that communication is an essential building block for all family relationships — family interactions are the crucible for attitudes, values, priorities, and worldviews. Beyond the shaping and modeling of these essential personal characteristics, the family shapes an individual’s interpersonal system and self-identity.
Further, stable homes include specific talk about religion and support for children’s involvement in religious activities. These families create high-quality relationships by specific communication behaviors, such as openness, assurance, and dependency. Those same characteristics, not incidentally, are powerful predictors for marital success or failure. 
The authors, G.L. Forward, Alison Sansom-Livolsi, and Jordanna McGovern, stress the fact that a family is more than merely a group of individuals who live under the same roof. They cite numerous studies indicating that parents play a crucial role in a child’s personal and social development. In fact, a child’s relationship with his or her parents is the single most important factor in predicting that child’s long-term happiness, adjustment, development, educational attainment, and success. Beyond that general information, studies indicate that girls get better support from the family than do boys. Girls feel closer to their parents, perhaps because parents converse with and express emotion more readily with daughters than with sons. In general, mothers spend far more time with daughters than with sons. Likewise, fathers spend more time with sons than with their daughters. Yet, father-daughter and mother-son relationships tend to have greater impact on a child’s future intimate relationships than their relationship with the same-sex parent.
All of this information has greater significance today then ever before because family structures are changing more rapidly than at any previous time. The National Center for Health Statistics reported in 2006 that 48 percent of all marriages in the United States ended in divorce. Other studies indicate that cohabitation, delayed marriage, serial marriages, and numerous blended family structures are affecting relationships and expectations between family members. Studies conclude that after a divorce mothers are less affectionate and communicate less often with their children. Long term erosion of family relationships is common, with the father-child relationship being the most endangered relationship following family turmoil.
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