Meet The Women Turning Into Their Dads — & Loving It

One weekend in January, Steph Sexton introduced a longtime friend to her father. After spending some time with both of them together, the friend had an epiphany. “Oh God, it’s all making sense now,” he said. Translation: You’re just like your dad.

She’s noticed it, too. “Some of the things that rubbed me the wrong way as a kid, I’m like, ‘I get it now,’” says Sexton, a 35-year-old marketer living in Kansas City. Like her father before her, she’s limiting her TV time and avoiding eating out with the tried-and-tested dad line: “We have food at home.” Oh, and getting up at the crack of dawn. “He would always wake us up for school [and tell us to say], ‘I’m alive, I’m alert. I feel great.’ And we’d always be like, ‘Shut up.’ Now, I’m stomping around my house in the morning while my husband’s like, ‘Could you please keep it down?’”

Sexton’s experiences invert a familiar trope, in which a woman has a flash of recognition — she says something a little too familiar or sees herself in the mirror — and realizes she’s turning into her mom. There’s often a terror associated with the realization, one that movies, TV, and books tried to unpack last year (see: the MILF cinematic universe, the All Fours group chats).

The question is: How should a woman feel when she realizes she’s becoming her dad, instead? Perhaps, in the wake of 2024’s Year of the Mom, the time has come to write it.

There are a lot of them, as it turns out — women in their 20s and 30s who find themselves falling asleep during movies, complaining about the music volume in restaurants, and parroting increasingly inane dad jokes. Something about settling down with a partner or finding their groove in a career seems to activate (or accelerate) the expression of their dad gene. Dadness, it turns out, is more a state of mind than a biological reality.

Dadness, it turns out, is more a state of mind than a biological reality.

Author Colette Shade, 36, first noticed she was taking on some of her father’s characteristics when she developed a taste for black coffee. “But I really knew it was happening when I started listening to opera in the car,” she says. The resemblance is physical as well: “I got a pixie cut about a decade ago, and since then we’ve basically had the same haircut.”

Kirsten Chen, a 27-year-old writer and strategist in New York, has also noticed her inner dad coming out in recent years. “Growing up, my mom, my brother, and I would say, ‘Dad, sit down, relax, watch some TV. You don’t need to constantly be scurrying around the house, pretending to work on something or being busy,’” she says. “As I’ve gotten older, I’m literally not able to sit down and relax at home anymore. I feel like I’m turning into my father, just rearranging piles of books or clothes or other things around my house or organizing things I don’t need to organize.”

The go-go-go mentality came up frequently among the women I spoke to. “[My dad] is never sitting down. He’s very involved. Since he’s retired now, he’s involved in sports or he does little side jobs and he's always very, very busy,” says Genesis Bonilla, 34. “My husband’s the opposite. He likes to relax. He can sit down at the beach and just take a nap. And I started to realize that I’m not like that — and I just started noticing that I’m the same [as my dad].”

A strong work ethic, a desire to be useful around the house — these are great dad traits. Others, unfortunately, are less societally accepted. “I’m an ER nurse, so I see really crazy things. I will literally come off a shift, [and if] something really gross happened, I’ll call him, and he’s the only one I’ll tell because he’ll be the only one who listens to it,” says Olivia Kosin, a 27-year-old in Baltimore. “I'll tell him something about, say it’s about bowels or something, and he’ll be like, ‘Oh my God, that’s so crazy.’ And then he’ll go on about it and then he’ll start asking for details. And my mom will be on speaker, and she’ll be like, ‘I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to know what happened.’”

They’ll just be like, “Wow, you are your father’s daughter.”

This carries over to Kosin’s sense of humor. “There’s this thing he does where he’ll make up these words, and when we ask what it means, he’ll be like, ‘Look it up in the dictionary,’” she says. “So now I have started making up random words while I’m talking to friends and stuff and they’re like, ‘What are you talking about?’" All of these symptoms add up to a clear diagnosis for Nurse Kosin: dad-in-training. “His side of the family, they’ll just be like, ‘Wow, you are your father’s daughter,’” she says, laughing.

Interestingly, none of the women I spoke to seemed uneasy with the idea of becoming their dads. Of course, some noted they’d like to avoid adopting a negative trait or two — becoming “a total crank,” in Shade’s case, or never being able to chill, in Bonilla’s — but on the whole, they seemed unbothered, even mildly entertained by the shift.

In some cases, stepping into dad’s shoes is a welcome development. “It helps me understand myself more,” says Kristen Lam, a 34-year-old living in New Jersey. It also lets her understand her dad — something she’s always struggled to do, both because of his quiet nature, and the generational and cultural differences that separate them. “It also helps me, the older I get, understand my relationship with my boyfriend, my partner, as well as my parents’ relationship,” Lam adds. “And I have a lot of conflict with my mom, but because I know how my dad is — and I’m starting to understand how he works and how he manages situations — that also helps me treat my mom in a different light. Knowing that I’m more like my dad, it helps me understand why and how to love my mom.”

Couch-sleeping and bad jokes aside, dadness can be a gift. As Sexton says, “I love my dad, and if I was going to become like anybody, I’m glad it’s him.”