father figure

plural father figures · alternative father-figure

1. One who represents, behaves as, or is regarded as equivalent to a father for another person or group of people.

   Orphaned at a young age, he found a father figure in the confident and committed al-Bahri.

   2008 July 21, Jonathan Mahler, “Hamdan: Guantánamo's Mystery Man”, in Time, retrieved 08 Jul 2014

   2 more examples

   [Editor David W. Blight said:] Deeply in need of father figures and spiritual hope, and “religiously seeking knowledge,” as he recalled it, the slave boy [the young Frederick Douglass] turned to a religious black man, a freeman named Charles Lawson, who worked as a drayman for a rope maker and lived on Happy Alley in Fells Point. Frederick spent countless hours with Lawson in the drayman’s shack reading the bible aloud, singing hymns, and praying together. “I could teach him the letter, but he could teach me the spirit,” Douglass remembered. Throughout his life Douglass would teach his teachers and learn from them at the same time. From old Lawson he gained […] above all […] a belief in a benevolent and protective God, the faith that his “life was under the guidance of a wisdom higher than my own.”

   1997 [1797], David W. Blight, “Editor's Introduction: The Peculiar Dialogue Between Caleb Bingham and Frederick Douglass”, in Caleb Bingham, edited by David W. Blight, The Columbian Orator, Bicentennial Edition (1997 republishing), New York University Press, →ISBN

   Tudjman, the national father-figure, emerged as the improbable and unexpected victor of the wars of the Yugoslav succession of 1991-99.

   1999 December 13, Ian Traynor, “Obituary: Franjo Tudjman”, in The Guardian, UK, retrieved 08 Jul 2014