Fatherneed: Why Father Care Is as Essential as Mother Care for Your Child

Kyle D. Pruett, M.D.

 Research

…shows that kids yearn deeply for dads. Infants in the first months of life can tell the difference between a mother’s and father’s style of care. Furthermore, children thrive when they experience those different styles throughout all the developmental stages of life. Developmental research clearly shows that children are born with a drive to find and connect to their fathers, and fathers have the internal capacity, the instinct, to respond. Children and fathers hunger for each other early, often, and for a very long time. [p. 2]

An infant’s capacity to recognize father care in its own right so early in life alerts us to how critical connecting to the father is to the healthy development of the child. And this is only the beginning. Children often utter their word (or sound) for “father” before their “mother” word, and no one really knows why. Is it because the mother and child are so close that the mother does not need a name whereas the slightly more separate father entity does? By the time kids can walk and talk, they search out their father on their own. [p. 8]

Infants who have time alone with dad show richer social and exploratory behavior than children not exposed to such experiences. They smile more frequently in general, and they more frequently present toys to their dad. They also spend more time looking at and manipulating objects as part of heightened exploratory behavior. [p. 20]

Since parenting is largely about solving problems as lovingly as possible for any given parent-child pair and since we acknowledge that men and women differ in the ways they solve problems, we can conclude that fathers and mothers have equal, if slightly different, parenting abilities…”With the exception of lactation,” writes Michael Lamb “there is no evidence that women are biologically predisposed to be better parents than men are. Social convention, not biological imperatives, underlie the traditional division of parental responsibilities.” [p. 23]

 …there are intriguing findings from child development studies that prove father care is necessary to the developing child from the first months of life. We already know that human development wastes little time or energy while promoting its own development, and the observable reality that infants only weeks old show interest in their father means that father care has its role in helping babies become fully human. [p. 25]

Here is what we know about the child’s interest in the father, beginning from the first weeks and months of life: [p. 25-26]

By six weeks of age, infants can distinguish their father’s voice from their mother’s voice. While a quiet and alert infant will attend more quickly to mother’s voice, an upset or fretting infant will calm more readily to the father’s voice.

By eight weeks, infants can anticipate differences in maternal and paternal handling styles. Pediatrician and researcher Michael Yogman’s split-screen video studies at Boston Children’s Hospital of the responses of alert, comfortable infants to the approach of their mother and father are still disarming twenty years later. When infants were approached by their mother, they slowed and regulated their heart and respiratory rates, relaxed their shoulders, and lowered their eyelids (Ahh…Mom). When the father approached, the infant’s heart and respiratory rates quickened, shoulders hunched up, and eyes widened and brightened (Dad’s here…party time!).

Toward the end of the first year, infants protest separations from mother or father less if they have an involved father. In fact, the infant’s ability to connect with the father delays the onset of separation protest in general.

Toddlers seek out and seem to join in the father’s more playful, more robust, less predictable style of play. Boston psychoanalyst James Herzog finds children of this age seem attuned to and anticipate the disruptive, stimulating nature of such play.

As Rob Reiner states succinctly in his I Am Your Child campaign, “The first years last forever.” [p. 41]

Adaptive and Problem-Solving Abilities

Infants who have been well fathered during the first eighteen to twenty-four months of life are more secure that those who were not in exploring the world around them, and they do so with vigor and interest. They tend to be more curious and less hesitant or fearful, especially in the face of novel or unusual stimuli. The combination of the fathers’ more active play initiation and his somewhat less immediate support in the face of frustration promotes adaptive and problem-solving competencies in the child…Research by Henry Biller and Frank Pederson explores these interesting predilections of fathers to show that by the time children of involved fathers are ready for school, they tend to have greater tolerance for stress and frustration… [p. 41-42]

Strengthened Cognitive Capacities

 In the early 1960’s psychologist Ellen Bing initiated one of the first studies ever of the effect on children of time spent with their fathers. Its findings surprised even the author. Bing found that the amount of time fathers spend reading to their children is a strong predictor for many cognitive abilities, particularly of daughters’ high verbal skills. Equally surprising is the finding that the amount of time mothers spend reading to children predicts neither daughters’ nor sons’ verbal ability, suggesting that there is something unique or characteristic about father-daughter reading time. [p. 43]

Another important investigation, by Norma Radin, compares preschool children of highly involved dads with preschoolers with less involved fathers. Radin found that both sons and daughters of the dad-involved group had higher levels of verbal skills. [p. 43]

Michael Lamb studied a group of preschool children of positively engaged fathers and recorded more cognitive competence on standardized intellectual assessments than for children of unengaged or negatively engaged fathers. Pediatrician Scott Nugent of Boston’s Children’s Hospital evaluated the degree of paternal engagement in the month following birth and at one-year follow-up and discovered strong positive effects of that paternal engagement on the strength of the infants cognitive functioning. [p. 44]

…Father-deprived children seem to have trouble solving the more complex mathematical and puzzle tasks. (Henry) Biller found a trend among fathers to spend more energy and time stimulating mathematical thinking in their sons than in their daughters. Norma Radin found a positive association between father involvement and their preschool daughters’ competence in mathematics. [p. 45]

Capacity for Attachment

…(Jay) Belsky found that fathers of securely attached infants (i.e. infants who can tolerate brief separations from their father without getting too upset or disorganized emotionally) tend to be more extroverted and agreeable in personality style and behavior than fathers of insecurely connected infants. [p. 47]

Frank Pedersen found that at one year of age infants whose fathers provided extensive care in the intermittent absence of the mother show higher rates of responding to their fathers and more frequent instances of exploratory and social behavior than children of less engaged fathers. These are babies who seem to enjoy initiating contact with their father by handing him a toy or by smiling and vocalizing; they then wait expectantly, confident that they will get a response from him. These infants smile more frequently at their father, show higher rated of face-to-face and general visual contact, and heightened exploratory behavior…Further benefits are seen in these infants’ desire to approach individuals other than their parents and in their competence in doing so. [p. 47]

…Michael Cox reviewed a large body of research to sort out the impact of variations in paternal behavior on infant attachment. He concluded that fathers who are affectionate, have positive attitudes, and spend more time with their three-month-olds, are more likely to have securely attached infants at twelve months than fathers who are more negative and distant. [p.47]

Empathy

…it was found that of the various qualities of maternal and paternal behavior the children were exposed to at age five, the strongest predictor of a child’s empathic concern for others in adult life was a high level of paternal child care. [p. 48]

…Sons of fathers who took more responsibility for limit setting, discipline, and helping their child with personal problems and schoolwork had significantly higher empathy scores. [p. 48]

Absence of Gender Role Stereotyping

Norma Radin’s study of school behavior outcomes among preschool kids whose fathers performed 40 percent or more of the in-family child care showed less gender role stereotyping in the kids’ choices of friends and in their overall social and behavioral expectations of their peers than children whose fathers were less involved in their care. [p. 49]

Self-Control

Psychologist Walter Mischel found young children with positively involved fathering displayed less impulsivity and more self-control, particularly in unfamiliar social situations than young children with negatively or uninvolved fathers…In a related study, (Martin Hoffman) found that boys with strong father identification scored higher on measures of internal control and conformity to rules; those with weaker feelings of paternal identification had more trouble with moral judgments and nonconformity. [p. 50]

Educational psychologist Paul Amato evaluated the sense of self-control in elementary and high school children and found positive paternal engagement to be related to a whole cluster of healthy outcomes including life skills, self-esteem, and overall social competence. [p. 51]

Moral Sensitivity

In one of the more highly regarded, scientifically rigorous outcome studies of the correlation between moral behavior of children and paternal engagement, psychologists Mosley and Thompson found that positive paternal engagement, for boys and girls, is closely associated with: a lower incidence of acting out, disruptive behavior, depression, sadness, and lying; higher sociability through complying with parents’ wishes, getting along with others, and being responsible; boys having fewer school behavior problems; and girls having more cheerful and happy interchanges, greater capacity for positive self-involvement, and greater willingness to try new things.

These results are especially compelling because it was statistically possible to isolate the father effects from the mother effects with unusual clarity. Bottom line: positive father care is associated with more pro-social, and positive moral behavior overall in boys and girls. [p. 52]

Physical Development

 Ross Parke studied how a child’s physical development responds to involved fathering. Infants’ scores on assessments of intellectual and motor, or physical, competencies are higher if fathers are actively involved during the first six months of their child’s life. The father’s tendency to activate his child in their interactions encourages and supports the child’s pleasurable discovery of his own body. [p. 53]

Summary

 How does involved fatherhood actually go about shaping a child’s growth and maturation, and what makes it so influential? Father influences may be especially important precisely because they are influences not of the mother. A dad begins to enhance his child’s maturation and autonomy by balancing the powerful pull toward the mother; he does this merely by being an interesting non-mother partner in his own right. His very differences from the mother as a physical being – his smells, textures, voice, rhythms, size – promote an awareness in his child that it is okay to be different and okay to desire and love the inherently different, the not-mother entities of this world. A father’s separateness from the mother, in combination with his constancy, gives the child a safe haven in the storms over autonomy that blow up so fiercely in the second year of life. [p. 56-57]

Dads offer intriguing and exciting imitative opportunities for safe and loving social interactions with a not-mother entity. This shores up self-regard and self-confidence when it matters most, in the early formation of personality. Fathers also offer older children an opportunity to explore and interact with the essence of maleness itself and to explore male-female differences. For boys it fascinates and comforts because the father’s maleness is “the same as, but still of me,” and for girls it intrigues and excites because it is “different than, but still of me.” [p. 57]

Fathers promote children’s acceptance of the real world by emotionally taking them to the mountain, teaching them to climb, showing them the world, and, over time, showing them the way through and around it. Even when men serve as primary caregivers, this role stays in their hands, and children seem to count on them to fulfill that emotional promise to get them, safe and whole, into the real world beyond their mother’s arms. [p. 57]

“…parenthood is not a contract and you cannot break it. The law’s attempt to achieve the civil death of a non-custodial parent is foolish and destructive.” Margaret Mead [p. 102]

Sondra was eight when her parents divorced. Although she feels bad, she thinks her parents should not fight over who gets more time with her: “Because they both made me and own me. I belong to both of them, don’t I?” What a clear statement that children are a relational asset to both their parents and that they should share and protect this resource even after divorce. [p. 105]

Gatekeeping

A father’s involvement with his children, especially his young children, when it matters most, is powerfully contingent on the mother’s attitude toward, and the expectations of, support from him. The National Survey of Families and Households found that mothers’ characteristics outweighed fathers’ characteristics with regard to predicting father involvement with their children! Responsible mothering, by definition, means support of the father-child bond. [p. 151]

Single Mothers

 …all children have fathers; whether they know them or not, they have them. All children learn eventually the mystery of their own beginnings. From their own understandings of where babies come from, they know that they could not be here if there was no father. And so they conclude that there’s got to be one for them, somewhere. …Kids know the numbers, as is clear by what five-year-old Jake screamed painfully to his grandmother, who told him he didn’t have a daddy: “You lie, Gamma, you lie big! It takes two people to make one.” [p. 158]

 The need for a father is so strong in children that they make one up if they don’t have one. And they spend a lot of energy looking. A kid will use almost any marginally substitute (sometimes to the mothers alarm). Useful though these substitutes are, they are never really sufficient. [p. 158]

 When it comes to choosing to raise a child without a father, the statistics are sobering: fatherless kids are more prone to depression than kids with a father, are twice as likely to be school dropouts, do less well and are more violent when in school, abuse more drugs, are more criminally active, try (and succeed at) suicide more often, and are at high risk for becoming teenage parents… [p. 158]

 …Penelope Leach tells it like it is: “Why is it socially reprehensible for a man to leave a baby fatherless, but courageous, or admirable, for a women to have a baby whom she knows will be so?” [p. 159]

 …we cannot ignore the fact that raising a boy without an involved father in the home raises the statistical probability of his becoming violent. Boys in school who are violent are eleven times more likely to be living without a father. [p. 159]

Fatherneed and Justice

 …paternity establishment serves everyone well – child, father, and mother. The man is subsequently the legal father of his child, with all the responsibilities and rights of any father, married or not. He can raise issues of custody and visitation, and he can participate actively in health, schooling, and residency decisions affecting his child. He is expected to supply child support and health care insurance, all the things children have a right to expect from their father. [p. 199]