New research provides some of the most conclusive evidence to date of fathers’ importance to children’s outcomes. The study reinforces the idea that early childhood programs such as Head Start should focus on the whole family—both mothers and fathers.
“There’s this whole idea that grew out of past research that dads really don’t have direct effects on their kids, that they just kind of create the tone for the household and that moms are the ones who affect their children’s development,” says Claire Vallotton, associate professor at Michigan State University and primary investigator on the research project.
“But here we show that fathers really do have a direct effect on kids, both in the short term and long term.”
The effects include language and cognitive growth in toddlerhood to social skills in fifth grade, according to the research, which appears in the journals Early Childhood Research Quarterly and Infant and Child Development.
Dad’s Stress
Using data from about 730 families that participated in a survey of Early Head Start programs at 17 sites across the nation, the researchers investigated the effects of parents’ stress and mental health problems such as depression on their children. Parental stress and mental health issues affect how parents interact with their children and, subsequently, childhood development.
The study found that fathers’ parenting-related stress had a harmful effect on their children’s cognitive and language development when the children were 2 to 3 years old, even when the mothers’ influences were taken into account. This impact varied by gender—fathers’ influence, for example, had a larger effect on boys’ language than girls’ language.
