Book review: Do Fathers Matter?

My latest read: Do Fathers Matter?: What Science Is Telling Us About the Parent We’ve Overlooked. The author is an MIT graduate who has worked for decades as a science writer (Paul Raeburn background) and he does a great job summarizing the research frontier.

In most U.S. states the divorce system has an implicit presumption that a child’s interaction with the father should be cut back to an every-other-weekend experience (and in fact some states offer mothers a multi-million dollar cash incentive to become an official “primary parent”). For many children, especially if the mother decides to move to another state with the kids, this tends to dwindle down to no contact at all with the father. Raeburn gives some stats:

In 1960, only 11 percent of U.S. children lived apart from their fathers. By 2010, that figure had climbed to 27 percent. … Fewer fathers are living with or are in touch with their children now than at any time since the United States began keeping relatively reliable statistics. Those fathers who are separated, divorced, or never married—but who see their children regularly—are not likely to be involved in monitoring them or setting and enforcing rules, meaning they are not really playing a parental role.

Raeburn’s book is not about divorce, custody, or child support litigation, but it still is relevant to answering the question of “Is this a good idea for kids?”

It turns out that with most mammals, the answer would be “yes.” Other species evolved so that the fathers tended to wander off after contributing some genetic material. Why not in humans?

But they are among the most committed mammalian fathers of any species on Earth. There is no example of a human society in which fathers do not help raise the children. Admittedly, some fathers are better at this than others. Some abandon their families for other mates, and some for reasons we can never be quite sure of. But most human males, at the very least, put food on the table. It would be exciting to trace the evolution of fatherhood over the past few million years to find out whether men were always as invested in their children as they are now, or how that contribution might have changed over time. Did our earliest male ancestors put time, energy, and resources into offspring who would be heavily dependent on parental care for years to come? Or did they swiftly resume the search for other willing females, to multiply again and again, increasing the chance that some of their offspring would survive? And if so, when did that change, and why? Those are questions we will probably never answer. We’re not even sure exactly when, in the course of human evolution, males and females began to forge relationships with one another. But we have some hints, sifted from prehistoric remains examined by archaeologists and paleontologists. They tell us that among australopithecines—the earliest members of the human family, who lived 4 million to 1 million years ago—mates were involved enough for males to have provided food and care for infants and protection from predators. Long-term male-female relationships likely began with the appearance of Homo erectus about 1.5 million years ago. Fathers, mothers, and children slept together, so children could watch and learn from their fathers, and their fathers could protect them. In the Late Pleistocene period, about 120,000 years ago, men hunted for large game and often had multiple wives. They spent a lot of time in camp between hunts, and were often available to their children.

Note that we humans are never as unusual as we believe:

Experiments have shown that even in species in which fathers have little or nothing to do with their young, males can be coaxed to rise to the challenge of fatherhood. Stephen J. Suomi of the National Institutes of Health has spent his career working with rhesus monkeys. “They are probably one of the worst species to study the effects of fathers,” Suomi says. “The females won’t let them get near their kids. They chase them away. But even these monkeys can be good fathers when the opportunity arises. To make the point, Suomi points to a forty-year-old study by William K. Redican at the California Primate Research Center of the University of California, Davis. Redican removed infant rhesus monkeys from their mothers and left them with their fathers. Because fathers can’t nurse, Redican hand-fed the infants. He collected data on the fathers and infants for seven months, in the absence of mothers and peers. When they were no longer being chased away by the mothers, the males became remarkably good fathers. They did almost everything the females would do with two exceptions. One, of course, was that the fathers couldn’t nurse the infants. The other was that they played with the kids much more than females do. “Mothers don’t do much of that,” Suomi says.

Thus the modern experiment in producing fatherless children is in fact an experiment. We don’t have any guide from history as to what kind of a society we’ll end up with.

Raeburn reports on research showing that fathers are more important than mothers to children’s language development. Fathers interact with children in a different way:

“Fathers often use objects in an incongruous way,” writes Daniel Paquette of the University of Montreal. During rough-and-tumble play like this, fathers tend to use playful teasing to “destabilize children both emotionally and cognitively,” which children like—despite the seemingly ominous implications of the word “destabilizing.” It might not sound like a good idea, but this destabilization could have a critical function. It could be helping our children confront one of their principal challenges: the need to learn how to deal with unexpected events. Children’s need to be “stimulated, pushed and encouraged to take risks is as great as their need for stability and security,” says Paquette. He describes fathers as having an “activation relationship” with their children that “fosters children’s opening to the world.” Fathers’ unpredictability helps children learn to be brave in difficult situations or when meeting new people. In one study of one-year-olds taken to swimming class, researchers observed that fathers were more likely to stand behind their children, so that the children faced the water, while mothers tended to stand in front of the children, the better to make eye contact.

There are some practical tips for us dads:

Ross Parke thinks the way a father plays is the key to healthy development in kids. He says that when fathers exert too much control over the play, instead of responding to their children’s cues, their sons can have more difficulty with their peers. Daughters who were the most popular likewise enjoyed playing with their fathers and had the most “nondirective” fathers. The children of these fathers also tended to have easier transitions into elementary school. Children whose fathers took turns being the one to suggest activities and showed an interest in the child’s suggestions grew up to be less aggressive, more competent, and better liked. These were fathers who played actively with their children, but were not authoritarian; father and child engaged in give-and-take.

Why do fatherless daughters turn out the way that researchers have found? (see Father-Daughter Relationships by Professor Linda Nielsen for a good summary). Raeburn explains a theory from evolutionary biology:

For Hill and DelPriore, that was a tipoff that something entirely different was going on. “Researchers have revealed a robust association between father absence—both physical and psychological—and accelerated reproductive development and sexual risk-taking in daughters,” they wrote. You might expect sexual maturation to be deeply inscribed in teenagers’ genes, and not likely affected by something as arbitrary and unpredictable as whether or not they live in the same house as their fathers. But the association is quite clear. The problem comes in trying to explain it. How could a change in a girl’s environment—the departure of her father—influence something as central to biology as her reproductive development? I put that question to Hill. “When dad is absent,” she explained, “it basically provides young girls with a cue about what the future holds in terms of the mating system they are born into.” When a girl’s family is disrupted, and her father leaves or isn’t close to her, she gets the message that men don’t stay for long, and her partner might not stick around, either. So finding a man requires quick action. The sooner she’s ready to have children, the better. She can’t consciously decide to enter puberty earlier, but her biology takes over, subconsciously. She enters puberty earlier, gets pregnant sooner, and has more children quickly. “This would help facilitate what we call, in evolutionary sciences, a faster reproductive strategy,” Hill said.

Ellis quickly discovered that there was something about fathers that gave them a unique role in regulating their daughters’ development—especially their sexual development—around the time of puberty. In a series of studies beginning in 1999, he found that when girls had a warm relationship with their fathers and spent a lot of time with them in the first five to seven years of their lives, they had a reduced risk of early puberty, early initiation of sex, and teen pregnancy.

What about making the salad versus firing up the grill?

Speculation about the social behavior of humans before recorded history is difficult to prove or disprove; we might never know what happened. Yet division of labor according to gender “is a human universal,” true in all cultures, says the Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham. That means it would have appeared at least sixty thousand years ago, before humans began to spread around the world and diversify into those different cultures. … Women generally provide the staples and men the delicacies. One of the other notable features of their lives is that they pool their resources and share everything. … Researchers have looked for exceptions to this division of labor, but they haven’t found many. A study published in the 1970s looked at cooking and other family activities in 185 different cultures. It found that women did the cooking in 98 percent of those societies. … Even in the rare communities in which women did not do all the cooking, men cooked only for the community; women still cooked household meals. And the authors found one small exception in some of the groups: men often liked to cook meat.

How about child-rearing versus working?

It continued with the arrival of farming, some 10,000 years ago. Men tended the fields and women prepared the food. Women likewise provided most of the child care. The division of labor survived the establishment of the first nation-states about 5,000 years ago. … In that long prehistoric era, fathers taught their children how to work. Their children watched them work and often worked with them. … We no longer judge fathers exclusively on their ability to protect and educate their children, because we’ve turned those jobs over to the state. Instead, we judge fathers on their economic contributions to their families and on their caregiving. Fathers now earn the money they need to have someone else teach their children.

What do fathers do differently at home with the kids?

Annette Lareau, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, … found that fathers were not only important in family life, they dominated their families. “Fathers added color, fun, informality and ‘accent’ to family life. Mothers were likely to worry, chastise, and punish. Fathers were playful … We were repeatedly struck by the ways in which the fathers who participated in our study enlivened and lightened the tone of family life.”

Conclusion: A very readable summary of some interesting research with some practical implications for current fathers of children under the age of 18.

More: Read the book.