There is a tendency today to speak of 'parents' or 'carers' rather than 'mothers' or 'fathers'. People often say that the most important thing in raising children is to give them lots of love, something that all parents can do, regardless of whether they are a mother or a father. However, there are also many ways that mothers and fathers can bring unique strengths to their relationships with their children. In real people's lives, you can see these contributions, and they have been measured by social scientists. Fathers-just like mothers-always matter.
Two Heads are Better Than One
Richness of Care
A child who has both a mother and a father benefits from an increased richness of care. In other words, children with both a mother and a father can benefit from more caring, as well as a variety of caring styles.
Bridges to the World
Through their fathers and mothers, children have access to a vast network including grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, friends of the family, work colleagues, community organisations, faith communities, and even personal histories. Fathers and mothers provide 'bridges' to all these aspects of the outside world, providing more experiences for children as well as practical opportunities such as job possibilities.
Mothers Benefit from Fathers' Support
If a mother can count on her children's father to help with keeping the house clean and in good repair, caring for the children, paying the bills, and planning for the future, she probably will be a happier, more effective parent. The support a mother receives from her child's father can even help her be more competent and sensitive when feeding her baby. Mothers seem to gain the most security when they are married and know the father is committed to a lifelong relationship to her and their child.
Breadwinning
Today, most families rely upon the incomes of both mothers and fathers. However, fathers still provide the lion's share of income. Fathers are either the sole earners or the main earners in two-thirds of two-parent households. Moreover, fathers' earnings are uniquely linked to many positive results for children, even when mothers' earnings are taken into consideration.
Complementary Roles
It often is useful, as well as accurate, to generalize about average differences between men and women. Whether these differences are due more to inborn biological chemistry, or social pressures, or some combination of the two, is much debated.
It is generally agreed that men and women should no longer be regarded as 'opposites'. The important thing to remember is that mothers and fathers often bring different strengths and styles to their parenting roles. These roles complement each other, meaning that they are not interchangeable and are each necessary for healthy childtraining
'Do fathers and mothers have different styles of play? Consider these two examples: a father picks up his son, seven-month-old David, tosses him in the air, and throws his head back so that he and David are face to face. As David giggles and chortles, his father lowers him, shakes him, and tosses him up in the air again. A mother sits her daughter, ten-month-old Lisa, on her lap and pulls out her favourite toy, a green donkey that brays when you squeeze it. Lisa smiles, and for the next few minutes her mother moves the donkey in front of Lisa's eyes, makes it bray, and talks and sings to her daughter. Lisa watches intently, smiles, and occasionally reaches for her donkey. Are these examples merely cultural stereotypes, or do mothers and fathers really play with their babies in different ways? A series of studies confirm that differences in parental play styles do exist.'
From the book Fatherhood, by Ross Parke
How Fathers Influence
Children As They Grow
In the past, psychologists studying the development of children focused almost exclusively on children's relationships with their mothers. Today, they have come to agree that fathers play a unique and crucial role in nurturing and guiding children's development. Many experts now believe that fathers can be just as nurturing and sensitive with their babies as mothers. As their children grow, fathers take on added roles of guiding their children's intellectual and social development. Even when a father is 'just playing' with his children, he is nurturing their development.
Fathers and Babies
Babies need predictability and security, which they get when their mother and father respond consistently, promptly, and appropriately to their cries, smiles and other signals. As a baby develops a relationship with his or her mother and father, he comes to prefer them to other adults, in a process known as attachment. Psychologists agree that babies with secure attachments to their parents have better chances to develop into happy, successful, and well-adjusted children and adults. Mothers tend to be relied upon more than fathers for the comfort and security components of attachment, primarily because they are usually the infant's main caregiver. Babies also form attachments to their fathers, who tend to be just as responsive to their babies' bids for attention as mothers. When fathers spend more time with their babies, they get to know exactly what each of their baby's signals mean. This familiarity allows fathers to respond sensitively, meaning that they know when their baby is hungry rather than when he just wants a change of scenery.
The effects of attachment on children are broad and long-lasting. For example, one study found that primary school children scored higher on tests of empathy-the ability to see a situation from another person's viewpoint-if they had secure attachments to their fathers during infancy. These children were able to recognize how other children felt and took steps to make them feel better.
Both mothers and fathers encourage their babies to investigate the world, manipulate objects, and explore physical relationships. However, mothers and fathers have different styles of relating. Mothers tend to speak soothingly and softly in repetitive rhythms to their infants and snugly hold them. Fathers tend to provide more verbal and physical stimulation, by patting their babies gently and communicating to them with sharp bursts of sound. As babies grow older, many come to prefer playing with their fathers who provide unpredictable, stimulating, and exciting interaction. This stimulation is important because it fosters healthy development of the baby's brain and can have lasting effects on children's social, emotional, and intellectual development. Infants with involved fathers tend to score higher on tests of thinking skills and brain development.
Both the mother and the father are important to an infant's development in special ways. For example, in one study, baby boys whose fathers engaged in physically playful, affectionate and stimulating play during infancy were more popular later as school children. Mothers influenced their sons' popularity through a different route, by providing verbal stimulation
Fathers and Small Children
When babies become toddlers, parents must go beyond nurturing them and begin to address two additional needs: supporting their toddler's exploration and setting appropriate limits for the child. Through playing with their toddlers, fathers take a special role in achieving these two goals. Children learn from them how to solve problems and how to get along with others.
Fathers spend a larger proportion of their time playing with their young children than mothers do, and they tend to be more boisterous and active in their play. Most children enjoy this kind of play. Even if their fathers spend less time with them than their mothers, fathers become salient, or meaningful and special, to their children through play.
When fathers play with their toddlers, they are not just entertaining them. They are providing a safe, yet challenging arena for toddlers to learn how to interact with the world and with others. Through rough-and-tumble play, fathers create obstacles for their children and demand respect for limits and boundaries. At the same time, they challenge their children and encourage them to explore their own strength, their ability to do new things, and their impact on the world around them. Toddlers who must work out for themselves how to achieve goals-such as retrieving a ball that is just out of reach in their father's hand or wrestling their father to the ground-are practicing important problem-solving skills. In fact, when fathers are good at playing with their young children, these children score higher on tests of thinking and problem-solving skills.
Playing with fathers also helps children develop emotional knowledge, so that they can identify their own emotions, acknowledge the emotional experiences of others, and describe the causes of emotions. Toddlers must also learn emotional regulation, the ability to express emotions responsibly and control their behaviour. To understand how much emotional regulation develops during early childhood, one can picture a toddler in the midst of an angry temper tantrum, holding his breath until he gets his way. Contrast this with a four-year-old who feels frustrated that the rain has ruined his plans to play football, yet moves beyond those feelings and engages in a board game with his sister instead. When children understand their emotions and know how to control them, it makes them more popular with other children.
The father's influence on emotional development is not limited to play, but also comes through direct teaching and daily interaction. Studies have shown that, when fathers are affectionate and helpful, their children are more likely to get on well with their brothers and sisters. When children have fathers who are emotionally involved-that is, they acknowledge their children's emotions and help them deal with bad emotions-they score higher on tests of 'emotional intelligence'. Moreover, they tend to have better relationships with other children and behave less aggressively. Fathers' involvement in their young children's care can even last well into adulthood. Mothers seem to have much less impact in this area of emotional regulation and peer relationships than fathers. It really is fathers who can have a major influence on helping their children build strong social relationships during childhood and later in life.
