More than money: Father love and fathers’ and children’s wellbeing

There’s one prevalent social and cultural view of what it means to be a “good dad,” I would argue. Good dads pay; that is, they are financially responsible for their children. “Bad” or “deadbeat” dads, rich or poor but disproportionately poor, don’t. A dad who’s financially responsible for his children never gets called out for not spending enough quality time with them. Think of presidents, CEOs, doctors, lawyers, and other high-income professionals. These men probably work long hours and thus have little to no time with their children, yet they are not necessarily seen as “deadbeat” dads. In contrast, a “poor” dad who does all the childcare and is knee-deep in the day-to-day of parenting—attending to minor bruises, bathing, reading, calming his children’s fears—but does not financially provide for his children is often seen as a “deadbeat” dad.

Why? The simple answer is that dads are seen as first earners and a distant second as nurturers. This view is reflected in our social and cultural norms and policies. Fathers who fail to meet their child support obligations can go to jail; nothing of legal consequence happens to fathers who do not provide emotional support to their children. In fact, visitation is not a required counterpart to child support awards.

The opposite expectations often apply to mothers. Although most mothers with children under age 5 work at least part-time outside the home, they are not valued for their financial contribution to the household; rather, they’re valued for their emotional and caregiving support. Mothers who fail to provide emotional support are often seen as terrible parents. Although fathers are parents, too, we continue to expect mothers to be first nurturers and then earners. Mothers who quit their jobs to stay home with their children are seen as fulfilling their expected and valued role. On the rare occasions when fathers quit their jobs to spend time with their kids, they do so because they are financially secure and can afford the time off from the labor force. We would never accept a poor dad quitting his minimum-wage job because he believed his children needed more of his time and attention. The double standard is clear: a father’s financial provision compensates, in the eyes of society, for limited or no caregiving, whereas a father’s caregiving may not compensate for his inability to provide financially.

The social and cultural dichotomy of fathers as earners first and then nurturers is at odds with fathers’ own views of what it means to be a “good” dad. Contemporary fathers in the United States and perhaps across the world have embraced, to different degrees, both dimensions of being a “good dad”: being a nurturer and being an earner. The empirical evidence supports that both dimensions of fatherhood are key to rearing happy and socially adjusted children as well as happy men. The dissonance between how fathers view themselves and what social and cultural institutions expect of them not only threatens to undermine the wellbeing of families but also perpetuates the frustration fathers feel when they’re just seen as “cash cows.” In this commentary, I make the case that science, programs, and public policies need to meet fathers where they are—providing emotional and financial support for their children—and implement policies and programs that value and support their efforts.

A few caveats to keep in mind as you read this commentary. First, I focus on fathers of young children because this period of development is the most researched and the most consequential for the policies and programs that are currently in place. To be sure, fathers’ relationships with their children encompass the life span. Fathers never stop parenting their children. The science on what fathers’ parenting looks like across the life span, however, is in its infancy, and we know little about how it impacts adult children’s wellbeing. Second, I don’t discuss how healthy and positive relationships with children that endure over time also have a meaningful impact on men’s health and wellbeing. This is an important topic that deserves more attention than it gets. Third, I have also not included any discussion of how engaged and loving fathers have a measurable impact on the communities where they live, in terms of crime reduction, neighborhood safety, etc. This is also a very consequential topic that doesn’t get enough attention. Loving and engaged fathers are good for families, children, and the larger community. I focus here only on the impact they have on their children’s wellbeing.

Who are dads?

Dads come in all shapes and sizes: same-sex, single, married, partnered, adoptive, and biological. According to the U.S. Census, roughly 6 in 10 men (61.6%) in the United States are fathers. Over 1 in 4 men have a biological child under the age of 18, and approximately 3 out of 4 of them live with their minor children. Approximately 73% of fathers are married, 13% are divorced, 3% are widowed, 2% are separated, and 8% have never married. According to a 2023 report by the Pew Research Center, from 1972 to 2022 there was a decline (from 85% to 55%) in the proportion of men who were the primary or sole breadwinner. During this same period, marriages in which both the wife and husband earn roughly equal shares of the family’s income also increased from 11% to 29%. Not surprisingly, we’ve also seen a corresponding increase in stay-at-home fathers, who represented 18% of stay-at-home parents in 2021, up from 11% in 1989. Moreover, these numbers seem to be increasing. While national data on the impact that taking care of children has on parents’ sense of wellbeing are not available, a 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that in 2022, 85% of fathers and 88% of mothers with children under the age of 18 said that being a parent was either the most important or one of the most important aspects of their identity. And in 2024, another survey by the same organization found that more young adult men (ages 18–34) than young adult women wanted to be parents someday. These trends have been observed across the globe and not just in North America. Taken together, these statistics challenge the view that fathers are mostly earners. Instead, they suggest that children today are being reared by fathers who provide both financial and emotional support.

What does it mean to be a “good” dad?

Almost all men we interview for our studies view being an earner and a nurturer as two sides of the same coin. Their idea of being a “good dad” is to support their children financially and “be there” for them, for the “big” (e.g., skipped school) and “little” stuff (e.g., a school recital).

They often feel frustrated that their long hours at work or their multiple jobs leave them little if any time to spend with their children. A father participating in one of our studies aimed at understanding how much time fathers spend with their children asked the interviewer, somewhat exasperated, “So, when are you going to ask me how many jobs I have so I can support my family?” Another dad of a two-year-old girl said that when she was born, he took another shift at work to help pay for the extra expenses. But soon he realized that he was just paying for her and not spending any time with her, as he left in the morning before she woke up and returned home after she went to sleep. So, he and his wife decided to put their child to bed earlier and then wake her up at 11 p.m. when he returned so he could have some “daddy time” with her.

Contemporary fathers are not blind to the “cost” of being an emotionally supportive father and many are willing to pay it. Aside from the financial burden—expenditures connected to food, shelter, clothing, medicine, toys, etc.—the men we interviewed acknowledged the emotional and social cost. One dad said that when he became a dad, he got very little support from his friends. He was no longer included in many social activities, and they didn’t prioritize his obligations as a dad. Another dad who participated in our intervention said that he realized that being a good dad requires a lot of patience and self-regulation as he could no longer do all the things he was used to doing before his children were born. He felt that his child motivated him to be a better person by giving up “bad habits,” confronting his fears, and being less selfish. Often, dads feel criticized for not doing better and not supported enough for what they’re trying to do. By the same token, many fathers don’t think they need help. A director of a program for fathers sponsored by Healthy Start told me that fathers don’t come to any “parenting” programs open to them because they don’t think they’re for them.

Being an engaged parent is very challenging for everyone, and it’s even more so for men with few economic resources. Fulfilling their desire to be “good dads” is a tall order and a source of stress and anxiety for many fathers. This is especially true for the lowest-paid workers—those earning in the bottom quarter of the earnings distribution—and, in some ironic ways, for the highest earners. Particularly in a child’s first year of life, fathers can miss out on important milestones and opportunities to bond with their babies when working multiple jobs for many hours. A dad told us how he really hadn’t seen his baby since birth because he leaves the house for his first shift at 5 a.m. when his child is asleep and returns after his second shift, which ends close to midnight. Weekends can be better, but when there is overtime, he takes most of it so his partner can be at home with their child. One participant in our study told us that working and taking care of children is a consistent source of stress: “…once I get out of work I pick him up from her [grandmother’s] house … and once we get home, we cook something, and then it is already too late to go out, so I can’t take him out [to the park]; it is 7 or 8:30 p.m.” Another man told us that as his children got older, the long hours at work meant little contact with them and little time to monitor them. Soon, one of his sons joined a gang and got killed, leaving him with a grandchild. He was convinced that what got his son killed was the fact that he and his wife were always working and could not properly monitor and supervise him. He vowed not to make the same mistake with his grandchild; he has taken another job so his wife can quit her job and stay home to take care of their grandson.

Of course, balancing long workdays and family is not just the plight of poor men. Men at the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum also work long hours (usually in one job), but they typically have more flexibility to make choices that serve their families. Alex Williams, in an article for the New York Times, wrote in 2012 about the increasing number of (mostly professional) fathers who have chosen to leave their 70- to 90-hour-a-week jobs to raise their children. Although few fathers stay home to take care of their children, particularly among fathers with higher levels of education, many have jobs that offer flexible time or allow work partly at home. This flexibility gives them opportunities to be a much more consistent presence in their children’s lives, in ways that children value most—such as attending a recital or a swim meet, accompanying children on a school trip, watching a soccer game, and attending teacher conferences. A 2015 article by Andrew Moravcsik, in the Atlantic, discussed his choice to put his prestigious career as a college professor on hold and put his wife’s career first so that he could stay home and take care of the children. Moravcsik was able to quit his job and become the “lead” parent when his older son got mixed up with bad company. The boy was skipping school, failing some classes, and even got arrested. Moravcsik reasoned that more money or more “things” were not what his son needed most: more meaningful parental involvement, which he could afford, was what his son needed.

These calculations and decisions are out of reach for most poor men. Leaving work early or even quitting to provide close supervision for a child who might be going astray is economically prohibitive for poor dads. Low-income men who work spend little time at home and run the risk of becoming estranged from their families. Some men in this position tend to disengage from their families over time, which can decrease both the financial and emotional support they provide. One of the men we interviewed became estranged from his family by working long hours and getting in trouble with the police. Upon release from his incarceration, he tried to reach out to his 9-year-old daughter, but she wanted nothing to do with him.

How are fathers important for children’s development?

Although mothers are still doing more of the household chores, including childcare, fathers’ share of housework has steadily increased for many reasons, including a narrowing gender wage gap. Analyses from the American Time Use Survey found that over the last fifty years (from 1965 to 2016), fathers’ time spent on childcare more than tripled (from 2.5 to more than 8 hours/week). The gap between mothers and fathers in hours spent in childcare and household tasks is smaller when both parents work full-time than when men are the sole breadwinners. Fathers are more involved than ever before in early learning activities such as playing, reading, singing, drawing, or telling stories. In 2024, almost 3 in 5 fathers (57.6%) in the UK played and about 1 in 2 (47.4%) read with their child every day.

In our own research with smaller samples of fathers of young children, we find that fathers report being very much involved in the day-to-day aspects of their children’s lives, including caregiving, putting children to bed, bathing, reading and playing. For the most part, men enjoy these activities with their children, noting how children grow so fast, and how important it is to spend time with them. In fact, many fathers who participated in several focus groups say that they’d like to spend more time with their children than their work obligations allow.

In many ways, the view that fathers’ main impact on children’s development is through their financial contributions alone was inadvertently supported by earlier research on parenting that included mostly mothers and concluded that fathers had no independent effect on children’s development and that once you captured the mother’s contribution, you pretty much got the fathers’ as well. A pivotal moment in understanding how fathers matter for children, independently of or in addition to mothers, came with the availability of data. Not just trend data, but observational data on father-child interactions that came from small-scale studies. In the 30 years since national and small-scale data sources became available, we’ve learned a great deal about how and why the father-child relationship is an important contributor to happy and socially adjusted children.

A caveat about the empirical evidence. Most research on how and why fathers matter for children is still done in disciplinary silos: Developmental scientists like me focus on father-child relationships and don’t always account for the financial contribution, while sociological or economic research typically focuses on financial contribution and rarely accounts for the quality of the father-child relationship. In our book, “How Fathers Help Their Children Develop: Money and Love,” written with my colleague Ron Mincy, we review the empirical data and present new information showing that both money and love matter for children’s development. Below, I highlight the main findings to give you a sense of the importance of fathers’ emotional contribution to children’s development. Overall, the research shows that fathers’ spending time with their children in various activities has short- and long-term effects on children’s social adjustment and learning. These effects are unique and independent of mothers’ contribution, and they’re consistently associated with children’s better outcomes across an array of developmental domains.

The most important ingredient to rearing happy and adjusted children is their relationships with their parents. From the start, children do better when they have secure, predictable relationships with their mothers and fathers. Loving and consistent father-child relationships provide children with both safety when distressed and security to explore their environment. The opposite also holds: young children who don’t have secure relationships with their fathers tend to act out more and show signs of internalizing behaviors such as sadness or anxiety. Fathers tend to be a little different from mothers in that they encourage children to take more calculated risks in play that get them out of their comfort zone, explore unfamiliar situations, develop skills, and build autonomy, all of which are skills children need to learn in school, make friends, and deal with adversity.

Another marker of an effective parent is the degree of sensitivity—recognizing children’s signals, understanding their needs, taking their perspective, and responding appropriately and promptly—that fathers show in their interactions with children. Fathers can be as sensitive to infants’ needs as mothers. When children experience sensitive fathering, they are more likely to have stronger language skills and executive function, be emotionally regulated, and show fewer behavior problems. Children with these attributes are, in turn, easier to parent, which then elicits more positive parenting. Warmth and affection are central to positive father-child relationships and are associated with children’s prosocial behavior, including sympathy and helping.

Not surprisingly, any type of play—physical, pretend, rough-and-tumble—is central to children’s development and father-child relationships because it is loaded with opportunities for enjoyment, learning, cognitive, and socioemotional development. It is also just fun! Playful fathers are flexible, experiment with ideas, and encourage children’s imagination. Play also changes in nature as children get older. Physical activities such as bouncing, tickling, chasing, and rough-and-tumble play are common in infancy and toddlerhood, while preschoolers’ growing cognitive, linguistic, and social abilities support increasingly imaginative and cognitively complex play. Studies find that playful father-child interactions are linked to children’s lower anxiety and negativity, better emotion regulation, fewer behavior problems, and stronger vocabulary skills. Physical play, including rough-and-tumble play or play fighting, provides opportunities for children to practice emotional regulation, recognize others’ emotional states, and respond sensitively to others’ needs. During play, fathers can model prosocial behavior and respect for others by managing excitement, frustration, and conflict. Lastly, responsive interactions between children and fathers in rich literacy activities including reading, singing, storytelling, and stimulating play can support early cognitive, literacy, and mathematical skills, particularly for boys and children with disabilities.

A consequential finding is that fathers provide distinctive linguistic experiences, including more diverse vocabulary and complex speech. Social and public anecdotes, including “dad jokes,” sometimes suggest that fathers who speak to children in full, complex sentences and challenge them to clearly articulate what they need or want, rather than accept gibberish, are clueless to their children’s needs and unsupportive of language development. The empirical evidence, however, concludes otherwise. Father sensitivity has been found to predict children’s language skills at age 3. Fathers’ linguistic interactions with children during play and everyday activities are robustly associated with better vocabulary and comprehension. In our lab and others, we find that fathers who read to their children frequently and challenge them linguistically through complex grammar and diverse vocabulary have children with stronger vocabulary skills than children whose fathers do not. The quality of father-child interactions also matters beyond just reading frequently or language input itself. Fathers’ supportive behavior, including responding to children’s cues and asking wh-questions, has been associated with stronger receptive and expressive language at ages 2 and 3. Similarly, fathers’ playful, imaginative interactions with toddlers have been linked to stronger vocabulary skills in prekindergarten. Fathers’ impact begins early in their children’s lives. Studies have found that when fathers respond to their infants’ bids for attention promptly and meaningfully—serve-and-return interactions—their children are observed to have better language skills later in development.

The evidence discussed here points to one overall conclusion: father-child relationships support development through interconnected processes: emotional security, playful engagement, and learning-oriented interactions. Warmth and sensitivity provide a secure foundation for exploration; play creates opportunities to develop social, emotional, and cognitive skills; and responsive teaching and linguistically rich interactions support cognitive, academic, and language development. The research also suggests that paternal behaviors should be evaluated in context, with attention to children’s developmental stages, family circumstances, and the quality of the broader relationship.

What’s next

Today’s fathers are motivated to be “good dads” in ways that go beyond supporting their children financially. The emotional support they provide children is consistently and significantly related to children’s wellbeing in all aspects of development. Happy and engaged dads make for happy and engaged kids. Fathers need support, validation, and acknowledgment that loving their children is just as important as providing for them. Top policy priorities to help fathers and children thrive should include paid family leave, flexible work arrangements, parenting programs that include both parents, and subsidized childcare.
 

Natasha J. Cabrera

Professor, University of Maryland