ResearchFatherhood & Family, Mental Health, Black Boys & Men
Dads Rock: The Evidence
SUMMARY
The evidence is clear: Dads matter; they are doing more fathering than ever; they bring something extra to parenting; and they want to do more.
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1. Dads matter
Fathers have a direct, positive impact on the social, emotional, and cognitive development of their children, and this shows up in measures of educational achievement, social skills, and long-term mental health.¹⁻⁴ While fathers do more paid work, and perform less childcare overall than mothers, they play a unique and complementary role in child raising.
While they play an essential role at all stages of a child’s life from infancy to adulthood, their presence seems especially influential as they grow older. A father’s closeness to his child in middle childhood and adolescence protects against loneliness and depressive symptoms, particularly in girls.⁵ Sixteen-year-old girls who are close to their fathers have better mental health at 33.⁶ Controlling for many other factors, the adolescent delinquency rate for boys is lower when they have involved fathers.⁷ As Anna Machin, a scholar of fatherhood, writes:
[M]any dads in the West really step into their role during late childhood and adolescence, particularly when the time comes to teach their children. It’s that all-important role in preparing children to step into the big wide world.⁸
2. Dads are doing more
Since the 1960s, the time fathers spend with their children has increased by over 250%. As mothers have entered the labor force in greater numbers, fathers have reduced the average amount of time they spend in paid work, and increased the time they spend completing household activities and caring for their children.
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DATA NOTE
3. Dads parent a bit differently, and that’s good
While fathers are often considered “secondary caregivers” for their children, “helping” mothers or even “babysitting” their own children, this hugely downplays their role and the significant impacts they can have. Moreover, they play a unique role: sociologist David Eggebeen shows that 42% of parental inputs were “additive” (i.e., that even when the activities of each parent were similar, they nevertheless provide a cumulative benefit), 12% were redundant, and 22% were unique—that is, they came only from the father or mother.⁹
There are some things that fathers are especially good at providing their children. As William Jeynes, author of a meta-analysis on the role of fathers, writes, while mothers tend to be “more nurturing in their relationships with children, fathers tend to be more involved in preparing children to deal with life.”¹⁰ And they tend to do this through play, teaching, challenging, and modeling behavior.
Play: Dads spend a larger percentage of their time with children engaged in play, as shown in Figure 2. While the idea of Dads as the “play parent” is often used as a negative criticism, it is better to see it as a positive contribution. Play is critical to children’s development, helping them learn to manage their emotions, develop social skills, and regulate their behavior.¹¹ The play dads engage in is different from the type mothers engage in, typically involving more rough-and-tumble physical activities, which particularly supports behavioral and motor skills.¹²⁻¹⁴
DATA NOTE
Teaching and Challenging: Fathers help children explore by encouraging them to take risks, challenging them, and setting appropriate limits to stay safe. As one seminal review of the literature in fatherhood research concluded:
Fathers play a particularly important role in the development of children’s openness to the outside world and their autonomy. Men seem to have a tendency to surprise children, to destabilize them momentarily, and to encourage them to take ‘risks,’ thus enabling children to learn to be brave in unfamiliar situations and to stand up for themselves. Children seem to need to be stimulated and motivated as much as they need to be calmed and secured, and they receive such stimulation primarily from men…¹⁵
A more recent review found children with fathers who engaged in this high-quality paternal “activation parenting” tended to have better self-regulation and fewer emotional difficulties.¹⁶ There’s also evidence fathers uniquely challenge their children via language—asking them more “wh-” questions—which in turn stimulates their language development.¹⁷ Within Black households in particular, fathers also play a key role in teaching their older children how to protect themselves from violence and victimization.¹⁸
Modeling behavior: In addition to the primary childcare provided by parents, the American Time Use Survey also tracks the provision of secondary childcare—i.e., care for kids under 13 years old that’s provided “while doing something else”—where that “something else” could be fixing things around the house, socializing with friends, or working.
Fathers spend several hours each day providing such care (as do mothers), and this can be an important channel through which to model behavior. Witnessing the way fathers conduct themselves, what tasks they take on, and how they communicate can help children learn effective ways to solve problems, interact with others, and regulate their emotions. Fathers can help their daughters understand what a protective male relationship entails, and they can teach their sons a more prosocial masculinity.¹⁹ ²⁰ A father who has a more egalitarian views—who, for instance, prepares dinner or does the laundry—in turn tends to transmit to his sons “less knowledge about feminine stereotypes.”²¹
4. Dads want to do more
Fathers spend much more time with their children than they did decades ago, but want to do even more. Almost two in three dads (63%) say they spend too little time with their kids, according to a 2017²², Pew survey. Only 35% of mothers said the same thing. A more recent 2023 survey, also by Pew, found that fathers were about 50% more likely than mothers to say they were less involved in their young adult child’s life than they’d like to be. A New America survey found that fathers were more likely than mothers to feel work demands get in the way of home and family time.
Fathers have always played a significant economic role in their children’s lives. Dads today also play an increasingly large part in their child’s growth and development. Let’s wish them a Happy Father’s Day. They deserve it!
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Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan is a Professor of Developmental Psychology at The Ohio State University and President of the Board of the Council on Contemporary Families, and Jay Fagan is a Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Work at Temple University. Together, they authored ‘The Evolution of Fathering Research in the 21st Century: Persistent Challenges, New Directions,’ published in the Journal of Marriage and Family in 2020.
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