A Boston College researcher, Rebekah Levine Coley is letting the academic world in on a little secret: Fathers make a difference. She writes: “Historically, fathers have been a rather invisible group in the study of child development and family processes, with their influence rarely considered and their voices scarcely heard.”
Writing in American Psychologist, Coley takes note of the effects of out-of wedlock births, stating, “Demographic trends have led to a situation in the United States in which a significant proportion of fathers are peripheral or transitory members of their children’s households and minimal or unstable financial providers. In 1997, 32% of all children born in the United States were to unmarried mothers, a sixfold increase since 1960.”
This portends a fatherless future, as “The numbers of nonresidential fathers appears to represent a disturbing removal of fathers from children’s lives, further exemplified by many nonresidential fathers’ lack of contact with, financial support of, and involvement with their children.”
Children whose parents were married, but now are divorced, fare just as poorly, given that “…recent national estimates indicate that about one third of divorced fathers have no contact with their children.”
On the other hand, Coley describes a revival, of sorts, among some fathers, noting that “there is also a growing trend for some fathers to be increasingly involved with their children and families. Fathers are doing more child care and household work than ever before, although they still do only a fraction compared with mothers and rarely take actual responsibility for these tasks.” It would appear however, that these are fathers that are mostly, still husbands, as well.
This apparent divergence in paternal involvement is “indicative of the voluntary nature of fatherhood in today’s society,” Coley suggests. Hearkening back the “Mystery clause” in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Casey decision, Coley states that, “fatherhood is becoming a state that can be more individually interpreted and defined. In other words, society appears to lack consensus concerning the appropriate role of a father, and there is great individual and subgroup variation in fathering behaviors.”
One glaring difficulty with most previous research into fathers and fathering concerns the fact that most were based upon maternal reporting, that is, it was the mothers of children—often with some animus against the father—who were the sources of researchers’ information, while “[t]he voices of fathers themselves have rarely been heard, an important deficiency in the data.”
Furthermore, previous research tended to take a thin description of what it means to be a parent, particularly in the role of a father. “Although residence, visitation, and financial support are seemingly objective and easily measured indexes of paternal involvement, they represent an incomplete and simplistic view of parenting,” writes the Boston scholar. This bias is resident in many aspects of the research process, beginning with the training of the scholars themselves: “Economists and sociologists who study fathers tend to gather extensive information on economic and cultural issues, whereas psychologists often focus on measuring family relationships and individual functioning. Few data sets or studies have collected extensive measures of all of these realms.” The bias is seen in full bloom with “the inability of most of the extant research to adequately address issues of generalizability, selection bias, and causation.”
Even with this bias, fathers still have made an impact: Ms. Coley concludes, “A consistent finding across this research is that more involvement by fathers correlates with better cognitive and school functioning by children.”
In the end, it is not surprising to learn that men who think that parenting is important, tend to make their children a priority in their lives: “Fathers with a strong commitment to parenting and who see their role as a father as integral to their image are, not surprisingly, more involved fathers, regardless of their marital or residential status.” …and the children reap the benefits.
