Do Fathers Matter?: What Science Is Telling Us About the Parent We've Overlooked (10 page)

Attachment theory remains one of the foundations of developmental psychology. It made Bowlby the most-cited psychologist in academic journals in the twentieth century, outranking even Freud. It revolutionized the understanding not only of attachment, but also of separation and bereavement. And it focused exclusively on mothers. The role of the father, Bowlby believed, was to provide support for the mother. In the drama of childhood, he was merely a supporting actor. (Shakespeare thought so, too. In his monologue on the seven ages of man beginning with “All the world’s a stage,” he describes men as infants, children, lovers, soldiers, and more—but never as parents.)

Despite the overwhelming acceptance of attachment theory, it was based primarily on Bowlby’s clinical observations of children and parents, not on experiment. It was more scientific than Freud’s work, but it hadn’t been subject to rigorous evaluation. That job would fall to Mary Ainsworth, a disciple of Bowlby’s who worked with him for several years in the early 1950s. Early in her career, she moved to Uganda with her husband, who had been hired by the East African Institute of Social Research in Kampala. When she arrived, she scraped together enough money to do a nine-month study of Ugandan mothers and infants. She concluded that sensitive, responsive mothers, and those who particularly enjoyed breast-feeding, were more likely than other mothers to foster secure attachment in their infants.

Two years later, Ainsworth moved to Baltimore, where she began teaching at Johns Hopkins University and continued her research. She took on a British student named Michael Lamb, who came to the United States because he wanted to study with her. Lamb, now a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge and one of the leading figures in father research, was excited by Ainsworth’s work, but puzzled that fathers were being so completely ignored. “These kids they were studying were growing up in two-parent families. They had fathers as well as mothers, but all the focus was on the relationships with the mothers,” he told me. “It struck me as odd that there seemed to be this incredibly matricentric assumption in the field. That’s what got me started asking about those other relationships.”

His initial interest in fathers came not only from his scientific work, but also from his relationship with his own father, who was a hugely important figure in his life. Lamb grew up in Zambia, where his father worked for the British colonial government but came home every day for lunch and spent as much time as he could with his children. The studies that Lamb did under Ainsworth’s tutelage were among the first to challenge assumptions about the supporting role of fathers. When he first told Ainsworth he wanted to look at fathers, she tried to discourage him. But he persisted, and did a study which showed that babies and fathers become attached in the same way—and at the same time developmentally—that mothers and babies do.

It was a significant finding, not only for psychologists, but for fathers themselves. “Fathers can hardly be expected to maintain a belief in their importance when they are continually being told of their irrelevance, other than as economic supporters of the family unit,” Lamb wrote.

*   *   *

Lamb was one of the first to push back against the conventional wisdom, but far from the last. The study of depression in children is yet another area in which fathers were long overlooked. Psychologists understood that depression in pregnant women can adversely affect their children, but for a long time, nobody seriously entertained the idea that depression in fathers during pregnancy could do the same. But that is changing. Depression in fathers increases the risk of depression in children, just as mothers’ depression does—even though fathers have no direct connection with their fetuses during their partners’ pregnancies.

Some of the best evidence for the adverse consequences of depression in fathers comes from work done in early 2013 by a research team in Norway led by Anne Lise Kvalevaag. She sifted through data on 31,663 children and their families to collect information on fathers’ mental health during pregnancy. Studies such as these look for associations; they don’t say anything about why such associations might exist. The researchers suggested three possibilities: The fathers could be passing on to their children genes that are associated with psychological problems. The fathers’ depression could be having an influence on their partners, which could in turn have an effect on the children. Or the children’s problems might be a result of paternal depression during their infancy and early childhood: fathers who are depressed before birth are more likely than others to be depressed afterward, too. Whatever the explanation, all this work suggested that fathers’ mental health can indeed have important consequences for their children.

And the outcome can be even worse for the unfortunate children who have two depressed parents. Researchers at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center showed that if both parents are depressed, children have eight times the risk of behavioral or emotional problems of children whose parents are not depressed. Many studies have shown that poor mental health in mothers has negative impacts on children’s behavior and emotional health, but few studies have looked at both parents.

There is some good news here. A healthy father can ease the impact of a mother’s depression on their children. He can serve as a buffer, engaging the children when mother isn’t available because of her illness. But that’s not easy to do. Mothers do a lot for their children, and if they’re compromised by illness, they aren’t easy to replace. Depression often carries with it a good deal of guilt, and mothers or fathers who are depressed around the time of their children’s birth may carry the additional burden of knowing that they cannot fully engage with their children and might be putting them at risk of emotional problems of their own later on.

The list of unfortunate consequences of fathers’ depression continues to grow. A mother’s depression is known to be related to excessive crying, or colic, in infants, but the role of depression in fathers was unknown. When Mijke P. van den Berg of Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands took a look, he found that paternal depression was indeed a risk factor for excessive crying in infants. The explanation is unclear. It could be something in the father’s genetic makeup that he is passing on, his altered interaction with the infant, or marital or family stress related to the depression. Whatever the case, the study emphasizes the importance of considering fathers when studying infant behavior, including excessive crying. Yet another study found that depressed fathers were more likely to spank their children and less likely to read to them than fathers without depression.

*   *   *

Conflict between mothers and fathers can also interfere with infants’ well-being. In the late 1990s, James P. McHale, a family therapist now at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, conducted a research project at Clark University in Massachusetts sponsored by the National Institutes of Health called Families Through Time, in which he explored how mothers’ and fathers’ coparenting relationships affected their children. It was the first study to look at the development of the coparenting alliance in intact (not divorced) families. One of the things McHale and his colleagues recognized from the outset was that they should investigate parents’ relationships during the mothers’ pregnancy. Research had suggested that the personalities of the parents, their thoughts about intimate relationships, and the quality of the marriage were all important. But McHale thought there was another ingredient that researchers had overlooked. “The missing element was parents’ perspectives on what family life ought to be like and what they hoped to create individually and together with their partner in the new family.”

McHale, who says his work was inspired by the Cowans, recognized that a key ingredient to family health that had been missing from prior research was an understanding of the coparenting alliance adults formed with respect to their children. The idea behind his study—and one that was borne out by his research—was that when parents have a strong alliance, children show fewer signs of stress, marital relationships are stronger, and children have better relationships with their peers. Other researchers had studied coparenting in divorced families, in which parents try to work out arrangements that reduce conflict, but nobody had looked closely at families in which the parents are still together. In many families, “both parents have good relationships with the kids, but still the kid is in turmoil, and it’s often because of the coparenting relationship … Two parents can hate each other and try to win the child’s affection and loyalty.” This kind of chronic child-related conflict often leads to a poor outcome for the child, as one might expect. Many divorced families fit this pattern, but so do one in five intact families, according to McHale.

One of the first things he found was that the coparenting beliefs of parents-to-be were shaped by their experiences with their own parents and families growing up. “My family always had family days on Sunday,” said one parent, Candice. “I want us to be doing the same things, too, as a family.” Her husband, Ron, agreed with her about Sunday dinners, but not about child care. “She’ll handle most of the child-care responsibilities,” he said. “She’s going to be a stay-at-home mom, and I’m hoping she’ll change all the diapers.”

Candice said, “I’ll be the primary caregiver during the day, but when he gets home, he’ll take over … I think he’ll be a very involved dad because his father wasn’t.” Ron said his parents “argued about us kids a lot. I don’t want us to re-create the kinds of arguments that I always used to experience between my parents.” Clearly, unless they begin to talk about their coparenting, Ron and Candice are set up for a serious confrontation about Ron’s obligations as a father. McHale called the disagreements “potential flashpoints.”

McHale and his team assessed depression and marital satisfaction in the expectant parents at the beginning of the third trimester before their child’s birth. They were surprised to discover far more strain than they had anticipated. Forty percent of the mothers and 22 percent of the fathers scored high on a test designed to assess depression. After examining the survey results, the researchers hypothesized that the tests may have actually reflected not depression as much as general anxiety about impending parenthood. “At a minimum, a great many parents in our sample were experiencing jitters,” McHale wrote. “Quite often these were significant levels of jitters, and many experienced much more than that.” Marital satisfaction was less of an issue, with only a handful reporting problems. But when the researchers added up all the numbers, they found that at least one parent in half of the families reported concerns with symptoms of depression or strains in their marriage.

*   *   *

As the Cowans, McHale, and others talked with expectant fathers, one thing that emerged was the determination of the fathers to “be there” both physically and emotionally for their children, as many felt their traditional fathers had not been for them. “This is what men look forward to about having a baby,” wrote the Cowans, “and it is what they worry about while they are waiting.”

These men have the right idea. But they needn’t wait until their children are born to get involved. A father who helps his pregnant partner buy supplies, takes her to doctors’ visits, and sees the fetus on an ultrasound or hears its heartbeat is more likely to be involved with his partner and baby after the birth than one who doesn’t have that kind of involvement. This is true even of fathers who don’t live with their partners. Fathers who are involved during pregnancy are also more likely to play with and read to the baby, and generally to help take care of the baby. They are more likely to find employment if they are out of work. And if they live elsewhere, they are more likely to move in with their partners. These ripple effects are good for the parents
and
for the children.

Wanting to be involved, however, doesn’t always translate into
being
involved. When expectant fathers are asked how they expect to divide chores and child care once their baby is born, most say they expect mothers to do more, but think they will make a substantial contribution. Six months after their children are born, most say mothers are doing more than expected and they are doing less. Part of the reason could be that fathers are too quick to accept that they are less important to their children than mothers are. It could also be that, as with Ron and Candice, they and their partners disagree about what kind of relationship the father should have with his children. This raises an important question: Is it possible to intervene with families to get fathers more involved? Can the beliefs of expectant parents be changed so that they put more value on the relationships of fathers with their kids? What effect will that have on the children?

The Cowans partnered with another husband-wife research team, the Yale child psychiatrist Kyle D. Pruett and Marsha Kline Pruett, a clinical psychologist at Smith College in Massachusetts, to find out. They knew that fathers are often excluded from efforts by family service agencies to promote healthy pregnancies, and they wanted to see whether changing that approach could elicit more downstream participation in family life by the fathers. So they devised a program of sixteen weekly sessions for expectant couples to help them work on their relationships both as partners and as parents-to-be. They offered the program to 289 couples from low- and middle-income Mexican-American and European-American families in five California counties.

Previous research had identified some of the factors that helped fathers become more involved with their families and children. Among them were many we’ve already discussed: the quality of the relationship between the parents, their mental health and stress levels, and the patterns they had witnessed in their own parents and grandparents. Various groups, including government agencies and religious organizations, had devised fatherhood workshops of some sort. Most were led by male speakers and counselors. The problem with these programs, according to the Cowans and the Pruetts, was “that the single most powerful predictor of fathers’ engagement with their children is the quality of the men’s relationship with the child’s mother, regardless of whether the couple is married, divorced, separated, or never married.”