Do Fathers Matter?: What Science Is Telling Us About the Parent We've Overlooked (18 page)

The importance of play might be connected to the demands it places on both fathers and children to recognize one another’s emotional signals during fast-paced, intense activity—which is what children also need to do with their peers. Fathers who’ve said they remember both the good and bad in their own childhoods are more likely to be sensitive to the needs and feelings of their children.

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Before we get too carried away with the joys of fatherhood, we should note that there is a dark side, too. The connection between fathers and their children can have disturbing consequences for kids, sometimes in unexpected ways. One example concerns children’s weight. In 2012, researchers from the University of Adelaide in Australia examined data on the families of 434 nine-year-old Australian children, nearly a quarter of whom were overweight or obese. The researchers found no association between the mothers’ work schedules and their children’s weight, contradicting some earlier research.

Fathers’ work schedules were, in contrast, significantly associated with an increased likelihood that their children would be overweight or obese. And that was true whether or not the mothers worked long or odd hours. The reason, they speculate, is that the fathers’ complicated schedules put extra time pressure on families, meaning children were more likely to get quick meals high in fat, sugar, and salt. The effect was important enough that the researchers concluded that any program designed to help overweight or obese children should consider fathers’ work schedules.

Another example of fathers’ behavior that can be harmful to children is smoking. We know that secondhand smoke poses all sorts of health risks to adults as well as children. Mothers’ smoking during pregnancy is associated with a variety of health risks, including her infant’s future mental health—specifically in terms of acting out, which can impair the child’s ability to participate in social activities and make friends. But up until now, evidence linking fathers’ smoking to fetal harm has been less clear. Fathers’ smoking has been associated with overweight children, but most of those studies looked at families in lower socioeconomic brackets, in which other factors could have explained the children’s obesity.

To determine the consequences of fathers’ smoking on children, researchers analyzed data on more than six thousand children in Hong Kong, where smoking is not confined to those in lower economic brackets and where most smokers are men. The children were assessed when they were seven years old and again when they were eleven. Those whose fathers smoked when the mothers were pregnant were more likely to be overweight or obese. It was the first evidence supporting the idea that childhood obesity could be affected by a mother’s exposure to her husband’s smoking while she was pregnant.

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When we add up everything we know about fathers and children, we find overwhelming evidence that engaged fathers contribute to better outcomes for their toddlers and school-age children in a variety of ways. During the course of my interviews, however, I came across an issue that seems to undermine much of what we’ve been discussing. Fathers, the record shows, do not seem to contribute much to children’s
survival
. The ultimate purpose of good fathering (as well as mothering) is to ensure the survival of children. If the presence of fathers doesn’t boost children’s chances of surviving to have children themselves, does anything else matter?

The study that posed this question was published in 2008 by two British researchers. They analyzed forty-five studies looking at the effect of family members on children’s survival rates. The idea was to determine whether the presence of a father improves children’s survival, or whether other family members might be more important. The study, by Rebecca Sear of the London School of Economics and Ruth Mace of the anthropology department at University College London, is titled “Who Keeps Children Alive?” Unlike most scientific papers, it begins with a provocative observation: “Children pose a problem.” Human families have children about three years apart—a short interval compared to close relatives such as the orangutan, where the interval between births is about eight years, and chimpanzees, where it is four to five years. That means that human families are especially burdened with the need to raise two or more children simultaneously. Human mothers need help. But it’s unclear where that help is coming from.

The traditional answer has been that the help comes from fathers, as parents cooperate to raise their children. But Sear and Mace are interested in another possibility: grandmothers. Too old to have more children of their own, they are free to help with their grandchildren. It’s possible that menopause and the high human birthrate evolved hand in hand. The ability to have more children evolved along with the opportunity to get help from grandmothers, and the fruits of this evolutionary path are with us today. Some researchers have found that children with older female relatives are better nourished, and there’s evidence that gathering food—usually a woman’s task—contributes more nourishment to children than does hunting—the men’s job. (There are exceptions to these findings. In the Arctic, hunters, such as the Inuit, derive almost all their calories from the hunt. There isn’t much to gather under the snow and ice, and children couldn’t survive on a hunt in the harsh weather.)

The analysis by Sear and Mace supports these ideas. They found, first of all, that the worst thing that can happen to a child is the death of its mother, which is clearly associated with higher mortality. But in some studies, this applied only to very young children. After age two, children who were suddenly motherless no longer faced such dismal odds of survival. “Clearly, two-year-old children are not self-sufficient, so the good survival prospects of children who lose their mothers in later childhood must be due to other individuals taking over child care and provisioning,” they write. But fathers “frequently make no difference to child survival.” Of the fifteen studies that included an appropriate mathematical analysis of the statistics, “there is no association between the death of a father and the death of a child.” To put it another way, a child who loses its father faces no increased risk of dying. Can that possibly be true?

Sear and Mace are cautious in their interpretation of these results. They suggest that the importance of fathers in providing food has been overestimated; the children are getting it from somewhere. “Fathers may play more important roles in the lives of older children, teaching them subsistence skills and enhancing their marriage and fertility prospects,” they write. But it might be easier to compensate for lost fathers’ contributions than for those of mothers. That is where grandmothers come in. “Maternal grandmothers tend to improve child survival, as do elder sibling helpers at the nest. Paternal grandmothers are frequently beneficial, but show rather more variation than maternal grandmothers in their effects on child survival.” They emphasize that these links are not causal relationships; they are associations. And this overview deals solely with the role of fathers in preventing children’s deaths, and so it doesn’t conflict with much of the research by others showing that fathers make important contributions to such predictors of success in life as their children’s cognitive skills, social skills, and competence in school. What the study does do is provide a richer picture of the contributions of relatives and of the differences between mothers and fathers.

The study also has important implications for politicians and policy makers who believe the nuclear family is the best setting in which to raise children. That widely held belief has been endorsed by many politicians and public figures; it’s an article of faith among millions of Americans. And it’s certainly true, as we’ve seen, that we should encourage fathers’ involvement with their children—the research supports that in many different ways. But this is not the exclusive model for families. Other arrangements can work well, too. If the absence of fathers doesn’t increase the rate of childhood mortality, it could be because when fathers are absent, other relatives can step in to compensate for that absence. Policy makers who want to encourage fathers’ involvement with their children are right to do so, but they might want to take a flexible approach. As we’ve said before, fathers are not
essential
for the healthy development of children. But as the many examples I’ve presented show, fathers can give children many, many important advantages.

And despite the findings of Sear and Mace, the positives outweigh the negatives with regard to fathers’ contributions to their kids. Fathers should spend as much time as they can with their toddlers and school-age children. And they shouldn’t feel compelled to prop flash cards in front of them or read sixth-grade books to third-graders. They should spend more time playing.

SEVEN

Teenagers
: Absence, Puberty, and Faithful Voles

In 2013, the psychologists Sarah E. Hill and Danielle J. DelPriore departed from the usual formality of scientific papers and began their report with an anecdote from the news. The story they told came from Frayser High School in Memphis, Tennessee. Frayser had made national news in 2011 when officials came to a disturbing realization: about one in five of its female students was either pregnant or had recently given birth. Memphis officials disputed the exact figures, but they admitted that Frayser had a problem. One local official blamed the disturbing rate of teen pregnancy on television. She pointed to the MTV shows
16 and Pregnant
and
Teen Mom
. “So much of our society is sexually oriented,” she said, arguing that the fixation on sex was enticing the girls to have unprotected sex earlier and more often. A lot of us might say the same thing. We know that teenagers are impressionable, and the idea that they would be swayed by MTV makes sense. They adopt fashions and products they see on television; why not sexual behavior?

But Hill and DelPriore, who are at Texas Christian University, took note of a more subtle fact about Tennessee: nearly one in four households was headed by a single mother. For Hill and DelPriore, that was a tipoff that something entirely different was going on. “Researchers have revealed a robust association between father absence—both physical and psychological—and accelerated reproductive development and sexual risk-taking in daughters,” they wrote. You might expect sexual maturation to be deeply inscribed in teenagers’ genes, and not likely affected by something as arbitrary and unpredictable as whether or not they live in the same house as their fathers. But the association is quite clear. The problem comes in trying to explain it. How could a change in a girl’s environment—the departure of her father—influence something as central to biology as her reproductive development?

I put that question to Hill. “When dad is absent,” she explained, “it basically provides young girls with a cue about what the future holds in terms of the mating system they are born into.” When a girl’s family is disrupted, and her father leaves or isn’t close to her, she gets the message that men don’t stay for long, and her partner might not stick around, either. So finding a man requires quick action. The sooner she’s ready to have children, the better. She can’t consciously decide to enter puberty earlier, but her biology takes over, subconsciously. She enters puberty earlier, gets pregnant sooner, and has more children quickly. “This would help facilitate what we call, in evolutionary sciences, a faster reproductive strategy,” Hill said.

In contrast, a girl who grows up in a family in which the bond between her parents is more secure, and who has a father who lives in the home, might well (subconsciously) adopt a slower reproductive strategy. She might conclude that she can take a bit more time to start having children. She can be more thorough in her preparation. In this scenario, men stick around; there’s time. “If you’re going to have two invested parents, you’re investing more reproductive resources. If the expectation is you are not going to receive these investments, you should shift toward the faster strategy,” Hill explained.

These links between fathers and the age at which girls enter puberty are associations. We see, by looking at populations of teenage girls, that an absent father and early puberty go together. But the ideas about
why
this happens are speculation. There’s no proof—at least, not yet—that the behavior of fathers
causes
these changes in their daughters. Ideally, the experiment that would answer this question would be to assemble a group of families as research subjects and randomly assign some of the fathers to abandon their families and others to stay. Obviously, this is not a proposal likely to win approval from ethics boards. So what is the next best thing? Hill and DelPriore designed an experiment in which young women—some of them teenagers and others just past their teen years—were reminded of an incident in which their father supported them, and then were encouraged to think about a time he was
not
there for them. The idea was to see whether the different memories would change the girls’ attitudes toward sexual behavior. The way Hill and DelPriore prodded their subjects to bring those memories to the fore was to ask them to write about those experiences. After they finished writing, they would be asked about their attitudes toward sexual behavior. If the hypothesis was correct, memories of unpleasant father experiences would lead the young women to express more favorable views of risky sexual behavior. Pleasant memories of their fathers should push them in the opposite direction.

And that’s what happened. Young women became “more sexually unrestricted” after recalling an incident in which their father was disengaged, Hill explained. “They reported having more favorable attitudes toward short-term sexual encounters; they didn’t see love as necessary for sex to occur.” Further experiments showed that father disengagement didn’t change women’s views of other kinds of risky behavior; they weren’t more likely to ride a bike without a helmet. The effect was limited to sex.

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