• Parents who work outside of the standard Monday-Friday, 9-5 hours must strike a balance between their work schedule and the demands of parenting.
• Fathers’ parenting is often influenced by non-standard work schedules and some types of work, such as night shifts, may increase certain types of parenting, whereas others may decrease the amount of parenting.
• Achieving the right balance between work and parenting should be considered within the context of the family. For example, the mother’s work schedule, the child’s age, and the type of parenting activity may all play a role in the effect of non-standard work schedules.

How do fathers’ non-standard work schedules affect their parenting?

Fathers matter. We know the positive impact of fathers as caregivers in terms of emotional support, interactive caring, and day-to-day raising of their children. But does it matter if they regularly work non-standard hours, such as evenings, nights, or weekends, that may challenge their ability to carry out their parenting activities? Given that more than half of employed U.K. fathers work such non-standard hours during the first decade of their children’s lives, it is imperative to understand how this affects fathers’ parenting and whether the effects vary by context. (Non-standard work schedules are also common among U.S. fathers.)

New quantitative evidence from the United Kingdom offers a nuanced answer. My colleague, Anne McMunn, and I used data from the Millennium Cohort Study – a nationally representative sample of children born in the United Kingdom between 2000 and 2002. We analyzed 11,412 fathers when their children were nine months old and 7,791 fathers when their children were nearly seven years old. We focused on two measures of parenting – basic care (in both age groups) and play and recreation (for seven-year-olds).

Photo: Gustavo Fring. Pexels.

Fathers of nine-month-olds were asked how often they looked after their babies on their own, changed diapers, fed their children, or got up in the night to attend to them. Fathers of seven-year-olds were asked if they helped their children get ready for bed or cared for them alone. They were also asked how often they read with or to their children, told stories, did musical activities, drew, played physically active games, took the children to the park, or played with toys or games indoors.

Different non-standard schedules influenced fathers’ involvement in different ways

We found that fathers who worked in the evenings, between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m., spent less time on basic parenting activities both when their children were infants and when they were seven than did fathers who worked standard hours. For example, they spent less time looking after a child alone, getting a child ready for bed, changing diapers, or getting up in the night to soothe a baby. In contrast, fathers who worked night schedules, such as from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m., spent more time on these basic care activities.

Initially, we found that fathers who regularly worked evenings spent more time and those who worked weekends spent less time in play and recreation than did fathers who worked standard hours. However, these differences may stem more from work characteristics, such as long working hours, than from work schedules. Lastly, we found no evidence that the relation between fathers’ work schedules and parenting differed by the intensity of fathers’ work hours, families’ poverty status, or fathers’ educational attainment.

While fathers who work evenings may decrease the amount of parenting they do, fathers who work nights have opportunities to be more actively involved in parenting

These findings support a more nuanced view of the integration of non-standard work schedules with parenting. Not all non-standard work schedules negatively affect fathers’ involvement. While fathers who work evenings may decrease the amount of parenting they do, fathers who work nights have opportunities to be more actively involved in parenting.

Previous research on working specific times of the day helps interpret these results. Night schedules could create openings for dads to be involved in parenting routines during the day, or in the early morning or evening, depending on when work starts and ends. In contrast, evening work may occur during children’s bedtimes, giving fathers who work at this time fewer opportunities to be involved in parenting. In addition to the basic parenting activities we examined, other studies have also found that fathers who work evening schedules miss out on family activities, such as helping with homework and eating meals together.

Mothers’ employment schedules also influence working fathers’ parenting time

The story is incomplete if we fail to consider the role of mothers’ employment. We examined whether parents’ available time in the household also mattered for fathers’ parenting time. We found that fathers’ night work facilitated more basic parenting activities when mothers worked than they did when mothers did not work. However, fathers participated in even more basic parenting activities when both parents worked non-standard schedules than when both worked at standard times.

Photo: Pavel Danilyuk. Pexels.

Perhaps this indicates a preference for parental child care. Some couples engage in tag-team parenting, which involves decreasing the overlap between their work schedules and maximizing time with their children. For example, if one parent works nights or weekends, the other parent stays at home and engages in parenting instead of paying for child care.

Alternatively, our findings may indicate not that parents choose to work non-standard schedules but the financial constraints of finding child care at non-standard times. Despite the greater provision of publicly funded child care in the United Kingdom for three- to five-year-olds, relative to the U.S. context, child care is expensive and harder to find outside regular daytime hours.

Policies and programs can help reduce the challenges of parents’ non-standard work schedules

How can fathers make it work so they can make important contributions in their children’s lives? The challenge for workplace policies and government programs is to reduce the potential difficulties for fathers of working non-standard schedules. Employers need to acknowledge a lesson learned from the COVID-19 pandemic: that many jobs can be worked flexibly.

Working non-standard hours may compromise supportive parenting – but it also has the potential to lead to more time parenting under the right circumstances.

Some parents view non-standard work schedules as an opportunity to fulfil their goals to integrate family time, parenting, and paid work. Employers can advertise job vacancies as flexible and in the United Kingdom, reduce the qualifying period before employees can request flexible work schedules. Such a policy promotes inclusivity as the demand for non-standard employment is met and matched with workers who are available and willing to work such hours.

When parents don’t have control over work schedules

However, not all parents have control over their work schedules. For those parents, government policies can provide incentives for childcare facilities to remain open evenings and weekends, and employers can offer pay premiums for working outside standard hours. Such programs can relieve the constraints on families who need affordable child care.

Parents working nonstandard work schedules may very well want to minimize the potential negative impacts of their work times on their parenting. As parents reflect on the integration of their work schedules with family time, they should consider the context of their home life –for example, the age of their children, whether both parents work and at what times of the day, and the types of parenting activities which they engage in during the course of a day (e.g., play or basic care).

In our research, we were unable to consider whether a parent chooses to work at a non-standard time, but such choice in work schedules is unquestionably a factor in how parents integrate work and family time. Amid the daily challenges of balancing work and parenting time, working non-standard hours may compromise supportive parenting – but it also has the potential to lead to more time parenting under the right circumstances.

The post Are fathers’ non-standard work hours always a bad thing? appeared first on Child and Family Blog.

The researchers conclude: “The present study challenges the assumption that women are more suited to primary caregiving than men … fathers and mothers are equally competent at parenting in the primary caregiving role.”

Based on this finding, they recommend: “The high quality of parenting demonstrated by the primary caregiver fathers suggests that more fathers should be encouraged to be highly involved parents. To do so, policies facilitating this, such as shared parental leave and flexible work, including more part-time employment options, need to be widely promoted both by governments and by individual organizations.”

Previous research on primary caregiver fathers has often focused on gay fathers who became parents through adoption and surrogacy. These studies also found that children’s adjustment was positive. This study extends the research to heterosexual parent couples.

“The high quality of parenting demonstrated by the primary caregiver fathers suggests that more fathers should be encouraged to be highly involved parents.”

The study took place in the United Kingdom between 2017 and 2019,  and involved 41 primary caregiver fathers, 45 primary caregiver mothers, and 41 dual earner couples (both mother and father). The primary caregiver mothers and fathers had been the primary caregivers for at least 6 months, with children from 3 to 6 years old. Their partner was the primary wage earner; some primary caregivers (fathers more than mothers) were also employed part time or worked flexibly from home, but they spent more time caregiving than working. In the dual earner families, both parents were in paid employment and many worked full time. The families were mostly White and highly educated, and had no serious financial difficulties.

Through questionnaires and interviews, the researchers used previously tested measures to assess depression, anxiety, stress, social support, marital quality, the coparenting relationship, parental acceptance/rejection of the child, parenting quality, and children’s behavior. When assessing children’s behavior, the children’s preschool or schoolteacher also completed a questionnaire.

This research confirms a large body of earlier research showing that the parenting behaviors of fathers and mothers are similar, as is their influence on children’s development. Primary caregiver fathers typically describe their role in nurturing terms as fostering a close bond with their child.

In one study, compared to primary earner fathers, primary caregiver fathers showed higher emotional tone and their 12-month-olds showed more positive mood. In another study, very involved fathers had a more playful interaction style than the mothers, though both these mothers and fathers smiled more and imitated their child more than less-involved fathers. In other studies, primary caregiver mothers were more affectionate with their 3-month-olds and their 8- to 12-month-olds than primary caregiver fathers.

Other studies have found that primary caregiver fathers face particular social pressures – social isolation in a mother-dominated world of playgroups and playgrounds, the stigma of adopting a non-traditional role, and less social support. However, in this study, the fathers reported positive well-being. Perhaps the strong marital relationships and coparenting arrangements were enough to compensate for any additional social pressure.

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Nurturing fatherhood was embedded in male biology long ago and likely laid evolutionary foundations for other fathering roles.

How central is hands-on, caring fatherhood to men’s roles in families? We know that many fathers are very capable caregivers. Data show that fathers in many parts of the world are doing more hands-on care than their own fathers did. Many dads warm to the role. And research demonstrates that involved fathering benefits children. But how much is interactive caring at the core of who men are as fathers? Is it a passing development, an aberration from men’s foundational, evolved roles over the history of our species: to be a hunter/breadwinner?

New anthropological research offers an intriguing answer. It suggests that caring fatherhood is not only core to men’s parenting, but that it may have come first in human evolution, before fathers provided food for their offspring. Indeed, if humans had not first developed early forms of caring fatherhood, then the provider father might never have arrived: Thus, “caring dad” may have laid the evolutionary foundations for “provider dad.”

This explanation springs from our attempts to understand a very distinctive and unusual feature about humans: We are virtually the only primates who routinely share large quantities of food with one another. Adult males, females, and children benefit from such sharing. Indeed, the pooling of high-energy food resources (such as meat and root vegetables) helps explain how humans evolved large, energetically costly brains that make up only a small percentage (~4%) of our body weight but require nearly 20% of the calories we burn each day. It also helps explain our unique family strategy of raising many very needy, slow-growing children at the same time, which sets us apart from other mammals, including other primates.

“These findings highlight direct caring for children as an important feature of men’s lives from early in human evolution.”

The advantages of food sharing can be seen in some contemporary societies that practice foraging (or hunting and gathering) to meet their food needs. Hunting can generate large, nutrient-dense food resources, but successful hunts of large animals are also unpredictable. Men’s specialization as hunters is generally possible only with the nutritional assurance provided by women’s more consistent foraging of plants, insects, and other small animals.

Photo: Humphrey Muleba. Unsplash.

Thus, it is clear why humans continued to share food after sharing had become established. The more difficult question is: How and why did it begin in the first place? Food sharing and role specialization can be costly to the sharers; you need reliable partners for it to pay off. Hunting is risky and was probably inconsistent in the deep past, with simple technology and rudimentary communication. So humans would not have hunted routinely – and would likely not have shared the proceeds widely – if there was no assured payback.

The evolution of sharing would have required a history of cooperation, trust, and reliability within communities, including between males and females. What conditions might have enabled such strong, prosocial relationships to have already emerged among early humans and our extinct ancestors? Through observation of non-human primate behaviors, my research team suggests an answer: Low-cost, basic forms of adult male care of infants, aiding mothers, helped pave the way for greater cooperation, including food sharing.

Non-human primate males offer rudimentary care

For example, in some baboon species, individual adult males in larger multi-male, multi-female social groups form close social bonds with females when they have an infant. These adult males are very tolerant of the infant. They provide protection against infanticide and from aggressors in the group. These baboon friendships between adult males and females emerge during pregnancy and often continue beyond weaning, but they dissolve if the infant dies. Thus, the male-female relationship is supported by a loose form of joint parental care, which can give the male a better chance of mating, though the female generally does not mate exclusively with that male.

Male mountain gorillas are also very tolerant of infants and juveniles, and interact with them, even though they do not seem to differentiate their own young from those of other males. This caring behavior may enhance the males’ attractiveness to females: Males who provide more direct care have more reproductive success, according to a recent study by my colleague, Stacy Rosenbaum. Likewise, macaque females in some species prefer males who interact with infants, according to recent data. So it seems that basic paternal care can emerge in primates even in non-monogamous situations when the males are unclear about paternity, which was long thought to be a major evolutionary barrier to committed fatherhood. This care for infants, and the relationship bonds that it builds with females, is low cost and thus possibly part of males’ mating effort.

We argue that similar low-cost behaviors could have evolved in early humans and then been ratcheted up through evolutionary time. Caring would have laid the social and trust foundations for the later emergence of more proactive, riskier, more costly food sharing. Such food sharing eventually led to subsistence specialization and resource pooling that became common in human families and communities. Thus, we argue that the caring father predated the provisioning father rather than vice versa.

Testosterone and caring capacities

Another indicator tells us about the ancientness and centrality of child care to men’s parenting: their biology. Nurturing caring is supported in men and regulated by variations in hormones such as testosterone and oxytocin. There is evidence that men with lower testosterone often engage in more prosocial, generous, and empathetic behavior than men with higher testosterone. Our team of researchers was the first to identify, in the Philippines and subsequently in other contexts, a relationship between lower testosterone in men and the amount of child care they do. In a large project that tracked men in their 20s over five years, testosterone levels dropped significantly when men became partnered fathers.

“This perspective questions how paternal roles have been viewed through 20^th-century industrial societies, which shaped narrow perceptions of men’s capabilities.”

Therefore, fathers appear to be biologically primed to provide direct care for their children. Indeed, in many other animals, fathers’ hormones change in similar ways when dads cooperate with moms to raise young. As anthropologists, we know that cultural contexts have large effects on shaping human parents’ roles in families. So it might be most accurate to say that men are biologically evolved to be culturally primed as caregivers.

Photo: César Abner Martínez Aguilar. Unsplash.

These insights suggest that caring fatherhood is not an aberration of changing current social conditions. Rather, it is rooted in our evolutionary past and can be supported by changes in testosterone, other hormones, and the brain, which help men shift from one specialized role to another and back again. A biological and cultural requirement for these shifts toward caring is men’s proximity and availability to their children. In some societies that practice foraging, men are with their children for much of the day, and those fathers are more involved in hands-on child care than fathers in virtually any other human societies. We are still learning about the biology of fatherhood in these societies, but these caring behaviors and fathers’ availability to their children often correspond with lower testosterone in men in the Philippines, the United States, European countries, Israel, and other settings.

Is caring fatherhood linked to being community minded?

In our most recent research, we explored whether testosterone levels are linked to fathers’ social roles not only in the family but also in the broader community. In the Republic of Congo, we studied fathers in BaYaka families, which rely on forest resources for a major part of their income. They are generally hands-on dads, holding their babies, taking their older children with them to work in the forest, and sleeping with them as a family. BaYaka communities are also egalitarian and very cooperative.

As part of their roles as fathers, BaYaka men are valued for generously sharing resources across the group, so caring fatherhood in this context is not limited to the nuclear family but extends to the broader community. In our study, we tested for links between fathers’ testosterone and rankings from their fellow dads on these locally valued roles. We found that those men considered to be better community sharers had lower testosterone than their peers. Also, BaYaka fathers who were seen as being better providers had lower testosterone than fathers who were ranked as less effective in acquiring resources. So in many contexts around the world, lower testosterone in fathers is linked to expressions of parenting that fathers, their partners and co-parents, and their broader community value as critical contributions for children.

Caring fatherhood is no longer peripheral

These findings challenge how we might think about contemporary fatherhood and its potential. They highlight direct caring for children as an important feature of men’s lives from early in human evolution. This perspective questions more historically and culturally limited ways in which paternal roles have been regarded, viewed through the particularities of 20^th-century industrial societies, which shaped quite narrow perceptions of men’s capabilities. Our growing understanding of the biology of fatherhood underscores the flexibility of fathers to adapt to meet the many different challenges that face parents, whether it is providing direct care to children or food and resources for them.

The digital economy – and more immediately, the COVID-19 pandemic – are bringing fathers’ work back into the home. This means that many men are spending more time in closer proximity with their children. Will this greater availability of dads to children be correlated with a surge in caring fatherhood and further narrowing of the gender care gap?  Our research with BaYaka fathers also raises questions of whether more caring fatherhood can be harnessed to encourage greater community engagement by men in an age when many serious challenges demand communitywide action.

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Significant maternal health changes in response to a small change in actual days of parental leave taken by fathers suggest days at home are used when it really matters.

Research on parental leave in Sweden shows that when fathers take just a few extra days off during the first months of a child’s life, mothers’ health benefits significantly.

In 2012, Sweden introduced “Double Days” into its parental leave system, allowing fathers to be at home not just for the first 10 days after the birth of a child, but also up to 30 more days during the first year while the mother is still at home. These parental leave days can be taken at any time and in any combination, including as single days off., meaning fathers can be available more often to help at difficult moments. For example, they might help with post-childbirth complications, breastfeeding difficulties, mothers’ medical appointments or simply times when the mother is feeling particularly unhappy or stressed.

This new parental leave arrangement for fathers has had significant impacts on mothers’ physical and mental health. According to a new study:

1. The number of fathers taking more than 10 days off in the first 60 days increased by 50% (from 7.8% to 11.7%). These days of parental leave were taken mostly in the first three months. (The first 180 days saw a 24% increase in the number of men taking extra days, from 24.6% to 30.5%.) These results don’t reflect fathers’ using these days in place of sick leave– the number of sick days taken by fathers didn’t change.
2. Fathers used these extra days of parental leave sparingly – the average was only 1-2 extra days by each father in the first six months.
3. Nonetheless, fathers’ taking such days produced significant health benefits for mothers, and particularly mothers with pre-birth medical conditions.

• Mothers were 14% less likely to have an inpatient or specialist outpatient visit for childbirth related complications (falling from 10.7% to 9.2%). The decrease was mostly in months 4-6.
• Mothers were 11% less likely to be prescribed an antibiotic in the first six months (from 17.3% to 15.4%).
• Mothers were 26% less likely to be prescribed an anti-anxiety drug in the first six months (from 1.2% of mothers to 0.9%). The change was mostly in the first three months.

Such significant health changes in response to such a small change in days of parental leave taken suggest that fathers are staying home on days when it really matters. For example, in the modified parental leave system, fathers are more likely to take at least one day of leave on the same day as the mother has an engagement with the health system, particularly if the mother has a previous medical condition.

The researchers also looked at the impact of grandparents living nearby. Surprisingly, having grandparents nearby was not associated with less use of the additional parental leave by fathers in the first months. However, when no grandparents lived nearby, mothers’ health benefitted more from fathers’ taking extra days of parental leave.

These strong results raise substantial issues for how parental leave is organised and also how health is managed.

Parental leave

Until now the focus has been on fathers taking time off to be alone with the child for a consolidated period – a “sequential” and “lumpy” approach, as the researchers describe it. The aim is to promote father-child bonding, change gender norms and improve maternal labor market outcomes. The new system in Sweden highlights another purpose of parental leave, relating to health of mothers, leading to an important modification in its configuration. (This is not to say that traditional leave taking does not benefit maternal health. In a UK study, for example, mothers reported better health outcomes for themselves when the father took paternity leave just after the birth. In a Swedish study, when fathers took paternity leave, mothers were more likely to breastfeed.)

The study also puts the spotlight on interdependence in families, showing that the expansion of choice for one parent benefits the other one directly. The parental leave debate is dominated by considerations of individual decision-making by fathers, as if they make their choices independently of the family. In this study, the researchers describe the situation quite differently: they look at how “the household decides, on a day-to-day basis, whether the father should work in the labor market or stay at home with the mother and child”.

The researchers recommend further studies to see whether the mother-child relationship improves when fathers take additional parental leave, given that this relationship is influenced by the mother’s physical and mental well-being.

Managing health

The researchers recommend more attention to the environment at home in the management of maternal health, rather than just in the medical system. Mothers spend most of their time at home, after all, and not at medical appointments. They quote Dr Neel Shah, a leading maternal health expert at Harvard Medical School:

“What’s important to understand is that most maternal deaths happen after women have the baby and the fundamental failure is not unsafe medical care but lack of adequate social support…a lot of the risks around childbirth happen after the baby is born during that vulnerable time when you’re trying to care for an infant while also taking care of your household and doing all the things we expect of moms.”

A key aspect of the home environment for a mother with a newborn is the presence of the father. In the light of these health management considerations, the researchers recommend that family leave should be extended beyond parental leave to the illness of any family member.

The post When fathers can take individual days of parental leave during the first months after a birth, mothers visit health clinics less often and use less prescription medication appeared first on Child and Family Blog.

1. The loving care of a father is a foundation for his child’s wellbeing and creates a life-long relationship.

2. The loving care of father can be as powerful and important as that of a mother.

3. All fathers, both biological and non-biological, have an innate ability to bond with their babies from the first days. A father’s brain changes when he actively cares for his child, generating enhanced capacity for care and empathy.

4. Loving care takes many forms. Each family and each father-child relationship is unique.

5. Fathers are family, and family carers are among the most important influences on children’s development, wellbeing and health. This is so even when fathers do not live permanently with their children.

6. A harmonious community of care around a child, with parents and carers supporting each other, is a foundation for the child’s healthy development.

7. Fatherhood, like motherhood, is a journey. Fathers need time and practice – to care for, nurture, play with, and teach their children.

8. Loving fatherhood means respect for and collaboration with the mother and the absence of violence.

9. To provide the care and form the relationships that children need, fathers need support and validation from their partners, families, communities and society.

10. Maternal and newborn health services, early years services, and economic self-sufficiency services should offer, and encourage the use of, support for fathers and other family carers in ways that engage creatively with the local culture and socioeconomic conditions. They should provide information and help about how to support maternal and child health and child development. They should support family carers’ relationships with their children and a harmonious community of care for children within families. They should offer support for all carers to meet their children’s financial needs. This support should be accessible to fathers even if they live apart from the mother.

11. Workplaces and employment laws should honour and support the caring responsibilities of both fathers and mothers.

12. Fathers’ involvement in the first 1,000 days of their children’s life should be a focus of international early childhood development strategies.

13. Promotion of gender equality needs to include support for fatherhood. Equal economic opportunities for women and men must include the opportunity to share the care of their children.

14. Men are inherently loving and caring beings. Men’s caring instincts and emotional life should be celebrated as part of what it is to be a man in today’s cultures.

15. Loving fatherhood and men’s caregiving of all kinds should be recognised and celebrated as an inspiration to other fathers, mothers, grandparents and carers, in this generation and the next.

The Charter was coordinated by Duncan Fisher, Editor of the Child & Family Blog. The authors would like to thank the following researchers for their help in drafting the Charter: Andrea Doucet (Canada), John & Lynn Rempel (Canada), Richard Fletcher (Australia), Margaret O’Brien (UK), Kate Ellis-Davis (UK), Jaipaul Roopnarine (USA), Ruth Feldman (Israel), Ron Mincy (USA), Brenda Volling (USA), Marsha & Kyle Pruett (USA), Gary Barker (Brazil).

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New data on test scores of five-year olds suggest supporting parents to balance work and care, and providing subsidised preschool daycare, could help to limit the consequences of income inequality for children.

Previous research on income inequality has shown that differences in early cognitive development between children from high-income and low-income families are greater in the USA than in other countries. A new research project shows that a given level of income inequality is associated with larger gaps in how five-year-olds complete cognitive tests (language and literacy) in the USA than in the UK, Australia and Canada.

Three researchers, Bruce Bradbury, Jane Waldfogel and Elizabeth Washbrook, explored the role of five factors known to be related to child development in reinforcing income inequalities: the extent to which children in different income groups live with both parents, the likelihood that children attend daycare, the likelihood that children have an immigrant parent, the average hours worked by mothers, and the likelihood that a child’s mother was very young when she gave birth. For all these factors, higher-income families in USA have a greater advantage over lower-income families than do their higher-income counterparts in other countries.

This finding is consistent with the policy conclusions derived from other research: income inequality’s contribution to unequal child development can be reduced by helping parents to balance work and care, and by providing subsidised preschool daycare.

Using existing income inequality studies in the USA, the UK, Australia and Canada, the researchers compared five income groups across the four countries (using price adjustments to show all in US$):

Quintile 1 (Q1)            <$27K

Quintile 2 (Q2)            $27K-$44K

Quintile 3 (Q3)            $44K-$65K

Quintile 4 (Q4)            $65K-$96K

Quintile 5 (Q5)            > $96K

Previous work has shown that income itself is very important. A better income not only allows parents to invest more in their children (including living in a safer neighborhood), but also supports family stability and resilience to stress. Income inequality is greater in USA. Compared to all the other countries, a larger proportion of families in the USA are in the lowest income group. And compared to Australia and Canada, a larger proportion of families in the USA are in the highest income group.

But income is not the only factor that can drive inequality. Setting aside the fact that in USA a greater proportion of parents are in the very low and very high income groups, the difference in average cognitive test performance of children from the highest group (Q5) compared to the lowest group (Q1) is larger in the USA, though not very different from the UK. Strikingly, where the USA truly stands out is in how far the highest-income children (Q5) pull away from the middle-income group of children (Q3).

The researchers found that in the five areas, differences between the higher-income (Q5 and Q4) and middle-income (Q3) groups in the USA were significantly more pronounced than in other countries.

• Five-year-old children living with both biological parents

The difference in the proportion of five-year-olds living with both biological parents in Q4 and Q5 families versus Q3 families is considerably higher in the USA compared to the other countries.

Living with both biological parents is associated with better cognitive outcomes, so this factor may be contributing to the greater difference between average- and higher-income families in the USA.

• Attending center-based care before going to school

Q4 and Q5 parents in the USA are much more likely than Q3 parents to send children to preschool, compared to the other countries.

This is probably because preschool care is more subsidised in the other countries, so less exclusively available to the well-off. This disparity is likely to be linked to differences in average cognitive test scores.

• Proportion of children with an immigrant parent

Q4 and Q5 families in the USA are less likely than Q3 families to include an immigrant parent. In the other countries, Q4 and Q5 families are more likely to include an immigrant parent.

Having an immigrant parent is associated with additional difficulties associated with social integration. This finding suggests that higher-income children in the USA are less likely to be held back by such difficulties, on average.

• Average hours worked by mothers of five-year-olds

In the UK, Canada and Australia, mothers in higher-income families are likely to work considerably longer hours than middle-income mothers, which could be associated with lower cognitive scores for their five-year-olds. But in the USA, mothers in higher-income families work less, potentially combining the benefits of higher income and greater parental presence.

• Proportion of mothers under age 20 at childbirth

In the UK and Australia, very few mothers in either the middle- or high-income groups were less than 20 years old when their child was born. In the USA, however, the proportion of such mothers is considerably higher in the middle-income group. Having a young mother is known to be associated with lower cognitive performance at age five.

The research project didn’t look at some other potential factors that could be related to income inequality. For one, the cost of high-quality daycare is higher in the USA because the other countries provide more universal publicly funded care. That means access to high-quality daycare is more exclusive to higher-income groups in the USA. (This is offset, however, by substantial programmes, such as Head Start, for very low-income families in the USA.) Another key factor may be residential segregation: more segregation exacerbates income quality because it leads to more concentration of advantages and disadvantage between income groups in different neighborhoods.

The post Income inequality makes a bigger difference to child cognitive development in USA than other countries? Why? appeared first on Child and Family Blog.

Governments struggle to support positive, engaged fatherhood. Macroeconomics and political science might help explain what’s delaying policy reform. 

Fatherhood is central to raising children well. That’s an overwhelming message from half a dozen of the world’s leading researchers who have contributed to the Child and Family Blog.

There is compelling evidence that positive, engaged fatherhood walks hand in hand with good child development. Indeed, we’ve known for over 30 years that positive fatherhood in the early years is one of the best predictors of a child’s later success, explains Charlie Lewis.

Barriers to fatherhood

Yet almost everywhere, fathers face high, stubborn barriers to looking after their children – at work, in public services, in law, and at home. The media often paints them as incompetent, absent and largely irrelevant at best. Governments offer little support to caring fatherhood.

Most worrying, the barriers are highest for dads on low incomes – those whose positive involvement can make most difference to their children’s development. These men can offer help to children that they may find nowhere else.

“The institutional barriers to fatherhood remain. They represent a substantial malfunctioning of child development policy.”

Low-income dads can stretch their children linguistically, asking ‘who, why, where, what’ questions, finds Natasha Cabrera’s research. Their rough and tumble play helps children to learn to read emotions and regulate their behaviours. Fatherhood can be vital for narrowing the gap between their children’s school readiness and that of better-off peers.

Child development policy fails low income fathers

Yet precisely these low-income fathers receive the least support in raising their young. They miss out on leave benefits that don’t apply to the casualised work of the poorly paid. Likewise, these benefits may be unavailable to struggling non-citizens, explains Philip Hwang, and low-income dads are often marginalised by public services.

Mothers on welfare are financially penalised if they cohabit with their child’s father, notes Ross Parke. The state’s message to the impoverished dad seems to be: ‘If you can’t pay, then don’t stay.’ In the long run, that can mean he’s not involved with his kids.

Meanwhile, policy largely ignores lessons from Nordic countries about the success of lengthy ‘use-it-or-lose-it’ leave arrangements for dads, as Margaret O’Brien details. And so the institutional barriers to fatherhood remain, suggesting a substantial malfunctioning of child development policy. ‘Policy should be brought into line with what we know and what we say,’ argues Michael Lamb.

Support for motherhood seems easier than support for fatherhood

It’s intriguing that these same governments seem able to design policies that support motherhood, such as leave and childcare packages for mothers staying in, and returning to, the work force. What explains their persistent failure to support positive, engaged fatherhood? What’s stopping governments from implementing change that experts recognise as good for children?

It’s a question that child development research should answer. But perhaps the skill base examining fatherhood issues – and possibly other child development questions – is too narrow. That’s because the solutions for implementing fatherhood policies may sit less in, for example, developmental psychology than in fields not usually associated with child development: political science and economics.

“Political scientists could explain the dynamics of political systems – in Nordic countries – which have been early adopters of enlightened fatherhood policies.”

There are plenty of behavioural economists looking at child development. Janet Currie at Princeton University, for example, has tested the cost effectiveness of cutting local pollution levels to improve children’s learning. Greg Duncan is testing whether children’s cognitive and behavioural development in disadvantaged families is improved by cutting poverty – giving their parents an extra $4,000 a year for the first 40 months.

Apply broader disciplines to child development research

But macroeconomics tends to stay clear of fatherhood. Political scientists are also rarely present in the research debate. But their insights might bridge the gulf between existing child development evidence and more widespread adoption of policies supporting positive fatherhood.

Without their research, one is left to speculate about what’s going wrong. It may be that governments see policies that support positive fatherhood as at odds with a key goal: keeping their economies well-supplied with affordable workers. This goal may be good for families, providing vital income. It’s also consistent with policies designed for mothers that increase their participation in the job market. But backing engaged fatherhood is more problematic.

When fathers identify more as carers, they may shift from their traditional focus as workers. They may, then, prefer to work less, behaving more like mothers, for whom wage labour competes with the rewards of engaged parent-child relationships. In economic terms, increased caring fatherhood could be seen as equivalent in impact to a constraint on the labour supply.

In short, governments, driven by strategies for high employment, may have little incentive to support policies that shift fathers’ focus closer to home. It might even be said that most dads are exactly where most governments want them to be – at work. And if they’re not, the main option that policy typically gives them is to look for work.

This is why we need to learn more from macroeconomics about the wider and longer-term economic gains and losses that spring from supporting caring fatherhood. Insights from political scientists are also required to explain the dynamics of the Nordic countries’ political systems which have been early adopters of enlightened fatherhood policies.

We need to understand what’s inspiring them and what’s holding up the rest of the world. Optimising child development demands a more thorough understanding of what might encourage governments to implement father-friendly policies.

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Play with dad could help bridge cognitive, social and emotional learning gaps among low-income children.

Please can we stop telling fathers just to pay for their children? They’re more than walking wallets. We should also emphasise that spending time with children and playing is just as important for early childhood development. That’s because play by fathers can have special, often irreplaceable qualities. Sometimes dad’s way of playing involves a bit of magic and fun that can transform lives, particularly for disadvantaged children.

So it’s a mistake to demand that fathers work round the clock — perhaps for just $7 an hour — and fail to offer them support to spend time with children. That’s especially true if the kids are asleep when dad gets home and there’s no time to just hang out or play.

The case for ‘play and pay’ contributing to early childhood development is particularly strong for low-income dads—and not only because the cash benefits of work are low. It’s also because the returns from playing with dad can be particularly significant for lower-income children, who may be a risk of doing poorly at school.

Our research shows how these dads try to square the circle of paying and playing. In one family, the father, working three low-wage jobs, would wake up his toddler late at night when he got home so they could play for an hour or two. Otherwise they wouldn’t have had time together from one Sunday to the next. The child was tired the next day, but this was the only way the father saw to manage his responsibilities both to support his child financially and to spend time with her.

“Rough and tumble with dad is associated with learning to regulate emotions and manage social relationships. Dads pose more questions … boosting vocabulary, language and verbal reasoning.”

Three factors explain why it’s vital that public policy makers prioritise fathers playing with their young children. First, play is important for children per se in the early years. That’s why it underpins institutional practice and curricula – play is recognised as a foundation of cognitive development as well as social and emotional learning. So if play is at the heart of early learning, it should also be a focus of parenting, whether by mothers or fathers.

Social and emotional learning

Second, research shows that play with dad can deliver elements of child development that mom might not offer as much or as often. For example, the rough and tumble with dad is associated with learning how to regulate emotions and manage social relationships. This learning is then transferred to peer relationships and is vital for a successful adult life.

Cognitive development

Fathers can also act as challenging communication partners for children from an early age, aiding cognitive development. They tend to speak to their children differently from the way mothers do. Dads pose more questions that require conversation. They particularly use wh-questions, such as ‘what, why, who, when’. These types of questions encourage complex responses from children, boosting their vocabulary and language. Such skills can then provide pathways for enhanced development of verbal reasoning.

These two factors, perhaps, are reason enough for rethinking advice to and support for fathers around play. But the third factor should be a clincher for policy makers who seek to reduce poverty’s impact on early childhood development.

Photo: Shutterstock

Father play is a promising place to start in any quest to break the link between poverty in childhood and impoverished education and learning. That’s because some, though not all, low income dads are extremely good at the challenging wh-question communications which so benefit children’s cognitive development. They can also be very good at the rough and tumble play that support children’s social and emotional learning. Indeed, in play, some low-income fathers are at least as competent as some of the most able middle-class fathers. Many low-income dads are invested and motivated to make sure their children have the best chance to achieve a good life.

This is good news for policy makers and social scientists who wish to bridge the stubborn cognitive development gap between low- and higher-income children that emerges even before kindergarten.

We know some causes of the cognitive development gap, such as less access to educational resources and lower educational achievement among parents with low incomes. They can be summed up as ‘lower human capital’. It’s often difficult to boost the levels of human capital among lower-income families, at least in the short term. But there is also tremendous variability – many low-income dads and moms provide high quality support for their children to ensure their optimal development.

Child development in low-income families

Not all low-income families are toxically poor. They have capacities to mitigate the effects of poverty on children’s cognitive development so the next generation has a real opportunity to thrive educationally. For example, a capacity for influential ‘father play’ exists in many disadvantaged families and when mobilised, the evidence shows, can be important for early childhood development. But this capacity can also easily be squandered amid today’s limiting public narratives and policy approaches to fatherhood. These tend to promote an erroneous attitude that playing with dad is marginal to child development and insignificant beside a father’s central role – to work and provide income for his children.

“If fathers are going to ‘pay and play’, we must rethink how ‘responsible’ dads are defined and how they should be supported.”

So what is to be done? First, fathers should understand that they have skills and responsibilities to play in particular ways with their children. They should also know that the way they engage with their children matters for their social, emotional and cognitive development. The particularity of their input means that it’s not a responsibility they can pass to mothers, other siblings or outsiders. They have something special to offer early childhood development through play. If they don’t use it, then their children might lose it.

Policy can support play with fathers

Policy has to change, too. It is hard to legislate for play. But policy makers can tell fathers, their partners and the public some facts from well-established research about early childhood development. And they can provide opportunities for father play. They can also offer policies and programs that include parental leave when a child is born or when a father needs time off work to attend to his child’s needs.

If the authorities insist, for example, that dads pay child support after parental breakups, but visitation time is not universally built in, then they’re letting the children down. If Head Start talks only about moms, it diminishes fathers’ opportunities to do a good job. All of this has implications about how, for example, leave arrangements for fathers are structured and how early years services are delivered. If fathers are going to ‘pay and play’, we must rethink how ‘responsible’ dads are defined and how they should be supported.Policymakers should ensure that fathers have the supports they need to develop positive relationship with their children: coparenting support, parental leave, flextime, and ensuring that when parents are separated they both learn to coparent positively and in ways that are beneficial to children.Ensure that programs reach out to fathers, too, not just mothers. Often when we say parents, we mean mothers. Programs should develop different strategies and reaching out strategies for fathers – saying to moms “your husband/partner is welcome” is not the same thing as saying “you, as the father of xx, needs to be here… your partner/wife is also welcome”.

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Paternity leave is a good start to fatherhood, but well-designed parental leave underpins the sharing of care that boosts early childhood development.

Coparenting is arguably the most important ingredient that fathers bring to early child development. Children thrive best when parents share their care, research finds. Dad is a source of parental love, another pair of hands, and a partner in the joint enterprise raising children — usually with mom.

So any supports, such as paternity leave or parental leave, that aid a father’s involvement, as well his competence and confidence, contribute to coparenting and thus to early child development.

However, getting such supports right has proved a challenge for policy makers. It hasn’t been easy to design leave arrangements that genuinely help fathers to share in caring for their children, particularly early in the children’s lives. Schemes from around the world that were announced to great applause have often seen low participation by fathers.

Coparenting underpins early child development

Practices introduced in Sweden and other Nordic countries, however, have helped distil some of the ingredients of success. Good design addresses two powerful, traditional cultures – at work and at home – that may prevent fathers from taking leave and thus playing their role in the coparenting that underpins early child development.

Traditional attitudes represent men as indispensable in the workplace, even when they have fatherhood responsibilities. Meanwhile, they may also be seen as dispensable at home, even when there’s a lot of childcare to be done. Poorly designed paternity leave or parental leave are likely to have low participation because one or both of these traditional cultures gets in the way.

Promoting paternity leave and parental leave

How can we get more fathers to take up leave? The key is to set down paternity and parental leave in law because that sends a loud signal. But the legislation needs to be framed so that it empowers both fathers and mothers to be advocates for it, within the workplace and at home. It should, in essence, turn both men and women into cheerleaders for dad taking leave. (It also helps if the workplace acts as a champion, too.)

“Policies such as paternity leave and parental leave support the involvement of two parents.”

This empowerment requires clearly defined rights in the workplace for fathers to take leave. These rights are easier to exercise when they are accompanied by understanding among employers of the business benefits that spring from supporting fathers. For example, it helps when employers understand that encouraging leave taking by fathers is paid back subsequently in employee loyalty and retention.

Second, leave arrangements should offer clearly defined advantages to the whole family – not just to dad but also to mom. At the very least, when a father takes up paternity or parental leave, it should require minimal financial loss to the household and little sacrifice on the part of the other parent.

Evidence on coparenting

It’s important to understand why fathers are important in early child development. Research does not suggest that fathers are intrinsically necessary for healthy child development. Children can thrive without fathers. Likewise, they can do well without mothers. The well-documented successes of same-sex parenting, be it by women or men – highlighted by Susan Golombok and others – demonstrate these points.

Research indicates that coparenting, rather than gendered parenting, is a vital ingredient in early child development. For most children, Mom and Dad – or a variant including step-parents – are likely to represent the best chance of experiencing such coparenting. Policies such as paternity leave and parental leave strengthen coparenting by supporting the involvement of two parents.

Paternity leave

It’s also important to understand the difference between paternity leave and parental leave. Paternity leave is typically taken immediately around a child’s birth and is usually quite short — a matter of days or weeks. Fathers who take paternity leave can get to know their newborn, learn about infant care and share a precious time with the other parent.

Photo: Shutterstock.

Parental leave may be taken by either fathers or mothers. It is designed to aid their longer term care of dependent children. It can last for months, even years, if taken flexibly or part-time and depending on the generosity of the leave regime.

Impact of parental leave

Parental leave normalises caring fatherhood in the workplace by making fathers visible and embedding fatherhood into company culture. It challenges notions that fathers are indispensable to work and dispensable to their children. Meanwhile, parental leave normalises caring fatherhood in the home, developing and establishing male competence in the absence of mothers, and highlighting fathers’ importance to early child development.

“Parental leave normalises caring fatherhood in the workplace by making fathers visible and embedding fatherhood into company culture. It challenges notions that fathers are dispensable to work and dispensable to their children.”

We know that parents bring many benefits to children, not only in hands-on care but by bringing income into the home. Parental leave functions – for both men and women – by promoting continuous connection to both work and to children. It helps each parent to contribute parental care and also access the earning and prestige that spring from participation in the labor market.

Parental leave design

However, the patchy success of parental leave legislation demonstrates that some key ingredients are required. A change in the law that simply allows fathers to take parental leave allocated on a family basis (so the mother effectively forfeits that time) – works poorly and results in low paternal participation.

Reserved time for fathers – “daddy months” – has much higher take-up. This “use it or lose it” parental leave turns fathers into the implementers of legislation; that is, it empowers them to advocate for their own leave at work and at home and thereby challenges traditional attitudes in both locations.

In Sweden, for example, the introduction in 1995 of a “use-it-or-lose-it” daddy month led significantly more fathers to take parental leave. There was a further sharp increase in the number of days taken by fathers when a second “daddy month” was added in 2002. Now a third month has been added, and we are assessing the impact.

Other design features are also vital for successful uptake of parental leave by fathers – flexibility, large numbers of days available over a lengthy period, high levels of pay replacement and application to those working in the casual and self-employed labour markets.

A great strength of well-designed parental leave is that neither mothers nor fathers experience themselves as being “losers” in the system. Both see it as “win”, so the explosive, often conflictual politics of gender are avoided.Governments should support coparenting and fathers’ involvement in caring for children, for example, through parental leave. This supports strong early childhood development.

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