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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Research has discredited many cultural beliefs about fathers and their roles in child development but these mistaken beliefs still shape modern family policy.

Many widely held cultural beliefs about fathers are wrong. Decades of research have proved that dads are not marginal, secondary, or dispensable in child development. Rather, the father-child relationship is of great importance. Dads’ care, as far as children are concerned, is not discretionary.

These findings require changes in policies that continue to reflect mistaken cultural beliefs – policies relating to employment, maternity care, poverty and family separation. Policy and practice should, instead, recognise and support father-child relationships and their beneficial impacts on child development.

We now know that young children bond with mothers and fathers similarly and that relationships with each parent matter a great deal to child development and long-term welfare.

Public rhetoric increasingly reflects these findings. But we’re not walking the talk.

Policy and practice, the workplace, family dynamics and the law often lag far behind. Child development suffers when relationships with fathers are undervalued. Millions of children are unnecessarily let down by institutions and parents themselves when it comes to fathering. We could avoid many of these failures.

New fathers and mothers are similarly able to support child development

Here’s what we know about fathers and about families. Both men and women share an intrinsic capacity to be good parents. Both are physiologically prepared for, and changed by, parenthood. New mothers and fathers are equivalently competent (or incompetent) at parenting. Any disparity in skills usually reflects women’s greater experience and opportunities to learn, rather than a biologically given capacity.

“We need to bring practice into line with rhetoric, to align what we do – regarding fatherhood – with what we know and what we say.”

There does not seem to be a distinctive and necessary paternal way of behaving that makes the father-child relationship qualitatively different from the relationship between mother and child. Mothers and fathers influence child development in the same (non-gendered) ways – they promote psychological adjustment when they are caring, loving, engaged, and authoritative. Boys need their fathers no more and no less than girls: there is now plentiful evidence that girls, too, fall behind when their fathers are absent, offer poor care, or are inaccessible.

Relationships: Attachment to both in the first year

Fathers become psychologically important early in their children’s lives by the middle of the first year, just as mothers do, and differences in the parents’ sensitivity influence the relationships. From then on, the quality of these relationships continues to be important for child development and throughout later life.

However, the security of attachment relationships is not fixed in early life. They can be improved, and they can also be damaged. There is ample evidence that relationship quality can change when children’s care and living experiences shift. These quality changes are closely linked to long-term child development.

Photo: Shutterstock.

Child Development: What children need from their fathers

We know what matters to children. Healthy child development depends overwhelmingly on qualities such as the parents’ affection, consistency, reliability, responsiveness, and emotional commitment. It also depends on the quality and character of the relationships between parents and their intimates, and on the availability of sufficient economic and social resources.

Once these factors have been taken into account, the particularities of family structure (for example, single parents/same-sex parents, non-biological parents) have little impact on children’s development. Indeed, since the 1980s, it has been well established that children and adolescents can adjust just as well in non-traditional settings as in traditional families.

For example, fathers can have a very positive effect on their children, whether or not they live with the children’s mothers. The critically important factor is ensuring that children experience dad as a reliable source of psychological support. So having an appropriate amount of quality father time is crucial.

Recommendations for child development policy and practice

A consequence of these findings is that policy makers, practitioners, and the public in general should understand better how to promote strong child development through support for father-child relationships. At the moment, they sometimes fail to act in children’s best interests. Research evidence makes an overwhelming case for:

• fully including fathers in preparation for birth and parenthood;
• alleviating family poverty;
• refashioning the workplace so that fathers of young children have the flexibility to combine their roles as earners and parents;
• recognising and supporting father’s parenting in non-traditional as well as traditional families, and;
• supporting post-separation arrangements that minimise parental conflict and maintain meaningful father-child relationships.

“Brief dinners and occasional weekend visits with dad are not broad enough or extensive enough to nurture father-child relationships after separation.”

Take employment, for example. We know that, with very young children, it’s important to minimise the length of separations from mum and dad and maximise the quality of interaction when children are with a parent. This is a gendered issue because, on average, fathers earn more than mothers do, so, with the family’s increased economic needs, there is extra pressure on dads to work longer hours. That can become a problem for their parenting. Such issues are far from resolved in many workplaces or by the parental leave system, so weakening investment in child development.

Evidence also highlights continuing failures to ensure that separated fathers spend sufficient quality time with their children. In a minority of cases, very limited contact may be appropriate because the relationship is poor or parental conflict is high. Generally, however, we know that post-divorce parenting plans which encourage regular participation by both parents are vital to building and maintaining the committed and meaningful parent-child relationships that children need. Brief dinners and occasional weekend visits with dad are not rich, broad, or extensive enough to nurture such relationships. In contrast, weekday and weekend daytime and night-time activities are important for child development at all ages.

As in the workplace, the legal, cultural and social supports for fathers’ contributions to child development are often not yet in place to make these arrangements the norm, even though most people would acknowledge their importance. We need to bring practice into line with rhetoric, to align what we do regarding fatherhood with what we know and what we say. Dads are crucial to children , just as mothers are. This truth should be reflected in what happens at work, in the home, in public services and in decision-making and supports around children after their parents split up. It often isn’t at the moment.

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Less direct approach to interviewing child abuse victims increases disclosures, prosecutions, guilty pleas and convictions – providing better child protection.

Today’s increased commitment to uncovering the truth about child abuse is vital. Yet asking children detailed questions about abuse can be counterproductive. If children are questioned too directly, particularly about traumatic events, they may clam up. So the truth may never be known: children miss out on therapeutic help, and prosecutions fail for lack of evidence.

Evidence shows that a different approach can avoid letting so many of these children down. Interviewers achieve greater success if they have been trained to be supportive and empathetic when talking to abused children. They are instructed to avoid narrowly defined questions. For example, they simply ask the child what happened, rather than saying: ‘Did he touch you?’ or ‘Did he pull your clothes?’ or ‘Did he hurt you?’

According to a recent study, this less direct, more sensitive approach produces striking results. There are more disclosures of child abuse and more prosecutions, leading to more guilty pleas. If cases go to trial, guilty verdicts are more likely.

Greater certainty about whether abuse has taken place also helps the authorities make a child safe. Action typically relies upon a child’s disclosing what has happened. Without that disclosure, therapy is unlikely. Furthermore, conducting a good interview can increase confidence that something did not happen, allowing help to focus on genuine victims.

“They ask the child what happened, rather than saying: “Did he touch you?” or “Did he pull your clothes?” or “Did he hurt you?””

In the past, investigators typically adopted the more direct approach. They took the view that the child was frightened and should be shown that the adults knew what had happened. All the child had to do was to confirm what the adults already believed.

But this approach can be risky. Words may be put into children’s mouths and they may provide information whose accuracy is difficult to judge. Also, if a child fails to confirm what is believed to have happened, interviewers can become irritated that the child seems unwilling to cooperate. Interviewers may become coercive, putting pressure on the child, when what the child really needs is support and reasons to trust the interviewer.

My colleagues and I have shown repeatedly that more supportive and open-ended interviews do not require more time or resources. Achieving greater success simply demands a better understanding of children and knowledge of what works best.

These insights have been widely commended among those working with abused children. Many criminal justice systems would say that they have already adopted a more sympathetic, open-ended style of interviewing. The UK Government has, for example, published a 250-page guide, ‘Achieving Best Evidence’, which provides high-level justification for this approach. Nevertheless, there seems to be gap in many jurisdictions worldwide between aspiration and practice.

In the mid-1990s, while I was a senior research scientist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Washington, DC, we developed what has become known as the NICHD Protocol. It’s a straightforward, 18-page practice-based guide, now translated into many languages, that offers concrete advice on what to do, plus specific examples of how to interview children in ways that can free them up to reveal abuse.

It details how, for example, to let a child talk about the abuse, without raising the subject explicitly, and suggests ways to ask open-ended questions. It highlights signs of anxiety or distress in children and shows the interviewer how to relate to and empathise with those signs rather than ignore them.

We have measured the outcomes of investigations where interviewers adopted the Protocol and compared the results with pre-Protocol practice, often involving the very same people as interviewers. There is a striking association among use of the NICHD Protocol, more cooperative and informative interviewees, and better disclosure and conviction rates.

Our findings offer considerable prospects for improved evidence-gathering from victims in child abuse cases. The same approach can also yield better information from suspects. The criminal justice system is understandably expected to be inquisitive and punitive. However, our research suggests that less inquisitorial and punitive styles of questioning can lead to more successful identification of the guilty and better support for victims, particularly in cases of child abuse.

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