Start with acknowledging and celebrating the diversity of Latinx families and communities

The past 20 years have seen dramatic shifts in the location of Latinx communities, stretching beyond traditional jurisdictions in California, Texas, and New York into areas that are much less familiar with their needs and cultures. Indeed, the label “Latinx” does not capture the diversity of Latinx-identifying families and individuals born and raised in the United States versus recent and earlier arrivals who hail from different countries of origin and heritages, and who are fluent in different Spanish dialects and indigenous languages. (Latinx is a gender-neutral term used in the United States to refer to Latino/Hispanic individuals of Latin American or Caribbean heritage.)

This diversity can sometimes overwhelm rigid and unfamiliar systems, which can contribute to frustration, confusion, and tensions in receiving communities. Correspondingly, fear and distrust among Latinx populations and between Latinx populations and other groups can escalate. What may actually be misinformation or confusion among Latinx parents can be internalized as failure. In reality, Latinx parents bring with them hope, optimism, a sense of family cohesion, and a strong work ethic, which are key strengths that support children’s success.

Three key strengths: Optimism, work ethic, and family cohesion

It is hard to overstate the optimism that Latinx immigrants have today and have always had when they arrive in the United States. They feel they have had to risk everything, leaving behind family and the life they knew to move to a better life, one filled with hope of economic opportunity and promise for their children’s futures. This optimism carries them through difficult times. Such positivity protects their well-being and mental health and drives success.

Service and public infrastructure such as transportation, internet access, and schools can be extended in ways that capitalize on co-location of community organizations and neighborhoods that parents trust.

Optimism is just one of many strengths Latinx families bring with them, whether they are born in the United States or are recent immigrants. Their capacities include a strong work ethic, with many Latinx parents working long hours and producing high-quality output, rarely missing work or calling in sick, often at the risk of losing earned income and with no mechanism for recourse in case of injury or emergency.

This strong work ethic goes hand in hand with an equally strong commitment to their children, ensuring that they receive proper nutrition and feel safe, and attending to their children’s learning and education. As in all families, Latinx parents balance the competing demands of being a worker and a parent, and ensure that their children get not only resources but also their time.

Family cohesion is the hallmark of adapting and thriving in the United States. Latinx families provide love and support for each other in the form of social and financial capital. The strong family bond can protect them from adversity and provides a personal safety net that helps the family not only survive, but in many cases, thrive. An integral part of the family is the belief that children thrive when raised by two parents—mothers and fathers.

Photo: David Beoulve. Creative Commons.

Fathers’ role is not only to provide financially for their children, but also to be there for them and be involved in day-to-day parenting. Latinx fathers have a strong commitment to their family and their children, and their involvement in their lives matters for the development of children’s basic language and social skills. Fathers and mothers also co-parent and combine resources to ensure that their children have more opportunities than they had. 

Celebrating learning and education

The value placed on education and learning is infused throughout stages of child development, as demonstrated during children’s earliest years. Both Latinx mothers and fathers engage in active storytelling which is sustained through support of formal schooling.

Investments in early education in the United States have yielded high enrollment in programs serving preschool-age Latinx children, and the benefits to Latinx children, including dual language learners, sometimes outpace those of other groups of  children. Families also benefit from the role early education and care play in supporting parenting, access to other resources in the community, and connections to social networks.

The strong Latino parent work ethic goes hand in hand with an equally strong commitment to their children. As in all families, Latinx parents balance the competing demands of being a worker and a parent, and ensure that their children get not only resources but also their time.

Indeed, Latinx fourth and fifth graders’ math and reading achievement has increased over time, as have Latinx high school graduation rates and subsequent enrolment in post-secondary education programs. When researchers visit Latinx homes, parents ask about where and how they can purchase the educational toys used to observe children’s play. It is not unusual for young children to ask their teachers for more books to bring home from school, declaring: “One is for me, and one is for Mom.” Modelling good behavior is a tool parents use to inculcate in their children a love of learning, with many parents “doing homework” with their children. Family members, and sometimes entire communities, come together to participate in and witness schooling milestones, such as graduations.

Educational preparedness for many Latinx children includes fluency in two languages, mastering English and Spanish. Schools that embrace equity-oriented practices – including strategies to facilitate family engagement and family-school partnerships, and extended learning opportunities – have reduced disparities in Latinx students’ school progress compared to peers.

A foundation of good health

Across many metrics of children’s health, Latinx children fare well, notably in low rates of infant mortality. Latinx parents care deeply about the health of their children and the foundation that good health provides for their children’s educational attainment and economic opportunities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Latinx families, like many other families, expressed concern about the social isolation and mental health of their children. They also experienced high rates of economic, food, and housing insecurities, which threatened the well-being of their children.

Yet their abilities to meet the physical and mental health needs of their children are often hindered by structural barriers to medical care, public services, and other resources needed to support children’s well-being. As one example, 12 states, many in the U.S. South, have chosen not to expand Medicaid, a health insurance program for low-income persons. Even with insurance, Latinx families can face a variety of barriers to care, including limited time off from work to obtain medical care, limited access to transportation, and a lack of culturally and linguistically appropriate services in the communities in which they live.

Pandemic challenges

Optimism can wear thin when families are faced with health risks and economic uncertainty over a prolonged period. During the first few months of the pandemic, the mental health of Latinx parents was initially buoyed by their optimism and strong co-parenting support, but high rates of unemployment, especially among Latina parents, reduced household income. Not all eligible Latinx families received pandemic-related government assistance.

Although most Latinx families did their best to keep children engaged in learning activities at home, Latinx children’s learning suffered because they did not receive the support they needed for education transmitted remotely or online. Latinx children did not have consistent access to technology or equipment, such as extra iPads or laptops. In some cases, children missed online testing because digitally accessible equipment, including a smart phone, was shared by an entire household. 

As Latinx parents struggled to cope with extra demands, Latinx teens and young adults were expected to help their younger siblings with learning.

Photo: Jhon David. Unsplash.

Opportunity for policy investment and the price of policy failure

These and other stories speak to Latinx family strengths. How can these strengths of optimism, work ethic, and family cohesion be harnessed – and not undermined – by investments in education, health care, and child care policy?

Latinx children arrive at formal schooling curious and eager to learn. Although Latinx children quickly catch up to their peers in some academic domains, lack of support for their home language and cultural barriers contribute to dashed hopes and disillusionment with educational opportunities. As economic pressures on the family, youth are forced to disengage from the educational system as they face competing demands, including working to financially support their family or sharing in the responsibility of raising younger siblings. This path can lead to lost years of formal education.

Child care providers have difficulty accommodating the complexities of work schedules among some Latinx parents, and early education and care arrangements are not always culturally responsive, lacking support for Spanish-speaking or dual-language parents and children and failing to adequately accommodate children with special needs. The supply of child care slots is low, resulting in fewer options to reconcile work and parenting commitments.

Many Latinx families with children are left out of health insurance because of discrimination against individuals whose immigration status is not regularized. Latina adolescents have some of the highest rates of depression and suicide attempts in the United States. Longer-term consequences are documented in poor cardiovascular health, diabetes, and suboptimal functioning in adulthood.

When family cohesion faces such stressors, how far can the safety net it provides its members be stretched before it snaps? It is hard to know precisely. Low-wage work is deeply problematic, setting tight limits on what parents can do for their children. When a mother works two or three jobs, who cares for her children? When can a mother or father engage with the school if they are both working long hours? When is there time to navigate the health care system?

How can parents ensure that child care is good? If work is unreliable and unstable, with no benefits and few hours required on short notice, children may have to be placed in three or four different child care arrangements. Typically, there is no formal child care on weekends, so low-paid Latinx families are forced into an informal network of supports, some of which are not of very high quality.

How do parents square the circle of wanting to spend loving time with their children and earning enough money to feed their family? One father we know works three jobs, getting home at 11 pm every night. His two-year-old naps until 10:30 pm, then is wakened so she can play with her father for half an hour – but she is tired the next day.

A manifesto for change

It is time for public programs and services to re-envision their engagement with Latinx families and support Latinx children’s paths to success. They must also respect the rights of Latinx individuals: Most young children of immigrants are U.S.-born, thus have rights and privileges equal to all other U.S. citizens such that their parents’ immigration status is not a barrier.

Service and public infrastructure more generally—including transportation, internet access and schools—can also be extended in ways that capitalize on co-location of community organizations and neighborhoods that parents trust. Community schools have proven their worth in, for example, improving access to children’s health care and reducing the administrative burden on hard-pressed parents of accessing other services.

Latinx families bring such strengths – so much energy, skill, and commitment – to raising their children well. A public commitment to policies and practices that harness and align with these strengths can go a long way to recouping returns to investments.

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Breaking the cycles of bias and violence starts at home by talking to children about racism rather than well-meaning adults avoiding the subject.

In a 2008 column that went viral, the late journalist Fatimah Ali predicted that only the election of Barack Obama would save our country from a full-on “race war.” She was wrong. Obama’s two terms of service have long passed, but the racial injustices in this country are raging in full force. This spring alone, in the context of public health and economic crises that disproportionately ravaged Black and Brown communities, we’ve witnessed the systematic and blatant disregard for Black lives over and over again — George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Christian Cooper. Communities of color and their allies are tired, weary, angry, and impatient for change. Photos of peaceful protesters speak to our hearts, while burning cars, boarded buildings, law enforcement officers in riot gear, and state-mandated curfews tell the story of a nation at war. Company CEOs, university presidents, national sports figures, and the general public are responding to the countrywide unrest and are watching closely.

Our youngest generation is watching, too.

In these painful times, when the structural racism and inequality of American society is so palpable, many parents are asking two critical questions. Most immediately, “How and how much should we discuss these recent racial traumas with our children?” More importantly “How do we teach this generation about what it means to be White, Black, or any other racial or ethnic group in ways that help dismantle, rather than perpetuate, the systemic racial injustices and inequalities that appear to be so intractable?” The answer to both questions is the same.

Photo: Victoria Pickering. Creative Commons.

As researchers with expertise in parenting among ethnic-racial minority families, we advocate an approach to racial discussions with children that is intentional, honest, and focused on equity and justice for all people. We call it “intentional parenting for equity and justice” (IPEJ). It entails deliberate and purposeful conversations and activities that increase children’s awareness of racial dynamics in our country and impel them to resist and change those dynamics, which most notably include institutionalized racism and oppression; racial stereotyping, microaggressions and their consequences; and the damaging effects of racial privilege on those who are excluded. IPEJ also involves identifying opportunities to expose children to the strengths and rich cultural traditions of all cultural and ethnic groups, including their positive contributions to all aspects of our society.

‘Intentional Parenting for Equity and Justice’ entails deliberate and purposeful conversations and activities that increase children’s awareness of racial dynamics in our country and impel them to resist and change those dynamics, which most notably include institutionalized racism and oppression; racial stereotyping, microaggressions and their consequences; and the damaging effects of racial privilege on those who are excluded.

To achieve IPEJ as a normative approach to parenting, we need to shift the status quo. Currently, many well-meaning adults avoid mentioning race to their children, choosing instead to uphold colorblind and egalitarian national narratives. This is especially true of White parents. Studies following the killings of Trayvon Martin (2012) and Michael Brown (2014) showed that these highly visible events motivated Black parents to have extensive conversations about racism and discrimination with their children. But very few White parents did so, citing their wish to maintain a protected, worry-free childhood environment. Our research shows that on a more routine basis, Black, Latinx and Asian parents are far more likely than White parents to talk about racial issues with their children, especially cultural pride and awareness of discrimination.

The status quo hinders racial progress. To strongly position future generations to dismantle systems of racial injustice, inequality, and privilege, parents must deliberately teach children that they exist, that they are complex, and that they are unacceptable.

Photo: Victoria Pickering. Creative Commons.

Too many teens in our studies – teens of all racial backgrounds – say that racism is a thing of the past that ended when Rosa Parks sat at the front of the bus, even though they notice current racial disparities in the way people live, the opportunities they have, and the way people are treated in public places and by authorities. Children are learning race even when parents are not deliberately teaching it, and they are drawing conclusions that do not include the damage caused by persistent structural issues. In addition, when parents fail to sensitize children to racial bias, stereotyping, and their harmful effects, these racial dynamics persist uncontested.

In our studies, racial teasing and microaggressions are rampant in lunch rooms, schoolyards, and other unsupervised social and digital spaces where youth spend time: Although students of all races experience these aggressions, youth of color experience them more often, leading to what has been called “discriminatory distress” which, when chronic, has cumulative negative effects well into adulthood.  Instead of passively allowing young people to overlook or ignore these racial dynamics, we need to empower them to implement change. Moreover, when White parents continue to communicate to their children that race is unimportant, the burden of racial progress and change falls squarely on the shoulders of children of color, entitling White children to rarely or wrongly think about race. All parents, not just parents of color, need to actively help our children understand, interpret, and resist the structural racism and implicit biases they see in order to help prepare them as future leaders who recognize and fight against their own implicit racism and the racism of others.

How and how much, then, should parents discuss current racial events with their children? As much as possible, in ways that are aligned with children’s ages and readiness to learn. Importantly, though, parents need to have a plan about what they want to convey and how. For young children, discussion of highly visible racialized violence should be simple and brief. Although parents should certainly shield children from graphic video footage, they should prepare themselves to answer children’s questions about things they might see in newspapers or on TV (e.g., why are police officers pushing people? Why are stores and cars burning?). Answers should be simple and brief, and they should reflect parents’ equity and justice goals.

Photo: cool revolution. Creative Commons.

In our work, many parents have described situations in which young children’s questions caught them off-guard, leaving them at a loss for what to say or how to explain. Of course, older children are in a better position to digest more complicated information about inequality and structural racism, and we advocate that parents have frank and accurate discussions about current racialized events (especially their history and origins). Parents’ silence about racialized horrors that children see on TV and social media is in itself a communication to children that racism and inequality are an acceptable way of American life. It is important for all of us (teachers, parents, youth advocates, and researchers) to recognize that children are drawing inferences about the meaning of these events even if parents are not talking about them.

How can parents teach this generation in ways that help dismantle, rather than perpetuate, the systemic racial injustices and inequalities upon which America has been built? Our IPEJ principles apply most directly here. Parents first need to closely examine their own racial beliefs and attitudes to position themselves to teach what they value most to their children. If possible, they should expose children early to diversity in meaningful ways (the places and events they attend; the friends they have; the toys, books, symbols, and wall hanging in the home). In age-appropriate ways, find opportunities to talk about, rather than overlook, how racism and oppression has been deeply woven into the fabric of American life, both historically and to this day. Deliberately discuss, rather than avoid, how non-dominant groups are negatively stereotyped and harmed by slurs, stereotypes, and other stigmatizing public actions and portrayals of minority groups, both historically and now. When and where they see them, parents can identify instances of privilege and opportunity that result in people of color having less access. Find ways to expose children to the strengths, rich traditions, and positive contributions to all aspects of our society of diverse cultural and ethnic groups. In general, intentionally integrate teaching about race into your overall parenting agenda.

Racial injustice is a problem for all of us. Just as it required collective responsibility to flatten the COVID-19 curve, addressing racial oppression, injustice, and inequality is all of our collective responsibility. Intentional Parenting for Equity and Justice is a tool to end systemic and interpersonal racism by raising all children’s consciousness about the impact these systemic factors have on individuals’ health and wellbeing. Without this sort of approach, we, as social scientists, fear that traumatic and painful racial incidents will remain as entrenched as ever in the fabric of American life. Parents need to be part of the solution, recognizing that silence and inaction sustain systems of racial injustice.

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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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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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Low-income dads often speak and play with their children in unique ways that boost school readiness.

Ricardo is a committed father. But having dropped out of school in sixth grade, he’s virtually illiterate both in Spanish and in English. He has to work three jobs, cleaning tables, to make ends meet. So he doesn’t finish work until 11 p.m. By then, his two-year-old daughter, tucked in at 9, has long been asleep. He believes that being a good dad means providing for his daughter, but also being there for her—spending time with her. How does he have time to be a hands-on father? Ricardo wakes his daughter up when he arrives home. Then they play together for a couple of hours, until well past midnight, when the family eventually goes to bed.

This is just one of many stories my research has gathered of how fathers with low incomes, who often work long hours and struggle against the odds, still strive to care for their children against the odds. Their lives and what they do for their children contradict a stereotype of low-income dads as uninvolved and absent from their children’s lives. In fact, many are highly involved and have much to contribute in terms of care.

Blindness to benefits of fatherhood

The “absent dad” narrative is isolating and demoralizing for these fathers, who are doing their best in difficult circumstances, largely ignored and unsupported by social policies and programs. It has also blinded both researchers and policy makers to crucial benefits that such fathering offers in, for example, developing school readiness among children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

“Policy – which focuses on fathers delivering child support rather than care – should recognize and promote the skills that dads can bring to disadvantaged families.”

Our studies, and those of other researchers, have identified two areas in which fathers from poorer families contribute significantly and often uniquely to school readiness in ways that are typically different from mothers’ contributions: language development and emotional regulation. In both these important areas, young children from low-income families often lag behind their better-off peers.  Policy – which often focuses on fathers delivering child support rather than care – should recognize and promote these skills that dads can bring to such families.

Dads stretch children’s linguistic abilities

Take language development. Several small-scale studies of low-income families by my team and others have shown that fathers talk to young children in linguistically challenging ways. We videotaped fathers interacting with their young children and measured the number and quality of words that they used. We found that they ask more “who, why, where and what” questions than mothers do, thus linguistically challenging their children and promoting more sophisticated linguistic development and vocabulary.

In contrast, mothers tend to use familiar language and ask fewer “wh– questions”. Fathers’ different approach is helpful, particularly for more disadvantaged children who are more likely to experience delays in language development. Researchers have had to revise their views of the challenging language that fathers often use. In the past, fathers have been berated as insensitive to children for not speaking to them at the correct developmental level. Now we have evidence that this type of talk is not insensitive but rather linguistically challenging. Mothers’ parenting practices are not necessarily the gold standard.

Photo: Adrian V. Floyd. Creative Commons.

Playing with dad helps self-regulation

Another area in which fathers’ parenting may have an upper hand over mothers’ is in rough and tumble play.  Many dads are energetic with their children, pushing them to take risks and to set limits. When fathers do so, children learn to speak out in a safe environment with dad when what’s happening is too rough. They also learn to be careful with others if they themselves are being too rough. All this is about more than just play – dads are helping their children to read emotions and regulate their behaviors, training them in skills that will help when they enter school.

None of these practices are essential or exclusive to fatherhood. Low-income mothers can adopt more sophisticated language styles. Many also love a pillow fight. But based on our observations, mothers tend to do neither as often – or as well – as their male counterparts.

Research on the practice and the impacts of fatherhood on children’s development is still in its infancy: parenting research, like policy, has typically focused on mothers. However, it’s becoming clear that moms may have things to learn about parenting from dads, rather than always being the other way around. And policy makers may need to rethink their paradigms so that they base some of the best parenting norms and supports on fathers’ strengths and not solely on what mothers do.

Clearly, fathers can complement mothers in many other areas beyond simply supplying income. We know, for example, that the children of depressed mothers thrive better when their dad is more involved. Given the prevalence of postnatal depression and its impact on children, fathers may be vital in limiting damage in young children.

“Dads ask more “who, why, where, what” questions, stretching children and promoting more sophisticated linguistic development and vocabulary.”

Nevertheless, family policy typically focuses only on fathers’ ability and willingness to pay child support. That focus on money – and the corresponding lack of support for involved fatherhood – may contribute to father absence in low-income families. Some poorer fathers may think: “If I can’t pay, I can’t stay.” And mothers may believe that if he doesn’t pay, he shouldn’t stay.

Fathers don’t feel valued

The legal system chases down fathers who don’t pay child support. But it’s rare to find government programs or officials that reach out to dads, encouraging them to talk and play with their children – that is, to carry out the beneficial, responsive parenting practices that research has identified. We conducted focus groups where we asked low-income fathers: “What’s life like as a dad?” They talked about the many ways in which they care for their children, from knowing their children’s food preferences, cleaning their noses, and hugging and joshing with them to organizing their activities.

But dads didn’t feel valued in these roles. A father told us: “If my partner is missing and doesn’t pick up my daughter one day, they’ll get concerned. But no one is going to do anything if I’m missing from her.” This father – a young man with low-riding jeans – wants to be involved with his child. However, he sees how little people value what he can contribute in terms of love and care. That’s discouraging. It’s also failure of policy – which is presumably so concerned with the early years – to harness all the assets, including fathers, that surround young children in order to equalize opportunities, particularly for those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

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