Fathers matter to young children's development. That part is not controversial. What the research actually shows, and what it does not, is more interesting than the slogans, and more useful for dads who are trying to work out where they fit.

When my son was a few weeks old, I spent a great deal of time talking to him on the change table and getting nothing back. I did voices. I sang a song about a fish that, I have since discovered, was never about a fish. And somewhere in the third week I remember thinking, with something close to panic, what if he doesn't like me?

My wife had the milk. That felt like an enormous and unfair advantage, and I do not think I ever said so out loud.

I mention it because I think a lot of fathers carry some version of that feeling in the early months: that they are auditioning for a role nobody has confirmed exists. I want to look at what the research says about that role, because I think it is more reassuring than the feeling, and also more demanding.

What the research says about father involvement

In 2008 a team led by Anna Sarkadi published a systematic review of long-term studies on fathers' involvement and children's development. They found 24 papers, drawn from 16 separate studies with more than 22,000 participants, and 22 of those papers reported positive associations. Children whose fathers were more engaged tended to have fewer behaviour problems, better cognitive development and better social outcomes, with some effects stronger in some groups than others.

What I respect about that review is how carefully the authors handled it. The studies were observational, so they could not show that father involvement caused those outcomes. Families where fathers are more involved may differ in many other ways. The authors were explicit that their findings were not a suitable basis on their own for policy or clinical decisions. That caution is worth keeping in mind whenever you see a headline claiming dads make children smarter.

Closer to home, a 2022 report for the Ministry of Social Development used data from the Growing Up in New Zealand study. It found a clear gap between mothers and fathers in the time spent on childcare and on things like reading and playing, a gap that narrowed as children moved from infancy into toddlerhood. Most fathers took less parental leave than they wanted, mainly because of work and money rather than beliefs about whose job it was. And greater father involvement was associated with stronger language development, among other outcomes.

Natasha Cabrera, Brenda Volling and Rachel Barr summed up the wider picture in a paper with a title I like a lot: "Fathers are parents, too!" Their argument is that fathers influence children both directly, through their own relationship with the child, and indirectly, through how they support the other parent and shape the family around the child. Leaving fathers out of the research has meant leaving out part of the picture.

Is a father's role different from a mother's?

This is where I think popular writing tends to go wrong, in both directions.

You will read that fathers do the rough play and mothers do the comfort, as if it were biology. There are average differences in how mothers and fathers spend time with children in many families. But a lot of that looks like it follows from who does what, rather than from being a man or a woman.

One study I find genuinely striking was published in 2014 by Eyal Abraham, Ruth Feldman and colleagues. They scanned the brains of 89 first-time parents while they watched videos of parents and infants interacting. The group included mothers who were primary caregivers, fathers who were secondary caregivers, and fathers who were raising children as the primary caregivers with a male partner. In the primary-caregiving fathers, a brain region linked to emotional responses to the baby was activated at levels similar to mothers. And across all the fathers, the more time a father spent in direct childcare, the more connected the relevant brain networks were.

It is one study, and I would not build a whole philosophy on it. But it fits with what I see. Caregiving seems to shape the caregiver. The father who does the nappies, the 3am feeds, the dropping off and the picking up is not only helping his child. He is becoming the kind of parent who can read that child.

What involvement actually looks like

None of this is about grand gestures. It is mostly about being there for the ordinary bits, often enough that you learn the language.

Do the routine care. Bathing, changing, settling, feeding when you can, getting them dressed. These moments are where a huge amount of the back-and-forth that builds a relationship happens. They are also where you learn what this particular child's signals mean.

Leave gaps in the conversation. My son finally smiled at me at around six weeks, on the change table, halfway through a sentence about socks. When it disappeared I spent four minutes trying to get it back with every voice I had. It came back when I stopped performing and just looked at him. A baby's smile is often a reply, not a reaction to a show. Babies are looking for evidence that their actions get a response, and they need room to take a turn.

Learn the repair, not just the play. There is a chapter in my book about a night I shouted at my son, close to his face, when he was not yet three, over some spilled water. I put it in because leaving it out would have been dishonest, and because what happened in the twenty minutes afterwards mattered more than the shouting. Every parent loses it sometimes. Research on parents and infants, going back to Ed Tronick's work, suggests that a large share of ordinary interactions are slightly out of sync, and that the relationship is built as much in putting things right as in getting things right. A short apology at your child's height, in actual words, is a complete repair.

Support the other parent. Cabrera and her colleagues are right that a lot of a father's influence is indirect. Taking the night feed so somebody else can sleep, noticing when your partner is running on empty, sharing the mental load of appointments and kindy forms. That shapes a child's world too.

Look after yourself as well

Something that gets missed in almost all of this is fathers' own mental health. Postnatal depression and anxiety do not only happen to mothers. A widely cited meta-analysis by James Paulson and Sharnail Bazemore estimated that around one in ten fathers experienced depression between the first trimester and the year after birth.

If the flatness, dread or anger is not lifting between the bad evenings, please say it out loud to somebody: your GP, your partner's midwife or Well Child nurse, or a helpline. In New Zealand you can call or text 1737 any time to talk with a trained counsellor. Getting checked is not weakness. It is the same instinct that makes you check a child's temperature.

A note on families

Not every child has a father in the house, and plenty of children are raised beautifully without one. Grandfathers, uncles, stepfathers, two mums, a dad who lives across town: what research keeps pointing to is the presence of warm, responsive, reliable adults, not a particular family shape. I write about fathers because I am one, and because fathers have often been treated as optional extras in parenting advice. That does not make them the only thing that counts.

If you are a dad reading this at an odd hour, wondering whether you are doing it right, the most useful thing I can tell you is that understanding grows from time spent. Not from knowing more. From being there, noticing, getting it wrong, coming back and trying again.

Sources

  • Sarkadi, A., Kristiansson, R., Oberklaid, F., & Bremberg, S. (2008). Fathers' involvement and children's developmental outcomes: A systematic review of longitudinal studies. Acta Paediatrica, 97(2), 153-158. doi.org/10.1111/j.1651-2227.2007.00572.x
  • Cabrera, N. J., Volling, B. L., & Barr, R. (2018). Fathers are parents, too! Widening the lens on parenting for children's development. Child Development Perspectives, 12(3), 152-157. doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12275
  • Ministry of Social Development. (2022). Fathers' household and childcare involvement in New Zealand: A snapshot, determinants and consequences. Growing Up in New Zealand data. msd.govt.nz
  • Abraham, E., Hendler, T., Shapira-Lichter, I., Kanat-Maymon, Y., Zagoory-Sharon, O., & Feldman, R. (2014). Father's brain is sensitive to childcare experiences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(27), 9792-9797. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1402569111
  • Paulson, J. F., & Bazemore, S. D. (2010). Prenatal and postpartum depression in fathers and its association with maternal depression: A meta-analysis. JAMA, 303(19), 1961-1969. doi.org/10.1001/jama.2010.605
  • Tronick, E. (2007). The neurobehavioral and social-emotional development of infants and children. Norton.