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Bitter Sweet!

Northern Rancher

Well-known member
We had our 4H public speaking tonight and Megan and Sara both won their age divisions. This was Megan's last 4H speech after 13 years in it. It brought back memories as she related all her experiences. I remember her doing her full size record book as a five year old-it took us hours because I had to spell out each word for her as she printed. Hopefully she gets to provincial finals again-they're down in BMR's neck of the woods this year.
 

nr

Well-known member
I was just reading about the difference it makes in a child's success level when the father is involved in their learning process.(copied below should anyone be interested). It sounds like you got them off to a very good start. Congratulations to them, and you, Northern Rancher!
"* Most of the effects fall within the broad spectrum of fathering that occurs when a dad is reasonably involved or responsible. The former adjective evokes physical and emotional presence in the routines of the child’s life, the later implying a larger role in overseeing the child’s well-being, making decisions, and embracing the parent-child conflicts inherent in setting limits. By responsible, Pruett means an emotional commitment sufficient to honor one’s obligation to sustain the life and soul one helped create, not simply making children behave and act respectful or providing financial security or paying child support.

* Average (moderately involved) father care is characterized by day-to-day emotional dialogue between father and child, allowing a back-and-forth shared attention — sometimes positive, sometimes negative — to resonate in their relationship. Dialogue content varies according to the fathering tasks required at different ages and developmental levels (e.g., high level of physical caregiving during infancy; instruction in conflict management and problem-solving during adolescence).

* It is the closeness felt by the child to the father, not just his presence or even his living at home, that is most predictably associated with positive life outcomes for the child twenty-five years later.

* Children who feel a closeness to their father are twice as likely as those who do not to enter college or find stable employment after high school, 75 percent less likely to have a teen birth, 80 percent less likely to spend time in jail, and half as likely to experience multiple depression symptoms.

* At the other end of the spectrum are minimally involved, or simply present, fathers, that is, those who, though thin on responsibility, nonetheless participate in the family structure. Interestingly, their presence alone seems to have some impact on their children.

* Child development is positively affected in measurable ways by (1) the father’s warmth, even when he’s not especially involved, (2) his masculinity alone, and (3) his different-from-mother socialization and relationship behavior.

*Behavior alone doesn’t tell us much about why or how a father shapes his responsible behavior or closeness to his children.

* Studies of the influence of women’s and men’s personality traits on their parenting behavior tell us that personality traits such as extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and worry affect daily mood and parental behavior differently in men than in women.

* Fathering appears to be more consistently influenced by a man’s extroversion; mothering better predicted by a woman’s agreeableness.

* The first active force that father care brings to bear on child development is the influence exerted by the father’s expectations of who his child will be. Long before children begin to ply their considerable influence on father’s behavior, fathers are forming mental and emotional images of who their child will be in their life together. Those images are heavily influenced by expectations drawn from the father’s own emotional life.

* What the expectant father thinks his child will be like has much to do with how he connects to the child in the first months and with how he will eventually assess his child’s temperament.

* Paternal expectations tend to work to connect the father to his child emotionally, regardless of whether the father can say the child is “just as I expected” or “not at all what I expected:” Either way, the father is actively engaging in internal dialogue emotionally or external (or both) dialogue with his partner or infant about who his child will be in relation to him, a dialogue that first catalyzes and then sustains their emotional connection and effect upon one another.

* Fathers who don’t or can’t imagine who their child might, should, or could be tend to remain more aloof and noncommittal about who the child will be or actually is. Consequently, they usually find themselves stuck in the cheap seats of the theater as they watch their child’s life play itself out from a distance.

EFFECTS OF FATHER CARE ON CHILD DEVELOPMENT

* After considering dozens of potential influences, such as social class, economic and marital circumstances, child’s birth order and gender, Easterbrooks and Goldberg concluded that the father’s attitudes toward, and behavioral sensitivity to, the care of his children have more positive influence on the child’s socioemotional development than the total amount of time spent in interaction with the child.

* Bottom line: the closer the connection between father and child, the better off they both are now and in the future.

* Effects of paternal style are grouped into eight categories, arranged rather loosely in chronological order, listing the effects in the order in which they tend to appear in the child’s life cycle, with a slight tendency to emphasize how father care affects younger children. The science tends to be of better quality in this age group, and early childhood is the era of development that — given the brain’s preference for such phenomenal growth in the first three years of life — tends, overall, to matter most in terms of ultimate healthy or less than healthy outcomes. “The first years last forever.”

* Much of the science is skewed in the direction of middle- or working-class Caucasian families. It seems that boys have been more thoroughly studied than girls in terms of father care impact.

(1) ADAPTIVE AND PROBLEM-SOLVING ABILITIES

* Infants who have been well fathered during the first eighteen to twenty-four months of life are more secure than those who were not in exploring the world around them, and they do so with vigor and interest. They tend to be more curious and less hesitant or fearful, especially in the face of novel or unusual stimuli. The combination of the father’s more active play initiation and his somewhat less immediate support in the face of frustration promotes adaptive and problem-solving competencies in the child.

* By the time children of involved fathers are ready for school, they tend to have greater tolerance for stress and frustration. These children are better able to wait their turn for the teacher’s attention, remaining in their seats and maintaining enough interest in their work and confidence in their own abilities and thoughts to work on their own till the teacher can help. “Well-fathered” kids can be recognized by their self-confidence and willingness to try new things.

(2) STRENGTHENED COGNITIVE CAPACITIES

* The amount of time fathers spend reading with their children is a strong predictor for many cognitive abilities, particularly of daughters’ high verbal skills. Equally surprising is the finding that the amount of time mothers spend reading to children predicts neither daughters’ nor sons’ verbal ability, suggesting that there is something unique or characteristic about father-daughter reading time. Does the father’s verbal style, combined with his penchant for activating and his attention-generating playful dialogue, energize and stimulate his young child’s experience of words at some central neurological level in a way that the mother’s verbal style does not?

* Radin found that both sons and daughters of the dad-involved group had higher levels of verbal skills than the kids of less involved dads.

* Radin also found that boys’ IQ was positively associated with their father’s nurturing, (appropriate emotional and behavioral response to child’s needs) and, interestingly, negatively associated with their fathers’ disciplinary restrictiveness. Boys with nurturing fathers scored higher than the boys whose fathers were less involved unless the father was a strict, authoritarian disciplinarian.

* Mosley and Thompson found strong parental control to be associated with more, not less, school problems, lower sociability, and less initiative. Authoritarian limit setting by a father clearly has its limitations and should be viewed with much suspicion when valued.

* Lamb studied a group of preschool children of positively engaged fathers and recorded more cognitive competence on standardized intellectual assessments than for children of unengaged or negatively engaged fathers.

* Nugent evaluated the degree of paternal engagement in the month following birth and at one-year follow-up and discovered strong positive effects of that paternal engagement on the strength of the infant’s cognitive functioning.

* Parental influences exert significant, but not exclusive, impact on how children maximize their intellectual assets. It is important to understand that general intelligence is but the final common pathway of many factors — genetic, environmental, nutritional, experiential, and biological.

* Howard Gardner has tirelessly and convincingly argued for the existence of several separate domains of intelligence, including linguistic, spatial, logical-mathematical, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, social, personal awareness, and spiritual intelligence.

* We must look at IQ or cognitive outcome measures very conservatively. For example, families that support high involvement by fathers may themselves have cognition-promoting characteristics that are independent of the father factor; for example, the family may engage in lots of group discussion and open dialogue or have a great penchant for stimulation or enrichment experiences in general.

* Biller has repeatedly pointed out men’s special interest in analytical skills in interacting with their children over time. Father-deprived children seem to have trouble solving the more complex mathematical and puzzle tasks. Biller found a trend among fathers to spend more energy and time stimulating mathematical thinking in their sons than in their daughters.

* Radin found a positive association between father involvement and their preschool daughters’ competence in mathematics. When a daughter shares an interest with her father in math and analytic thinking that shared interest seems to have special salience for her and a long-term impact on her continued interest and productivity in this domain.

? What are some of the possible sources of this oft-measured positive effect of father care on children’s thinking competencies?
* Pruett thinks that the father’s predilection for supporting his child’s novelty-seeking behavior combines with his penchant for enriching and elaborating his child’s more routine and passive states to play a strong supporting role in his child’s measurable (and perceived) competence in problem solving and adaptation, a competence that is necessary for success in school and in the workplace.

(3) SOCIAL COMPETENCIES
(A) CAPACITY FOR ATTACHMENT

* Belsky found fathers of securely attached infants (i.e., infants who can tolerate brief separations from their father without getting too upset or disorganized emotionally) tend to be more extroverted and agreeable in personality style and behavior than fathers of insecurely connected infants.

* A positive marriage and flexible connections between work and family also help these attachment-promoting fathers promote attachment in their child.

* Pedersen found that at one year of age infants whose fathers provided extensive care in the intermittent absence of the mother show higher rates of responding to their fathers and more frequent instances of exploratory and social behavior than children of less engaged fathers.

* Pedersen speculates that the enhanced relationship with the father contributes positively to the mother-infant relationship as well. Further benefits are seen in these infants’ desire to approach individuals other than their parents and in their competence in doing so.

* Cox concluded that fathers who are affectionate, have positive attitudes, and spend more time with their three-month-olds, are more likely to have securely attached infants at twelve months than fathers who are more negative and distant. As usual, it was the quality of care, not the hours logged, that mattered more.

(B) EMPATHY

* In a 30-year study of seventy-five children, it was found that of the various qualities of maternal and paternal behavior the children were exposed to at age five, the strongest predictor of a child’s empathic concern for others in adult life was a high level of paternal child care.

* The original researchers had defined high paternal care as staying with the child when the mother was out and “taking care to do more for the child in that circumstance.” Though this definition of “high paternal care” is pretty tame by today’s standards, it apparently was sufficient to identify the fathers who were providing their infants with the level of father-support needed to enable them to become caring, empathic adults.

* In a study of boys, sons of fathers who took more responsibility for limit setting, discipline, and helping their child with personal problems and schoolwork had significantly higher empathy scores. Interestingly, this was true regardless of the father’s own level of empathy as described by the father himself or by his wife. Apparently, “Do as I do, not as I say” is the lesson here.

(C) ABSENCE OF GENDER ROLE STEREOTYPING

* Radin’s study of school behavior outcomes among preschool kids whose fathers performed 40 percent or more of the in-family child care showed less gender role stereotyping in the kids’ choices of friends and in their overall social and behavioral expectations of their peers than children whose fathers were less involved in their care.

* Williams and Radin looked at a group of adolescents who had positively involved dads either between the ages of three and five or seven and nine to see what effect that involvement had on later gender role expectations. As adolescents, these boys and girls held less traditional and less rigid views of and expectations for family life then adolescents with less engaged fathers. They expressed more open and flexible views about co-parenting and dual-earner marriage.

* Hardesty found that gender attitudes in both men and women are more strongly correlated with the nature and quality, rather than the presence or amount, of paternal involvement, although the effects were somewhat stronger for boys. High paternal involvement is associated with traditional gender role orientations in young men, although a close, nurturing, and ongoing paternal relationship is associated with nontraditional, more egalitarian orientations in young men.

* Gender role orientation and gender attitudes in young women were found to be shaped somewhat more by the father’s personal characteristics and less by his style of fathering or the father-daughter relationship itself.

* This work tells us that the way a man is as an involved father — the quality of his relationship and interaction with his child — affirms either the status quo or encourages broader horizons, especially for his sons. It tells us that dad’s personality itself, when involved with his daughter, is at least as influential as the way he behaves or relates to her.

(4) SELF-CONTROL

* Mischel found young children with positively involved fathering displayed less impulsivity and more self-control, particularly in unfamiliar social situations than young children with negatively or uninvolved fathers.

* Hoffman found that boys with strong father identification scored higher on measures of internal control and conformity to rules; those with weaker feelings of paternal identification had more trouble with moral judgments and nonconformity.

* Deprivation of fathering is especially toxic in this particular realm of child development for both boys and girls. The vast overrepresentation of father-absence literature that filled our journals until the last decade centered on this very finding — that father deprivation is directly linked to difficulties in a child’s self-control.

* This body of literature carried much more influence than it deserved to, because it rarely distinguished between nonresidential, abandoning, ejected, rejected, or even dead fathers. Both father presence and father absence exist on a continuum. Why the father is absent or present carries an influence all its own that has significant power.

* Amato found positive paternal engagement to be related to a whole cluster of healthy outcomes including life skills, self-esteem, and overall social competence. Apparently, self-control can be both a cause and a result of social competence, which itself is correlated with father care.

* Related to the development of a sense of self-control in children is the fostering of an internal locus of control, which experts define as the belief that one’s ability to affect one’s own behavior and the outside world resides more inside than outside the individual. Many of Henry Biller’s studies repeatedly reinforce the finding of a strong internal locus of control in children of involved fathers. This may not necessarily be measuring anything other than the superior problem-solving and adaptive skills that characterize many children of involved fathers.

(A) MORAL SENSITIVITY

* Though some four-year-olds might not be able to share their cache of candy with anyone, the boys who tended to be more generous were the same children who consistently saw their fathers as comforting, warm, and affectionate with them. What goes around, comes around.

* Mosley and Thompson found that positive paternal engagement, for boys and girls, is closely associated with (1) a lower incidence of acting out, disruptive behavior, depression, sadness, and lying; (2) higher sociability through complying with parents’ wishes, getting along with others, and being responsible; (3) boys having fewer school behavior problems; and (4) girls having more cheerful and happy interchanges, greater capacity for positive self-involvement, and greater willingness to try new things. These results are especially compelling because it was statistically possible to isolate the father effects from mother effects with unusual clarity.

* Bottom line: positive father care is associated with more pro-social, and positive moral behavior overall in boys and girls.

(5) PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT

* An important British study of at-home births in the 1970s found that the single most important birth circumstance that protected against birth complications and further illness or trauma in the newborn was the father’s presence at delivery. This held true even when the father was less than enthusiastic about being present.

* A related study concluded that the father’s presence reduced the mother’s loneliness, fear, and confusion and even the average length of labor, thereby lowering the overall rate of birth complications

* Infants’ scores on assessments of intellectual and motor, or physical, competencies are higher if fathers are actively involved during the first six months of their child’s life. The father’s tendency to activate his child in their interactions encourages and supports the child’s pleasurable discovery of his own body.

(6) INDIRECT EFFECTS

* Paternal involvement can affect the child indirectly through its effects on the mother herself. When a mother feels supported by the father, she is more patient, flexible, emotionally responsive, and available to their children. Interestingly, affectionate and facilitative fathering is also associated with more positive sibling interactions, indicating that paternal involvement has significant indirect effects for the entire family system.

* The feeling in siblings with engaged fathers that parental attention is “always” available encourages in them a sense of responsibility for keeping the peace and lessens the need for them to test limits to assure themselves that someone is on duty.

(7) SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES
(A) PREMATURITY

* Yogman questioned the conventional belief that a father who does not live in the home is uninvolved with his child, and he found that fathers could be categorized as having high or low involvement, irrespective of living arrangement. When his research group followed up the preemies at age three, they found a six-point difference in IQ between the two groups; that is, the children of fathers who were highly involved with them had higher cognitive scores than the children whose fathers had low involvement with them.

(B) MATERNAL ILLNESS

* Maternal illness or vulnerability can pull a father into a more vital role in the life of his children than he might otherwise have chosen, or than he might otherwise have been able to choose.

* Balsam studied the father’s contributions to their adolescent daughter’s development when the mother is significantly emotionally disturbed. These fathers involved themselves in their daughter’s life, and the young women developed a kind of vital energy and interest in struggling with their problems in order to become fully functioning adults. They were determined, steadfast, and committed to friends, academic achievement, athletics, play, and extracurricular activities. They tended toward the driven at times.

* At the very least, Balsam’s study show that the negative effects on child development of primary maternal vulnerability can be buffered by active paternal involvement and that this involvement can be sufficient to sustain development in daughters."
 
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