Importance of Fathers

In class this week we talked about the importance of fathers in the family. In the society we live in today, the notions of a family are being questioned and perceptions are being changed. The status of mothers has been under attack, and while they have traditionally been important, there are many today who would consider them less important. Because mothers spend so much time with their children, I personally think they hold the most important and influential position in society.

The role of a father is also under question, but I think there has been a stigma regarding their role in the family for a very long time. They are often seen as merely providers; they bring home the cash and make overhead decisions while ignoring any other responsibilities at home. However, I have seen on many occasions just how influential and beneficial it can be for children, and even the wife, to have a father who is involved in home life. While fathers generally should be responsible for providing a living for their family, they can also do so much more to help.

My father has personally helped me out in many different ways, of which I am grateful for, and I have seen how influential fathers have been in many of my friends’ lives, but I wanted to find some academic research that backs up this claim. Too often I see people make claims on how to help everyone based only on experiences in their own lives. I have found two academic studies, one which focuses on how fathers influence their daughters and the other which focuses on how fathers influence their sons, and I am excited to talk about them.

The first study I looked at was from the Society for Research in Child Development (Ellis, et al., 2003). I looked specifically at the results they took from the united states. The researchers observed a sample of 242 girls from age 5 to age 18 and were interested to see the effects on the absences of a father in girl’s stability, safety, education, and sexual activity. They found that girls whose father had been absent for any amount of time had a much higher chance of living in an unsafe neighborhood, had more family stress, and had less parental support, while girls whose father had been absent since they were young (age 0-6) scored even lower on these values. The most interesting statistic to me though was that girls whose father had been absent from an earlier age were two times more likely to engage in early sexual activity and seven times as likely to experience teenage pregnancy. Girls whose fathers had been absent later in their lives were still about were only slightly more likely to engage in early sexual activity and twice as likely to experience teenage pregnancy.

The second study I found was also from the Society for Research in Child Development and looked at the absence of Father’s on cognitive development in boys and girls, but I am just looking at the results of the boys (Santrock, 1972). It was a bit simpler than the previous study and looked at 3^rd and 6^th graders in several schools, taking their IQ scores and compiling their general achievement into a score. They found boys who had absent fathers scored significantly lower in IQ tests and scored much lower in their academic achievement.

So, looking at all of this data. I think it is clear that even just having a stable father figure in the life of a kid will significantly increase their chances in life. It makes me very grateful for my father and all he has done, and I hope to be able to be actively involved in the lives of my children when I get older.