For much of the 20th century and beyond, social scientists attributed a range of chronic mental health problems to dysfunction between infants and their mothers, who were categorized as overbearing, rejecting, domineering or ambivalent.
But a team of researchers from Pennsylvania State University has found that at times the early parenting behavior of fathers may have a greater impact on children’s health.
For a study publishedrecently in the journal Health Psychology, the scientists observed three-way interactions between 10-month-old infants, their fathers and their mothers, and then checked in on the families when the children were 2 and 7.
They found that fathers who were less attentive to their 10-month-olds were likely to have trouble co-parenting, instead withdrawing or competing with mothers for the children’s attention. And at age 7, the children of those fathers were more likely to have markers of poor heart or metabolic health, such as inflammation and high blood sugar.
Mothers’ behavior did not have the same effect, said Alp Aytuglu, a postdoctoral scholar at Penn State’s College of Health and Human Development and an author of the paper.
“We of course expected that family dynamics, everybody in the family, fathers and mothers, would impact child development — but it was only fathers, in this case,” Mr. Aytuglu said.
When the father’s behavior in three-way interactions is negative, he said, “then we start seeing how that negativity potentially bleeds over the family and eventually impacts child health.”
There is abundant research showing that children raised in high-stress households are at greater risk for health problems like obesity and diabetes, and premature mortality, later in life.
Researchers can track stress levels by measuring markers of inflammation, which activate the immune system in the face of adversity or depression, or blood glucose levels, because humans evolved to generate energy when facing danger.
But prior research has tended to focus on the parenting style of a single parent, typically the mother.
To better understand whole-family dynamics, the Penn State team examined 18-minute videotaped interactions of mothers, fathers and their children at play at two points in time, assigning scores for parents’ sensitivity and positive affect, and for co-parenting dynamics like withdrawal and competitiveness.
These behaviors sometimes arose when the father tried to divert the child’s attention from the mother, Mr. Aytuglu said. “You may not gain the child’s attention, and that could make you withdraw,” he said. “Mostly men, compared to moms, can easily withdraw when they see they are not winning.”
Then, when the children were 7 years old, the researchers took blood samples from their fingers to measure four inflammatory and metabolic markers. Two small-to-moderate associations emerged in the data: Fathers who engaged more sensitively with their babies were better at co-parenting; and the children whose parents more easily co-parented had lower levels of C-reactive protein, or CRP, and glycated hemoglobin, or HbA1c.
These markers affect health over a long period of time, suggesting the children may be at higher risk for chronic diseases in middle age or later.
“This does not mean that only the dads matter, not the moms,” said Hannah M.C. Schreier, an associate professor of biobehavioral health at Penn State and an author of the paper. Instead, Dr. Schreier said, it suggests that positive engagement by fathers during infancy and toddlerhood improves the health of the whole family.
To explain this result, the authors laid out what they call the “father vulnerability hypothesis,” which suggests that fathers are particularly emotionally reactive to strain between parents and may behave in ways that negatively affect the whole family. The father’s role, they wrote, “may thus uniquely position him as a channel for relational stress, ultimately shaping child health.”
Another explanation, they wrote, is that the children spent more one-on-one time with their mothers, and so were more sensitive to their fathers’ behavior when they were in a group. Family leave programs might address that imbalance by allowing both parents to spend time with their children while they are very young, Mr. Aytuglu said.
“It is kind of a missed chance for that parent who has to go and make money,” he said.
Greg Miller, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University who studies how stress affects health, said previous studies “haven’t looked at fathers very often at all,” because researchers typically ask only one parent to accompany the child for testing, generally the mother.
This reflects a longstanding assumption in North American psychology that “mothers are the most instrumental in shaping kids’ well-being,” said Dr. Miller, who was not involved in the study. “We don’t know what role fathers play because we haven’t studied them.”
Parenting behavior, he said, is just one of many factors that shape a person’s health in adulthood, alongside things like nutrition and physical activity. Parents, he said, can “shape the way we engage with the social world, the way we engage with challenges and stress.”
Researchers will have to see if the results can be replicated, he said. “It’s one study, so we are all asking questions, but it is certainly a tantalizing lead,” he said.
Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, a professor of psychology at Ohio State University who was not involved in the study, cautioned that the study was correlational, so it did not establish that the parenting behavior caused the child’s health effects. For example, she said, some families may share genetic factors predisposing them to stressful family relationships and heart problems.
“People tend to jump to conclusions about cause and effect,” she said. “There is a risk of overinterpreting this.”
She noted that the subjects of the study — first-time parents who were recruited from childbirth education programs in Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Texas — were mostly white, two-parent, middle-class families, making it difficult to generalize the results to a diverse population.
Nevertheless, she described studying family dynamics over time as “notoriously difficult,” calling it “impressive” to find any statistically significant association between parental behavior in infancy and physical health at age 7.
Ellen Barry is a reporter covering mental health for The Times.
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