We often treat paternity leave like a company perk—something HR lists next to the gym stipend and the 401k match. The research says we are wrong about that categorization. Paternity leave should be part of routine medical care during this stage of life: interventions we already agree are worth investing in because the return on investment continues years later in a child’s brain.
The U.S. is one of the only wealthy nations on Earth with no federal guarantee of paid paternity leave. The data on the impact of those first months on a child’s brain suggest we have been treating a critical developmental window like a scheduling inconvenience.
Employers and employees basically agree on a need to strive for work-life balance. And while the gender equity argument is used to both advance and stymie conversations about paternity leave, it is more than a values fight. It turns out that paternity leave and a father’s engagement during infancy is associated with better cognitive, social, and emotional regulation outcomes for the child that can be measured.
In a review of existing fatherhood research, Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, a researcher at the Ohio State University, highlighted better peer relationships, higher intelligence test scores, greater math and language readiness and development, and more secure attachment formation among children who experience positive and sustained father involvement compared to those who don’t. Though these trends are correlational, these father-involvement gains show up on report cards as early as preschool and can continue into adulthood.
One possible avenue through which these benefits pass from father to child is the quality of play. Canadian researcher Daniel Paquette observed that father’s play often includes excitement, surprise, awe, and temporary shock and disruption for children, and this kind of interaction is the foundation for crucial developmental skills like risk-taking, personal efficacy, and self-advocacy.
Children who have more consistent positive engagement with their fathers have better outcomes across some of the main child mental-health domains, including anxiety, depression, and behavioral problems. Paternity leave creates space for and helps develop active involvement like physical play, showing up to school events, and careful listening to a child, and these are connected to healthy child development. Secure attachment, more prosocial sibling interactions, and better social competence result in other benefits, like self-regulation. This is a hallmark indicator of school readiness and success, and here, too, father engagement pays dividends. What looks like fathers rough-housing, developmentally speaking, is training for children to build capacity for self-regulation, managing arousal, and controlling impulses and emotions in real time.
Early literacy and home-visiting programs like Head Start are widely celebrated for similar child development outcomes, but father engagement has additional social, developmental, and familial benefits including improved parenting relationships. Moreover, other countries have found success in persuading more fathers to take paid paternity leave after shifting to a “use-it-or-lose-it” policy, by which a portion of paid parental leave is reserved exclusively for fathers and is non-transferable to the mother. Compared to earlier trends dating back to the early 2000s, paid paternal leave uptake has steadily increased; in Iceland, just 15% of fathers took leave in 1998, while more than over 80% did in 2002. Spain recorded a 400% increase from 2000 to 2007. Also in 2007, after Germany replaced their flat-rate leave pay with an income-based benefit (i.e., 67% of net earnings) and reserved two “use-it-or-lose-it” months for fathers, uptake of parental leave increased from 3.5% in 2006 to 24.8% in 2021.
The U.S. is lagging far behind in this area. Where paternity leave does exist, it is often unpaid and unguaranteed, and mothers for instance, cannot transfer a portion of their allotted maternity leave to the father to allow him to take extra time off. This means that many fathers do not use this critical child development and family resource. Most new fathers are back at their desk within a week of their child’s birth, right as the research suggests their presence does some of its most consequential work.
We can increase the uptake of this resource with federal paid leave legislation, which will improve access to leave for all fathers. This would have the potential to lead to widespread positive cognitive, academic, and emotional development of children.
Employers need not wait on legislation. They can apply the “use-it-or-lose” approach at their companies in the best interest of their employees.
Fathers’ access to and use of paternity leave is not a question of available employment benefits. It is a developmental one, and we already know how to answer development questions. We don’t treat prenatal care as a “nice perk.” We should not be treating the first months of a father’s presence like that, either.
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