Analysis Of Father's Influence On Child Development

The topic of fathers and their impact on child outcomes has always been of interest to me. People tend to believe women are naturally nurturing and better than men at parenting children. I believe that personality holds much more power over who will be an effective parent and that gender is not a valuable variable in those skills. I wanted to learn more about the research to either counter or support my ideas on the topic. As an ambitious woman, having a partner that would be very involved with child care is something I care about. I wanted to gain more knowledge on the essentiality and impact of fathering on children’s development and other outcomes. The article arguing that fathers are essential for child development was “Father’s Influence on Their Children’s Cognitive and Emotional Development: From Toddlers to Pre-K” (Cabrera, Shannon, & Tamis-Lemonda, 2007). The researchers analyzed mother and father pairs’ income, education, their parenting styles, and their children’s cognitive, language, social, and emotional development. While income was related to fathers’ supportiveness, it was not consistent across the three ages that were measured. Father’s education was related to supportiveness at all three ages. The overall findings of the study were that

They focused on analyzing the literature that included couples and parents of more gender configurations than what is typically represented. Researchers acknowledged the shortcomings of stereotypes and previous research done such as confounding family structure with gender. This is a frequent confounding variable when researchers compare child outcomes from single mother households to heterosexual parent households to argue that fathers are necessary for child rearing. They individually broke down any strengths or weaknesses that come from heterosexual couples, lesbian couples, gay couples, single males, and single female