Father contribution to human resilience

Abstract

Fathers have been an important source of child endurance and prosperity since the dawn of civilization, promoting adaptation to social rules, defining cultural meaning systems, teaching daily living skills, and providing the material background against which children developed; still, the recent reformulation in the role of the father requires theory-building. Paternal caregiving is rare in mammals, occurring in 3–5% of species, expresses in multiple formats, and involves flexible neurobiological accommodations to ecological conditions and active caregiving. Here, we discuss father contribution to resilience across development. Our model proposes three tenets of resilience – plasticity, sociality, and meaning – and discussion focuses on father-specific contributions to each tenet at different developmental stages; newborn, infant, preschooler, child, and adolescent. Father’s style of high arousal, energetic physicality, guided participation in daily skills, joint adventure, and conflict resolution promotes children’s flexible approach and social competence within intimate bonds and social groups. By expanding children’s interests, sharpening cognitions, tuning affect regulation, encouraging exploration, and accompanying the search for identity, fathers support the sense of meaning, enhancing the human-specific dimension of resilience. We end by highlighting pitfalls to paternal contribution, including absence, abuse, rigidity, expectations, and gender typing, and the need to formulate novel theories to accommodate the “involved dad.”

Caregiver or Playmate? Fathers’ and mothers’ brain responses to ball-play with children

“…That said, our data also revealed some remarkable activation differences as a function of parent gender, which may mesh with theories postulating partly distinct roles for mothers' and fathers' as primary attachment and activation figures, respectively (Paquette et al, 2020;Feldman, 2023). In our study, mothers, while receiving the ball during the Cyberball inclusion phase (my-turn [MT] > not-my-turn [NMT]), recruited circuits subserving attention (e.g., IPS), social cognition (e.g., PCC/precuneus), and reward processing (e.g., putamen) more strongly compared to fathers.…”

“…In this regard, father-child interactions are thought to promote resilience (Feldman, 2023), social competence, and emotion regulation (StGeorge & Freeman, 2017;Amodia-Bidakowska et al, 2020), and to protect children against anxiety (Madjandzic et al, 2018), internalizing and externalizing symptoms (Ahnert et al, 2017;Feldman & Shaw, 2021). However, to date, the parental neural mechanisms that orchestrate such parent-child play interactions remain understudied.…”

Skin-to-Skin Contact at Birth for Very Preterm Infants and Mother-Infant Interaction Quality at 4 Months

“…Thus, an important conclusion of the present data might be that from a developmental perspective, time spent in SSC after birth is valuable and may be provided by either parent. This finding highlights the role of fathers in supporting the development of their very preterm infant immediately from birth when the mother is not available, and it also points to the triadic nature of family relationships …”

Resilience in development: Pathways to multisystem integration

“…Feldman (this issue) focuses her article on the contribution of fathers to human resilience, in a compelling summary of theory and the multisystem literature. Feldman describes the three “tenets” of her developmental resilience model – plasticity, sociality, and meaning – and then discusses the contribution of fathers to each aspect of resilience over the course of development.…”