The boffins are out again with a grand statement of the obvious: fathers count. How new fathers view their role as parents and their emotional response to their new baby does indeed have an impact on the behaviour of their children as those children grow older.
Put simply, fathers who embrace their new role as fathers and who were emotionally sensitive to their infants are less likely to turn out obnoxious brats about ten years later. Who knew? We did.
You would expect the feminists to jump on this kind of finding but that deafening silence you hear from the Guardian is because of a very interesting aspect of the research namely, that the amount of hands on childcare or chores the father does made no difference to the outcomes of the children. “Our analyses also show that the amount of paternal involvement with childcare and household tasks such as shopping, cleaning, cooking, and childcare activities was not associated with later child behavioural problems.”
The research was covered here in the Daily Mail but as I never trust newspaper reports on such research the full paper is here.
In sum: “The findings of this research study suggest that it is psychological and emotional aspects of paternal involvement in a child’s infancy that are most powerful in influencing later child behaviour and not the amount of time that fathers are engaged in childcare or domestic tasks in the household.
How new fathers see themselves as parents, how they value their role as a parent and how they adjust to this new role, rather than the amount of direct involvement in childcare in this period, appears to be associated with positive behavioural outcomes in children.”
So it is clear that, first, to have an emotionally sensitive and responsive father, you must actually have a father on hand to respond to his new baby. As such, we should stop setting up a tax and benefit system as well as a family justice system that deprives infants of their fathers in the first place and thus creating ‘man deserts’ or more accurately father deserts in parts of the UK.
Secondly, we should value fathers and encourage them to give sensitive and emotional responses to their newborns. We should respect fathers as fathers, not as merely instruments to be used by feminists to usurp the maternal role or take on childcare duties so mum can be pushed out of the labour ward and back to work as soon as possible.
Remember, feminists don’t care about mothers or children and they care even less about fathers – who until very recently were seen as disposable. Feminists only care about ideology and equality of outcome. It is fathers and mothers who count not the 1 per cent feminists.
