The Role of the Father in Child Development

"Michael Lamb has edited six volumes of this particular series. Whenever Michael would release a new edition people would say, ‘this is what we know as of now,’ because they trusted Michael’s view of the literature and the people whom he asked to write chapters for this book. It’s the Wikipedia of the field, only it’s real science, not fake science like a lot of Wikipedia. It is so trusted by so many people that you give it to graduate students who are interested in fatherhood, and have them read it cover to cover to see if their ideas still hold. Only after they’ve read the book can they decide whether they’ve got something to study. It helps people think about what the developmentalists have to say about paternal engagement. It’s not just about father’s rights or competition with mothering. I’ve always shared with Michael the belief that the bottom line about paternal engagement is not how the father feels about it, but how well the child does as a result of it. Michael is one of the most productive and helpful pioneers in understanding the effect that men have on child development. He has almost single-handedly elevated the field to an evidence-based science. Without him, this would be a much messier and far more incoherent field. He stuck with this work long after his own children grew up and he moved to another country. We all use The Role of the Father in Child Development as a Rosetta Stone. It’s kind of messy. You have father’s rights people and feminists writing about it, you have nurses, anthropologists, psychiatrists and early childhood educators writing about it. It takes perspectives from a bunch of different disciplines. The literature on fathering is actually much broader in its perspective than that on mothering . There’s a hundred times as much mothering literature, but it tends to come from the same scientific silos. In the literature on fathering, we have had everybody from Margaret Mead to Bill Cosby helping us try to identify what the fathering experience is about. I put those of us who have a lot of degrees from fancy universities after our names in the middle of that spectrum. That’s why it’s a big messy field. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Some of the less discussed pioneers, the people who really brought the father into the family dynamic, are family therapists and theorists like Salvador Minuchin. I didn’t select one of his books because he doesn’t write specifically about fathering, but he was one of the first to insist on paternal presence and engagement in treatment, because he knew that what fathers were bringing to the table, both in terms of repair and damage, was quite different to what mothers were bringing. He really was wise in saying: We’re willing to give the mother all the credit because we’re also willing to give her all the blame. Why are we leaving the father out? From the child’s perspective, the father belongs in the discussion. I got into this field by watching men bring their children in for visits in the early 1980s and late 1970s, when so many women were going back to work and men were picking up some of the childcare whether they wanted to or not. Some pediatricians and nurses wouldn’t talk to the father. They’d ask for the mother’s number. This invisible parent syndrome was the reason why I got interested in fatherhood, as well as my personal experience as a father. I had to get written permission from the head of OB-GYN to be present at the birth of my first child, who is now 41, at the very hospital where I had been delivering babies six months before. That was a jaw dropper for me."