Greater Good

I'm surrounded by super-involved dads. Dacher Keltner, founder and faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center, is one of the most admirably hands-on dads I know. My dad was considered involved back in the day because he coached softball once and took me to Indian Princesses. Dads today do more than just the fun stuff. My own dad has done more work—changing diapers, picking up prescriptions, cleaning up dog barf—in my household with his grandchildren than he ever did when my brother and I were kids. Dacher coaches soccer AND ferries his children to and from school. My friend Gary, a creative director at an ad agency, does lots of traditional dad things fixing stuff around the house AND he plans their family's meals, does all the grocery shopping, and most of the cooking. Andrew, a patent lawyer with a PhD, is home by 5:00 every day to help out with dinner and bed time. And I've never been to a school meeting or event that Andrew missed.

All the griping from the moms around me gives me the sense that these men are

outliers. Perhaps their privileged economic status affords them more time with their kids. But then again, they have traditionally long-hours jobs. "Seriously," one mom recently said to me after the Father's Day posting, "HOW do we get dads to be more involved?" Family sociologists often conclude that despite all the gains that women have made in the work force, they are still facing a stalled gender revolution at home: men aren't typically doing their fair share of housework or childcare. The good news is that amount of time men spend doing housework has doubled over the past three decades. The bad news is that women are still doing 70% of that work.

Change takes time; at this rate, if we keep working on it, our most of our grandchildren will have dads who do half the housework and childcare, and they'll be better off for it [link to last posting]. Research shows that there are three things that make men likely to be involved dads:

1) A mother's support.

• Men are more likely to be involved dads when mothers expect and believe parenting is a joint venture. When a child's mom believes the role of fathers is very important, his or her dad tends to place greater importance on his own role—which in turn leads to greater involvement on the dad's part.
• Mothers sometimes serve as "gatekeepers" to father involvement. Women who are ambivalent about the competency of a dad or who don't want to lose control over the parenting domain tend to block greater father involvement (whether or not they are conscious that they are doing it). On the other hand, support from mothers can improve the quality of a father's parenting.
• Differing standards for housework and childcare can be a common barrier to greater father involvement. The more moms support and provide encouragement—rather than complain about how a job was done—the more involved a father is likely to be.

2) A good co-parenting relationship.

• The best predictor a dad's involvement is the quality of his relationship with his children's mother (whether or not they are married).
• If a marriage or a co-parenting relationship is fraught with conflict, fathers tend to have a very difficult time being involved with their children, which of course weakens the father-child relationship.
• Good fathering can also strengthen a marriage! Fathers who are positively involved in their children's lives are significantly more likely to have successful marriages.

3) Reasonable work-hours.

• Fathers report that long work hours are the most important reason for low levels of paternal employment.
• Dads who work long hours tend to be less accepting of—and empathetic towards—their teenagers.
• Organizations that want to improve the health and well-being of employees' children need to find ways to reduce the work loads of fathers working long hours.

I think that the benefits of being an involved father have got to be pretty darn motivating to dads. Are you an involved dad, or do you know one? What motivates you to be involved? What do you get from it? Know a dad that is involved now, but didn't used to be? How do you account for the change? We'd love to read your comments.

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My kids' dad travels a lot for work. For seven years I heartily resisted his heavy travel schedule. Even though I knew that he didn't want to be away from us, I still longed for him to be more involved with the kids and household. But then I noticed the only return I was getting for all my complaining and negotiating was resentment. In January I stopped resisting; by February he'd signed up to attend an executive program at Harvard that is three weeks a year. He was gone for most of May.

The girls and I kept busy. They are older now and not so much work (they are in better happiness habits than they were in January), and so we had a good time doing our "GIRLS ROCK!" cheer and trying not to think about daddy being gone.

But his near-daily presence was missed. Mike is an involved dad when he's in town, home for dinner by 5:30 many nights and 100% on duty in the morning getting the kids off to school.

Mothers tend to get all the credit—and shoulder all the blame—for the happiness and health of their kids, but at least in my family, Fiona and Molly's happiness is heavily influenced by their dad, too. I assumed this was unique to our family, as father involvement varies so much more widely than mother's tends to. But then I wondered: are dads as essential as moms? I took a look at the research, and the short answer is YES, emphatically.

• Research shows that the love and care of fathers is equally important for the health and well-being of children as mother-love. Really.
• Children are WAY better off when their relationship with their father is sensitive, secure, and supportive as well as close, nurturing, and warm.
• One of the biggest problems with divorce is that when a father moves out, the father-child relationship frequently falters. If he stays in the game, his kids will cope far better with the divorce.

In general, kids who have dads that actively participate in their care and that interact with them a lot are more likely to:

1. Be smarter and more successful in school and work.

• Kids with involved dads are better problem-solvers as toddlers, and have higher IQs by age 3. One theory about why this is: fathers tend to talk to their children differently than mothers do, and as a result children to talk in longer sentences and use more diverse vocabulary when talking with their fathers.
• School-aged children with positively involved fathers are more likely to:
• Get As and have higher grade point averages
• Have better math, reading, and language skills
• Enjoy and have positive attitudes towards school
• Have higher levels of educational attainment and success overall
• Have a greater ability to take initiative, use self-direction and control
• Have better problem solving skills.
• Later in life, children of positively involved fathers are more likely to have greater success in their careers, and to earn more money.

2. Be happier. Children with positively involved fathers are more likely to be happier and more satisfied with their lives over-all. They experience less depression, distress, anxiety, and negative emotions like fear and guilt.

3. Have more friends and better relationships. Children whose fathers are positively involved have better social skills; they tend to be more popular and better liked. They have fewer conflicts with their peers. They are also more likely to:

• Grow up to be tolerant and understanding
• Have positive interactions with their siblings
• Have supportive social networks made up of long-term close friendships
• Adjust well to college both personally and socially
• Have long-term, successful marriages, be satisfied with their romanticpartners in midlife, and to have more successful intimate relationships.

4. Have happier, healthier mothers. When fathers are emotionally supportive of their children's mother (whether or not they are married), moms are more likely to enjoy a greater sense of well-being. In addition, supported moms are more likely maintain healthy pregnancy behaviors, an indicator that father support increases the odds that both mother and baby will be physically healthy.

5. And they are LESS likely to get into trouble, or otherwise engage in risky behavior.

• Positive father involvement protects kids from substance abuse in adolescence.
• It is also associated with a lower frequency of acting out, delinquency, disruptive and violent behavior, lying, and stealing.
• Kids with positively involved fathers are less likely to be bullied, and they are less likely to be bullies themselves.

Do fathers really deserve credit for ALL THAT??
Yes, they do. But research results like these don't necessarily show that father involvement causes all those great benefits for kids – we just know that kids who have involved fathers are more likely to have those qualities. Although many studies show the unique benefits of having an involved dad by controlling for other factors, the relationship between father-involvement and positive child-outcomes is complex.

For example, it could be in part about money: maybe having an involved dad also means that family income is higher, and the positive effects come from being able to live in a safer neighborhood and go to better schools. Or maybe having an involved dad means that your mom has to work less, and so some of the positives for kids come from the increased time that their mothers are able to spend with them. Reverse causality may also be at work once kids get older: happy and successful kids could be inspiring their fathers to be more positively involved. There are a lot of studies that take these factors into account in one way or another and, not surprisingly, the results still show that when fathers are positively engaged, their children benefit in a multitude of ways.

So this Father's Day, pat the involved dad in your life on the back—or better yet shower him with scientific evidence of his importance by forwarding him this posting. And if YOU are the engaged dad in the picture, sit back and relish your profound importance. There may be no greater way that you can contribute to the greater good than by being positively engaged in the lives of your kiddos.

This video about the strongest dad in the world makes me WEEP every time I see it. Dick Hoyt—couch potato with a heart condition turned world-class athlete—is evidence of what fathers will do for the health and happiness of their children, and of how children inspire us to be profoundly better people. See this link for the Hoyt story, which is background to the video below.

Next up: What makes a father likely to be "positively engaged"?

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Last week our graduate fellow, Sarah Garrett, took a look at whether teens today are less happy than their counterparts were in the past. The results are provocative and hopeful. But readers raised some important questions. Can we contrast Garrett's results—the clear majority of teens are "pretty happy" or better—with trends in teen depression? Kids might think of themselves as happy, but aren't they more anxious than previous generations? I'm reading Beautiful Boy right now, David Sheff's gripping memoir about his son Nic's meth addition, and it is hard to imagine that Nic's peers are doing better than teens have historically. Sheff notes that in a study of school teachers in the 1940's, the teachers' biggest complaints about the adolescents in their charge were along the lines of gum-chewing and note-passing.

Now, teachers, parents, and pretty much everyone I know worry more about school violence than spit-balls, about paralyzing anxiety than minor class disruptions.

And we have cause to worry. About 13% of girls and 5% of boys in the U.S. have had a major depressive episode as teenagers—and depression is the leading cause of suicide. Suicide is the third leading cause of death among American kids ages 10-24, behind homicide and accidental death. Between 1970 and 1993, the homicide rate for teens more than doubled, but then dramatically declined in 2002, where it remained in 2004 (the most recent year that data is available). In the 15 years prior to 2003, the teen suicide rate declined about 28%. But in 2004 the teen suicide rate increased 8%.

There are some consistent and significant inequalities between groups that are important to point out among who is happy and who isn't. For example, teenage boys are three and a half times more likely to commit suicide and five times more likely to be murdered than girls.

Because we know that the average experience may be quite different from subgroup experiences, Garrett took a closer look at her data. Below is her selection of subgroup comparisons by gender, maternal education, and race/ethnicity.

—Christine Carter

Maternal Education
The MTF study does not collect information about household income, but it does collect data on respondents' parents' education. Teen happiness appears to differ by maternal schooling, with the most educated mothers having the most happy children, and vice versa. Since these data were first collected, children of mothers with college (or higher) degrees have been significantly more likely to be "very happy" than have children of mothers who did not graduate from high school. In 2006, for example, almost 27% of teens with very highly educated mothers were saying that in general they were "very happy," compared to 16% of teens with the least educated mothers; they were nearly 88% more likely to be in that highest happiness category.

American teens whose mothers have the lowest levels of education—and who are therefore more likely to have lower levels of income, live in less safe areas of town, etc.—are much more likely than other teens to say that, in general, they are "not too happy." This inequality appears to have intensified in recent years.

Race
Happiness clearly differs across racial categories as well. Up until 2005 the MTF study coded their respondents as "white" or "non-white," so for the most part that is as much as we can know about respondent race. White American teens are significantly more likely to be happy than are non-white American teens; this pattern has held as far back as these data have been collected.

The good news is that the discrepancy between whites and non-whites appears to be shrinking as both do better. If we focus in on the proportion of youth describing themselves as being "very happy," we can see a clearly upward trend for both groups—and a narrowing gap—starting in the early- to mid-1990s.

Gender
There is no significant difference between the proportion of male and female youth in 2006 who were "pretty happy" or better in 2006, which is case for nearly all of the years since the data have been collected.

However, when we focus in on the proportion of teens who say they are "very happy," a clear discrepancy emerges. In the mid-1970's young women were significantly more likely to be "very happy" than young men were—almost 45% more likely in 1976, the height of women's happiness advantage in this dataset. However, this advantage disappeared by the mid-1980s, and the trend ultimately flipped. By the mid-1990s male high school seniors were significantly more likely than their female counterparts to say they were in the highest happiness category. For example, in 2006 male high school seniors were 30% more likely to describe themselves as "very happy" than their female peers were.

Though there's not enough information in this dataset to fully explain why these discrepancies between race, maternal education, and gender exist or why they've changed (or stabilized) over time, it is tempting to speculate. For example, why are the children of well-educated mothers so much more likely to be happy? (Does college really make you a better parent?) Next week the third and last posting in this series will offer a little insight (though perhaps not more than an educated guess) into why these trends might be what they are.

More information about the data I used, some references, and my tables are posted on the GoodWiki.

Sarah Garrett is a 2007-2008 Hornaday Graduate Fellow at the Greater Good Science Center.

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