After the Second World War, psychologists looked at how children whose fathers had been away fighting did at school and on intelligence tests. Absentee fathers damaged children intellectually and emotionally. Two factors were especially negative:
1 If the father is absent when the child is very young;
2 social class – working-class children are more affected than middle-class children by the father’s absence.
A 1962 study looked at the family life of elementary-school boys who had average intelligence but who were 1 or 2 years behind at school. These boys had very poor relationships with their fathers; the fathers were inadequate and failed to achieve their own ambitions. Insecure and poor role models, they transmitted failure to their sons.
Radin et al (2000) found that both the quantity and quality of time fathers spent with their 4-year-old boys correlated with intelligence test scores on the Stanford Binet and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. The strongest link was with so-called paternal nurturance. Children whose dad asked children whose dad reached out to talk did much better. Studies of black girls and boys in elementary school found much the same. The more both parents interacted with the children, the better the girls and boys did on a number of cognitive tests. The father’s behaviour was much more important than the mothers in affecting the boys. Sutton Smith, a leading researcher on play, looked at the relationship between father absence and aptitude test scores among sophomores – 2nd-year college students in America.
An absent father for Sutton Smith was a father who had not been there for two consecutive years. Children of these fathers did less well on verbal tests, on language tests and on general aptitude. Again the boys were hurt most.
It isn’t just language that suffers either. A study of 500 children by Lessing et al. (1970) suggested the most dramatic effect of paternal deprivation was on perceptual motor and manipulative spatial tasks. Carlsmith (1964) found boys whose fathers had been absent for long periods answered questions in psychological tests more like girls did. With no male role model, these boys identified more with their mothers.
In Boston in America, black clergymen who work with the probation service argue that 95%of juvenile crime has‘fatherlessness’ as a cause. The clergymen believe in a tough-love policy and claim they have helped reduce crime in the city; murders a year have fallen from 150 to 37. The reason for their success is telling; they believe the delinquents are desperate for fathering and so respond to a strong father figures.
Fathers matter, proved. But British families also face a curious cultural problem in dealing with education We have inhibitions about appearing to be intelligent or, even worse, intellectual.
Source : David Cohen. The Father's Book. 2001
1 If the father is absent when the child is very young;
2 social class – working-class children are more affected than middle-class children by the father’s absence.
A 1962 study looked at the family life of elementary-school boys who had average intelligence but who were 1 or 2 years behind at school. These boys had very poor relationships with their fathers; the fathers were inadequate and failed to achieve their own ambitions. Insecure and poor role models, they transmitted failure to their sons.
Radin et al (2000) found that both the quantity and quality of time fathers spent with their 4-year-old boys correlated with intelligence test scores on the Stanford Binet and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. The strongest link was with so-called paternal nurturance. Children whose dad asked children whose dad reached out to talk did much better. Studies of black girls and boys in elementary school found much the same. The more both parents interacted with the children, the better the girls and boys did on a number of cognitive tests. The father’s behaviour was much more important than the mothers in affecting the boys. Sutton Smith, a leading researcher on play, looked at the relationship between father absence and aptitude test scores among sophomores – 2nd-year college students in America.
An absent father for Sutton Smith was a father who had not been there for two consecutive years. Children of these fathers did less well on verbal tests, on language tests and on general aptitude. Again the boys were hurt most.
It isn’t just language that suffers either. A study of 500 children by Lessing et al. (1970) suggested the most dramatic effect of paternal deprivation was on perceptual motor and manipulative spatial tasks. Carlsmith (1964) found boys whose fathers had been absent for long periods answered questions in psychological tests more like girls did. With no male role model, these boys identified more with their mothers.
In Boston in America, black clergymen who work with the probation service argue that 95%of juvenile crime has‘fatherlessness’ as a cause. The clergymen believe in a tough-love policy and claim they have helped reduce crime in the city; murders a year have fallen from 150 to 37. The reason for their success is telling; they believe the delinquents are desperate for fathering and so respond to a strong father figures.
Fathers matter, proved. But British families also face a curious cultural problem in dealing with education We have inhibitions about appearing to be intelligent or, even worse, intellectual.
Source : David Cohen. The Father's Book. 2001
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