What makes a good father

Something strange happened in June 2016. Scientists from all over the world had booked a flight to Detroit to board a bus heading west. After an hour, they arrived in a pretty little university town called Ann Arbor. «This was the first time we had the leading people in fatherhood research together,» says Brenda Volling, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan.

For more than 30 years, she has been investigating what fathers do differently to mothers, how they play with their children - and how important they are for the development of their daughters and sons. «At first, hardly any of my colleagues took me seriously,» says Brenda Volling. «All the research was centred around mothers.» But the world has changed. For family psychologists - and for the families themselves. Together with their pregnant partner, most men today experience the moment when the image of their child appears on the monitor of an ultrasound machine for the first time.

Today, more than 84 per cent of fathers cuddle with their children and establish physical closeness.

In the delivery room, they hear the first cry with which their newborn baby greets the world. They change nappies, they feed, they comfort, they play. Just a few decades ago, all of this was the exception. Nowadays, it happens as a matter of course - our society has completely redefined the role of the father.

But what does it mean to be a «good father» today? New scientific studies are constantly providing surprising answers to this question. And networking between scientists is also improving. For example, researchers from Switzerland, Austria and Germany have founded their own network called CENOF. The abbreviation stands for «Central European Network on Fatherhood».

Fathers often see themselves as a kind of temporary babysitter

It is no coincidence that the German-speaking group has given itself an English name: Fatherhood research has long since become an international, worldwide project. It is still purely basic research that appears in the specialist journals. However, parents can already apply a few scientific findings to their everyday lives.

Hardly any psychologist today disputes the fact that children benefit from their fathers to an incredible extent. However, the data also sheds light on a completely different side of the family system: fathers often still see themselves as second-class carers, as a kind of temporary babysitter for times when mum is not available.

«Fathers still haven't realised how important they are. That is our key message as a research group,» says Brenda Volling. Several studies now show what happens when fathers take themselves and their role as carers for their children seriously. When they feel «meant» and responsible as soon as their baby cries, as soon as it wants to play «ringmaster» or «tea party» later in kindergarten, as soon as it needs help with homework as a schoolchild.

Good fathers comfort, good fathers play, good fathers help - good fathers care. And when they do this, they set something in motion for themselves and for the whole family that emotional psychologist Barbara Fredrickson calls an «upward spiral of flourishing». They lower their partner's stress levels, they strengthen their bond with their child, they experience themselves as more effective and satisfied, they improve their relationship with their partner. The whole family benefits from this.

Six different principles summarise the findings of current research. Not all of them sound particularly new or revolutionary. But they explain why the vast majority of fathers are on the right track with what they are doing.

1. good fathers are good partners

Traditionally, psychologists have tended to attribute a secondary role to fathers. The story goes like this: In the first years of life, the child needs above all a secure, trusting, safe bond with an adult. This allows the child's brain to develop optimally, so everything will be fine. «In fact, attachment theory is still our most important tool,» says Brenda Volling. «And I don't think we should turn our backs on it. No one will deny that this first relationship is the foundation on which children build their lives.»

This «first relationship» seems to be the relationship with the mother in a natural way. It is clear: the child grows in her womb. It is born from her. It is breastfed by her. She gives the child the security it needs. According to traditional attachment theory, the father should support his partner wherever he can and make her life easier.

Fathers still haven't realised how important they are.

Brenda Volling, father researcher

«I don't know of a single study in which a good couple relationship was bad for the child,» says Brenda Volling. "But I know of many studies that show a clear bad effect on children when parents argue frequently, when they shout at each other or undermine each other's authority.

It overwhelms the children, they can't handle it well." Good fathers are good partners - or at least try to be good partners. However, attachment theory has recently undergone some surprising extensions.

Researchers from Israel have investigated what happens when the father, rather than the mother, becomes a young child's primary carer. The results were a sensation: The fathers showed the same sensitive and attentive behaviour that can usually be observed in mothers. Activation patterns occur in the brain that are more typical of mothers, especially in those areas where emotions are processed.

Even the fathers' hormone levels have changed. A few years ago, psychobiologist Ulrike Ehlert from the University of Zurich discovered that fathers of young children often have conspicuously low testosterone levels and are therefore presumably more patient with their children.

It has now been shown that the production of the cuddle hormone oxytocin also fluctuates in fathers: it increases in a similar way to young mothers. Even a hormone called prolactin is increasingly released during the transition phase to fatherhood - in mothers it stimulates milk production. In some animals, father prolactin ensures greater involvement in rearing the young.

Anthropologists at the University of Notre Dame in the USA are currently investigating what function it fulfils in human fathers. All these results «suggest that evolution knows other paths to good parenthood than the old path of pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding, which is reserved for women alone,» writes Israeli brain researcher Eyal Abraham.

In other words: If a father wants to and is given the opportunity, he can actually be something like a great mum.

2. good fathers scuffle

However, the second and possibly more important extension of attachment theory aims in a different direction. It focuses not only on the safety and security of children, but also on their activation, their courage, their spirit of exploration and their desire to conquer the world. «Fathers tend to play with their children in a different way,» says Brenda Volling. «They tend to play more physically. And for a long time, research didn't understand how important this more physical play is for children's development.»

Research teams from Canada and Australia in particular have been studying rough and tumble play between fathers and children for some time. Incidentally, the first basic findings in this young field of research came from observing animals. It was discovered that rats owe part of their social skills to the playful wrestling matches of their childhood and that they solve problems better when they are allowed to wrestle extensively as young animals. Of course, humans are not rats. We wrestle differently to other mammals - and parents play a much bigger role in our behaviour.

Good fathers comfort, good fathers play, good fathers help - good fathers care.

Human children learn a lot for life when they regularly romp around with their fathers. They become more self-confident and are better able to deal with setbacks, concentrate better at school and regulate their emotions better. An Australian study from 2016 even found that children who frequently roughhouse with their dads take better care of their bodies and are less likely to come home with injuries. They have apparently learnt to assess their own limits when roughhousing, for example in the so-called «sock game». This involves trying to take off the other person's sock without losing your own.

Should you let your child win? Sometimes yes and sometimes no. Most researchers are convinced that children long to feel how strong dad is and how well he can protect the family. On the other hand, it can be observed in the fighting games of all mammals that the stronger one sometimes lets the weaker one win - signalling that it's all just great fun.

So good fathers sometimes lose and encourage their children to make an effort. But most of the time they win. In fact, the good consequences of roughhousing disappear as soon as the children are always given the victory. The best formula for good roughhousing comes from Australian father researcher Richard Fletcher. It reads: «I am much stronger than you. And I love you very much.»

3. good fathers read aloud and ask questions

It's no surprise that fathers like to romp around. But what about their influence on children's language development? We know that, on average, women have better communication skills. Words, books, reading aloud - all this therefore seems to be more of a mother's business. But here too, researchers have long underestimated the influence of fathers. Children benefit enormously when their parents read to them regularly.

In the long term, they become better readers; they become better at maths; they can concentrate better; they show fewer behavioural problems. This is according to a study by the University of North Carolina, which analysed more than 5,000 American families. The contribution of fathers was smaller than that of mothers. On average, they read aloud less - because they come home late from work, because they don't enjoy reading or because they believe they do it worse than their partner.

However, the work of psychologist Natasha Cabrera from the University of Maryland has shown: As soon as fathers read to their children regularly and enjoy doing so, their contribution to their children's development is even greater than that achieved by reading to their mothers. Even when they discuss things with their children, fathers do it differently; they ask questions more often because they have not understood the child exactly. As a result, the children's vocabulary grows to an astonishing extent.

Researchers believe that fathers act as a «bridge» out into the world by asking questions. It may be that mum reads every wish from the children's lips. But you have to explain to the rest of the world what you want - and talking to dad is the best training camp for this.

4 Good fathers comfort - as best they can

In most societies, mothers are better at some things. For example, comforting. Research has investigated how parents behave when their child wakes up from an anaesthetic in hospital. Both fathers and mothers try to give their child a feeling of security and calm - primarily through touch and physical contact. However, mothers do this more intensively and over a longer period of time than fathers. However, men have clearly caught up in this respect.

Margrit Stamm, an educational scientist from Bern, has shown that today more than 84 per cent of fathers cuddle with their children and establish physical closeness. Nevertheless, a higher percentage of children and young people still manage to build up a closer relationship of trust with their mother than with their father. When they need help, they are more likely to go to her than to him. What impact does this have on children's development?

The father should support his partner where he can and make life easier for her.

Several studies from the USA, Canada and Israel have come to identical conclusions on this issue: schoolchildren who are securely attached to both parents develop greater social skills and report fewer problems in everyday life. The simultaneous attachment to father and mother acts as a «protective factor» against loneliness, feelings of anxiety and depression. This effect was actually also expected for children who are only securely attached to their mother.

However, the protective effect was significantly weaker for them. «These results show that we need to take a closer look at the role of a close relationship between adolescents and their fathers,» says a research report from Tel Aviv University. «Some studies only look at men, others only at women,» explains Brenda Volling. «But there's no point in pitting fathers and mothers against each other. Ultimately, it's about painting the big picture and showing how parents can do the best for their children together.»

5. good fathers also stay at home

But why has fatherhood research recently become so important? The experts say it is primarily down to fathers themselves - and the society in which they live. Fathers today spend four times more time with their children than was the case in the 1960s.

«Back then, Dad came home from work and waited for his wife to serve him a martini. His job was to earn money for the family. Bringing up the children was entirely the wife's job,» says Brenda Volling. «This type of father hardly exists today. Fathers take it for granted that they are involved in bringing up the children.»

In other words, it is the new fathers who make a new type of research necessary. But these new fathers still have a hard time. In Switzerland, more than 80 per cent of them still work full-time and spend fewer hours with their children than they would like to. Part-time work is often not supported by employers. But what happens when fathers take a radical step, when they stay at home completely and hand over the breadwinning role to their partner?

Wassilios Fthenakis, the grey eminence of German-language father research, considers this to be an "important experience"(see interview). However, a study from Canada shows a different side: the researchers wanted to know how modern fathers are portrayed in films and TV series. The result: the committed but full-time working father tends to be portrayed as a likeable winner. Stay-at-home dads, on the other hand, are almost always portrayed as unmanly losers who can't get their lives together - being a full-time dad still doesn't seem to be a desirable career goal, at least on the other side of the Atlantic.

6. good fathers are real men

At the CSCW conference in Portland, USA, in March 2017, Jordanian fatherhood researcher Tawfiq Ammari described how some «stay-at-home dads» are reclaiming their male self-image in an original way. He noted that full-time fathers repeatedly use a kind of «DIY language» in interviews and self-written blogs to talk about their everyday lives. In fact, they perform some of their activities in a particularly masculine way - for example, by stirring cake batter with a drill or assembling their children's Halloween masks in the hobby room instead of buying them in the shop.

However, the pure interpretation of their role is also emphatically masculine. For example, fathers do not present themselves as «househusbands», but as " dadpreneurs" who reduce household expenses with well thought-out plans. Other fathers derive their male pride from the fact that they do repairs to the house themselves together with the children without having to call a tradesman.

The self-image as a «do it yourself» dad («DIY dad»), Ammari concludes, enables fathers to lead a life that is seen as «typically female» without having to give up their masculine self-image. In other words, good fathers look after their children like a mother - but they want to remain real blokes. In post-war England, there was a series of very successful radio programmes. It was dedicated to a simple question: How do you become a good mum?

The creator of the series, psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, has done immeasurable work for the well-being of families on the island. His central thesis was that no mother has to be perfect. For her child to grow up happy, it is enough if she is «good enough». The 2017 research on fathers tells a very similar story: one dad may be a great partner, the other a carer, a reader, a comforter, a stay-at-home dad who retains his masculinity. But as long as he does all of this from the heart, in his own way, he will be «good enough» - and the best father you could wish for your child.