Benefits From Early Father-Infant Bonds
For years, researchers have stressed the importance of the mother-infant bond--that early “connection” that can make or break a lifelong relationship.
Now, the father-infant bond is increasingly becoming a focus for scientists.
And investigators are finding that, when it comes to parent-child bonding, dads aren’t much different than moms.
Contact, physical and psychological, seems to be the key. Fathers who visit their newborns before they come home from the hospital frequently are more likely to view their children in a positive light, Israeli researchers reported recently in the journal Pediatrics. They studied 50 fathers of hospitalized premature infants, counting their visits and observing the families over the first 18 months of the babies’ lives.
Those fathers who visited about every two days were also more likely to have a positive relationship with their children later in life, said the researchers. These dads were more likely to be involved in care-giving, to display positive affection, and to hold the babies.
Babies seemed to benefit as well from extra fatherly attention: they gained more weight than other babies and left the hospital more quickly.
The findings of the new study came as no surprise to Warren Keller, a Buffalo, N.Y., psychologist who also has researched paternal bonding. In his study of 51 families, the fathers who visited their newborns often--spending at least four hours a day with the infants the first three days of life--were more attached to their babies at age six weeks than fathers who spent half that time visiting.
Dads who spent the most time with their newborns were also more likely to think their babies were cute, less likely to fear holding them and more likely to spend time playing with them, Keller said.
Taking their cue from such research, local hospital physicians say they encourage both mothers and fathers to spend time with their hospitalized newborns. “We actively encourage parents to visit,” said Dr. Jeffrey Pomerance, director of newborn care at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, who says parents of babies there usually may visit any time of the day or night.
In addition to offering that open-door policy, Pomerance helps jittery new dads bond with their infants with this advice: “Hold your baby as soon as possible. If that’s impossible, touch the baby. Remember, just the sound of your voice is soothing to your child.”
