He may be a little girl’s first...

He may be a little girl’s first love, a little boy’s role model. His paycheck, his encouragement and his relationship with their mother can make a difference in his children’s success at school, at work, in their relationships. His anger can leave permanent scars.

Clearly, fathers make a difference to their children. But only now are researchers learning how and how much.

“Fathers do matter, but you have to take into account the quality of the relationship,” said Ross Parke, UC Riverside child development specialist. Moreover, he said that contrary to popular belief, “Fathers matter more for social and emotional development than for some other domains.”

There is now consensus among researchers that fathers can affect their children’s development as much as mothers, Parke said. Researchers have found that men are equally capable as women of nurturing behavior from infancy on. But their parenting style differs markedly from that of mothers.

Through their play, fathers teach children to regulate their emotions, Parke said. “Children learn to get into the rhythm of father play. . . . Fathers who are play partners have kids that are more adept at reading emotional signals as well as kids who are better at sending clear emotional signals you can recognize.”

But fathers who get angry with their children during play have children who don’t do well with peers, Parke said. “Kids who are doing well have fathers who use humor to distract them and deal with it after.”

Fathers also have a significant influence on their children’s later success in life, according to Emory University psychologist John Snarey, who has recently published the results of a four-decade study of 250 fathers in the Boston area in “How Fathers Care for the Next Generation” (Harvard University Press, 1994).

Snarey’s study showed that fathers’ influence is greatest when their encouragement is contrary to gender stereotype.

For instance, Snarey said sons were more successful when their fathers encouraged their social, emotional and intellectual development. “Fathers who stayed involved with their intellectual growth during adolescence were more likely to have sons who were educationally successful,” he said. Daughters were more successful when fathers supported their athletic abilities.

“It is hard to find a daughter whose career is unusually successful who didn’t have a father who was very involved,” Snarey said.

The issue of involvement becomes politically charged when parents divorce or in other situations where the mother retains primary physical custody of the children. Several recent studies link family problems such as delinquency and teen pregnancy with fatherlessness.

Although many researchers think the influence of the father has been denigrated in the past, they criticize as too simple the recent claims of father advocates who have painted fathers as the saviors of a society riven by crime, poverty, unwed childbearing and violence. “To make assumptions that fathers regardless of quality are going to produce positive results flies in the face of data and common sense,” Parke said, adding: “No one would say the quality of mothering doesn’t matter.”

One group, the National Fatherhood Initiative, for instance, claims that a biological father in the home will reduce child abuse 40%, that his presence will improve a child’s physical health and reduce antisocial behavior caused by peer pressure.

In an ongoing effort to “prove beyond any doubt that fatherlessness is the crisis of the day,” the Lancaster, Pa.-based father advocacy group last week released a 50-page packet of “Father Facts.” They include the following statistics:

* In 1993, fatherless children were five times more likely to live in poverty, as compared with those in two-parent families, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

* Children who exhibited violent misbehavior in school were 11 times as likely not to live with their fathers and six times as likely to have parents who were not married, according to the 1994 American Journal of Public Health.

* Seventy percent of the juveniles in state reform institutions grew up in single- or no-parent situations, according to a 1987 Survey of Youth in Custody, U.S. Department of Justice.

Critics say studies on father absence rarely include control groups of equally competent mothers or data on the mitigating role of outside support. Most evidence shows that children are harmed more by an intact household where there is high conflict than a divorced household where there is a reasonably congenial relationship between the parents. The problems with single-mother families, they say, began long before the fathers left.

Conversely, some researchers worry about the long-term effects on children of divorce who are denied access to a father. Researchers said that a significant majority of divorced mothers don’t believe fathers’ involvement will benefit their children.

William Doherty, a family scientist at the University of Minnesota, said, “There is a small percentage of fathers who are lethal to their children and courts should be able to detect that. What I see more often is a woman who says, ‘He was bad to me and he must be bad for the children.’ That’s a slippery slope.

“Heaven help them when these kids grow up and feel they didn’t have a relationship with their father because the mother kept them apart.”

For children to grow up believing that their father has chosen to abandon them is a “terrible burden,” Doherty said. “Some of the research indicates they are worse off than children whose fathers have died.”

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Through the men’s movement and father-loss therapy groups over the past decade, anecdotal evidence has grown to support the notion of “father hunger,” the yearning for a positive male influence from adults whose fathers were distant, judgmental or abusive.

Jane Drew, a Newport Beach psychologist who authored a guide to “healing your father wound” eight years ago, categorized the fallout: Abusive fathers produce adults with a fear of betrayal and sense of helplessness; distant fathers produce adults who don’t feel worthy of love; judgmental fathers produce adults who feel guilty, ashamed and need to control.

Researchers are unsure who or what can compensate for father loss.

Studies by E. Mavis Hetherington, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, show that stepfathers can have a positive influence on boys when the remarriage occurs in their youth. Girls show no benefits from stepfathers, she said.

The Big Brothers of Greater Los Angeles reports positive testimonials on the strictly screened pairing of fatherless boys and men who visit them weekly. But Parke said the research is inconclusive on the effects of father surrogates. More important, he said, are the mothers’ attitudes toward men in general.

Snarey said his study shows that any man, regardless of his own upbringing, can learn to be a good father and have a positive influence on children.

Not only do children need good fathers, he said, but fathers also need children.

Contrary to the complaints of “daddy trackers,” he said men who give a high priority to child rearing are ultimately more successful in their careers at midlife than men who have focused only on their work. The reason is that parenting adolescents helps prepare men to mentor young adults beyond the family, a skill that can be rewarded in the workplace with promotions.

Moreover, he found that at midlife, men who had been more involved in child rearing were also more happily married.

* Next: Learning to Father.