Is the childcare men and women provide indistinguishable? And if not, are there any consequences for their kids?
Elizabeth Washbrook looks at whether men and women are equally good at caring for young children
The roles that parents are expected to play in family life have undergone dramatic changes since the 1970s. The traditional models of the father as breadwinner and the mother as homemaker increasingly seem like relics of a bygone era. And nowhere is this change more evident than in parental care for infants and toddlers.
Maternal employment is now the norm for mothers with children under the age of three in two-parent families, and there is increasing evidence that fathers both want to be, and are becoming, more involved in the early lives of their children. The introduction of paid paternity leave in April 2003 is just one example of government support for the idea that women and men are interchangeable in both the home and the workplace. But does this mean the childcare they provide is equally indistinguishable? And if not, are there any consequences for their kids?
My research, carried out at the Centre for Market and Public Organisation at the University of Bristol, addresses the question of how successfully fathers can assume the most fundamental of traditional female roles – that of primary caregiver to very young children. The study focused on 6,000 children born into two-parent families in Bristol and the surrounding regions in the early 1990s. I investigated whether children who regularly spent time alone with their fathers differed from other children in terms of behaviour or academic skills when they started school.
My findings suggest that the nature of the care provided by mothers and fathers is not the same, and that this can have small, but nonetheless noticeable, consequences for children’s development. I also found intriguing differences in the effects of paternal childcare on sons and daughters. These results suggest that, even in the twenty-first century, men and women differ in their skills, attitudes and beliefs about how boys and girls should be socialised.
Acknowledging such differences does not mean advocating a return to the rigid gender roles of previous generations. Instead, it allows us to value what is unique about being a mother, rather than a father, and vice versa. And if the fact that boys and girls are treated differently hinders their development in certain areas, then only by addressing these stereotypes openly can we prevent ongoing gender inequality being transmitted from one generation to another.
The study produced a number of specific findings. Firstly, I found no differences in children’s academic or social skills at all according to the amount of paternal childcare they experienced in the first year of life. This is perhaps surprising. Developmental experts have argued that mothers have a uniquely important role to play in this early formative period, both because of the health benefits of breast-feeding and the importance of mother-infant bonding in providing emotional security. Yet my research suggests that, on average, fathers are equally as able as mothers in providing early infant care.
When children pass their first birthdays, however, and presumably become more sensitive to the nature of their environments, parenting differences between mothers and fathers start to matter. Children who have spent the first of year of life primarily with their mother, but who are then left regularly with their father for five to 15 hours a week when they are toddlers, actually displayed fewer behavioural problems than other children when they began school. This applied to both girls and boys.
Interestingly, these beneficial effects did not emerge when fathers began care in infancy, nor when they looked after their children for more than 15 hours a week. This pattern of results is consistent with the idea that limited exposure to a second style of parenting gives children the ability to adapt to new social situations. The benefits of widening a child’s range of experience seem muted, however, when he or she becomes used to spending a lot of time alone with their father.
So in a number of areas I found that children do no worse, and in some cases may even do better, when some childcare time is transferred from mothers to fathers. There is one area, however, in which this conclusion appears not to hold. Boys left alone as toddlers with their fathers for longer than 15 hours a week performed worse on academic assessments when they began school than other boys. This was true for sons of many different groups of fathers, including both more and less educated men and those who did and did not work at the time. The single exception were boys who also spent some time being looked after outside their own home, such as in a nursery or with a childminder.
This raises the theory that, on average, fathers don't give their sons the same level of cognitive stimulation as that provided by mothers. Given that I found no evidence of a similar effect for girls, it would seem that this is not because men are innately less able in this regard. Rather, there may be something specific about the way that fathers interact with sons that doesn't fully encourage them to develop their intellectual skills.
Developmental psychology may throw some light on the processes underpinning my findings. It has been suggested that, when looking after toddlers, fathers tend to focus on play and physical activities, whereas mothers are more likely to be instructional and caretaking in nature. Some studies have found that fathers impose stricter discipline on boys than on girls, and also that they demand more from their daughters when it comes to language and mental agility. However, more research is needed in this area.
What are we to take away from this research? Well, given there appear to be no consequences (either positive or negative) for children's wellbeing as babies when it comes to who provides care, then greater flexibility in parental leave arrangements following a birth would give parents more freedom over the way they organise their lives and families.
One important caveat is that this study says nothing about whether these effects persist as children grow older, nor about whether the results would hold for children born more recently than the early 1990s. But if, for social and cultural reasons, mothers do have an advantage when it comes to nurturing children, then it makes sense for us to support their decisions to opt out of the workforce for a time, both financially and in terms of social prestige. And on a deeper level, it raises questions about whether masculine stereotypes that influence how fathers relate to their sons may be holding boys back at school from achieving their full potential.
Elizabeth Washbrook is a research associate at the Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol