This chapter explores the effects of fatherless families on children. It examines the connection between father's absence and juvenile delinquency, intellectual and psychosocial functioning, school achievement, masculine identity, mental illness, and marital instability. The review found inconclusive evidence for blanket generalizations about the consequences of father's absence. It found that the impact of father's absence on a boy is conditioned and to a large extent mediated by interacting variables. The review concludes that the number of parents in the home is likely to be less crucial…
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Journal Article Infant protest following separation from the mother has been used as a partial index of the strength of the mother-infant bond, in which case it is assumed that the strength of the bond covaries with the amount of social interaction. In this study, 36 1-year-old middle-class children with fathers who spent differing amounts of time with them at home were observed in two experimental contexts separated by 2 weeks. In the first, each infant was shown six to eight repetitions of three different nonsocial stimuli followed by a change in the stimulus. In the second, each infant experienced the…
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This paper describes a study examining the nature and importance of fathers' relationships to their infants. Most previous research in this area had concentrated on the negative impact on childhood development of a father's absence, or on the differences between children's relationships with strangers and with their mothers. This study examined the child's behavior in an unfamiliar playroom as a function of the presence or absence of his mother, father, or an unfamiliar female at the ages of 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, and 21 months. The sample consisted of 144 infants (all first-born children), with…
