The Distinct, Positive Impact of a Good Dad

Thursday, January 16th, 2014

As hard as it is to believe, there may be a distinct, positive impact from having a good dad, W. Bradford Wilcox dares to suggest, because good dads roughhouse with their kids, encourage (safe) risks, protect them, and discipline them:

The contributions that fathers make to their children’s lives can be seen in three areas: teenage delinquency, pregnancy, and depression. Here, to illustrate the connection between fatherhood and child well-being, I compare adolescent boys and girls who fall into one of four categories: those living in an intact, married family with a high-quality relationship with their father (top third), or an average-quality relationship with their father (middle third), or a low-quality relationship with him (bottom third), or living in a single-mother family. Relationship quality was measured by a scale of three items tapping a child’s assessment of his father’s warmth, communication skill, and overall relationship quality.

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Comments

  1. The Kong of Hoo-Ha, Nebraska says:

    How did they control for depressed kids biologically inheriting depression from their depressed fathers, who were too miserable to get along well with their kids (raises hand)?

    Or kids inheriting irresponsibility and impulsiveness from fathers who just up and left?

  2. Magus Janus says:

    As usual this suffers from a type of epidemiological fallacy, mainly, the inability to segregate the genetic predisposition from the family environment input.

    It is more likely the case, as we garner from adoptions studies, that the type of family that has a single mother has a genetic predisposition to all the usual problems, a predisposition passed onto the children.

    It is not that the father left that is the problem, but rather that he is genetically the type of father who would leave. Whether he left or not is irrelevant.

  3. Walter F. says:

    If you say it’s genetic, you’re racist. If you’re right, quit wasting money fighting genetics.

  4. William Newman says:

    “How did they control for … biologically inheriting …?” A blank slate denier, are you?

    We don’t need to control for any steenking heritability. A paper I saw on Arnold Kling’s blog, Chan and Boliver “The Grandparents Effect in Social Mobility”, is my current stock pointer to a representative “scientific” literature earnestly considering even seriously obscure possible effects (e.g. “Well-connected grandparents could also use their social contacts to help grandchildren with job searches.”) while rigorously excluding the unspeakable possibility that heritability could be nonzero. Even, I note, heritability of uncontroversial physical stuff like health and height that can be expected to affect economic outcomes.

  5. T. Greer says:

    Mates, I don’t think genetics alone is sufficient to explain what is happening.

    Lets look at this for a moment. Gen1 was bad Dads. We call them bad because they leave their sons. Gen2 has bad sons. We call them bad because they are often criminals, have poor grades, etc.

    Sure, works for me. It even makes sense to connect the two generations by genetic means.

    But how long have those bad genes been around?

    I suppose we have to look at Gen0 and Gen-1 for that. And there is the catch: Gen2′s grandads and great grandads lived in a time where there was less crime, more ‘pro-social behavior,’ and many, many less fatherless kids. Something changed. Unless someone here is willing to claim that genes for “irresponsibility and impulsiveness” are some new late 20th century mutation, then we have to slow down and explain what changed in the environment that allowed traits like impulsiveness and irresponsibility to express themselves as an explosion of crime, delinquency, teen pregnancy, and so forth when these same traits did not do this back in 1940.

    Lack of father is in the home to punish and curb extreme behavior seems like a plausible explanation for this.

  6. The Kong of Hoo-Ha, Nebraska says:

    T. Greer,

    I didn’t mean to claim it was 100% inheritable, merely that heritability possibly shouldn’t be excluded.

    The decades-long society-wide trends you mention are a strong hint IMHO that heredity is far from the whole story.

  7. JayMan says:

    T. Greer:

    Mates, I don’t think genetics alone is sufficient to explain what is happening.

    Lets look at this for a moment. Gen1 was bad Dads. We call them bad because they leave their sons. Gen2 has bad sons. We call them bad because they are often criminals, have poor grades, etc.

    Sure, works for me. It even makes sense to connect the two generations by genetic means.”

    How long have genes for obesity been around?

    “Unless someone here is willing to claim that genes for ‘irresponsibility and impulsiveness’ are some new late 20th century mutation, then we have to slow down and explain what changed in the environment that allowed traits like impulsiveness and irresponsibility to express themselves as an explosion of crime, delinquency, teen pregnancy, and so forth when these same traits did not do this back in 1940.

    Correct.

    Lack of father is in the home to punish and curb extreme behavior seems like a plausible explanation for this.

    Wrong. You are making a very common mistake where it comes to heredity and phenotype expression. The broad scale environment, the one that includes cars, highways, TVs, vaccines, etc. — the variation in environment between individuals living at the same time. The existence of secular changes doesn’t restore the importance of family dynamics, which are essentially ruled out by behavioral genetic studies.

    This is something I will address in depth in a future post.

  8. Toddy Cat says:

    Jayman,

    You’re a smart guy, and I respect a lot of your work, but I have to ask; why are you so utterly, dogmatically sure that the whole “unwed mother’s kids” problem is totally genetic?

    I mean, most social phenomenon that we observe are a mix of genetic and environmental factors, such as intelligence, criminality, etc. Why do you think that this area is 100% genetic? I’m not saying that you’re wrong, and I’m the farthest thing from a blank-slater, but do we really know enough about this area to be so sure? The presumption in most societies is that it’s a good thing for a kid to have a father. Until we have proof that it’s not, I’d think that it would be safer to go with the judgement of 10,000 years of civilized human history.

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