My sister sent me this article from the June issue of Ladies Home Journal. Here are some excerpts...
____________________________________________________
The Daddy Difference
By Hara Estroff Marano
Eden Williams was not even 6 when she flounced down the stairs in a dress propped up with two wads of toilet paper where here breasts will eventually be.
"What do you think, Daddy?" she said, flirting.
"Those are such pretty shoes," said her father.
"No, Daddy, that's not what I mean," teased Eden.
"I love your dress," said her father.
"Daa-dee," said a mock-exasperated Eden, who spun on her heels and retreated upstairs.
Her father, of course, understood just what she meant. "I recognized that she needed acceptance from her father of the woman she was practicing to become. But when she went back upstairs, I thought, What if I wasn't there? Where would she have gotten it? She would have looked for it elsewhere."
In a series of ongoing studies, researchers are finding that the absence of a biological father in a household is strongly associated with girls who enter puberty early and begin preconscious sexual activity.
Exactly how simply having a biological father in the home could affect the age as which a girl enters puberty is a story that is still unfolding... researchers are monitoring the development of several hundred girls. Some of the girls live in biologically intact families; others live with their mother and stepfather or a cohabiting partner of their mother.
Girls who live in a family with a father figure other than their biological father tend to reach puberty earlier than girls in intact families. Among the girls in biologically intact families, the ones who reached puberty latest generally had the biological fathers who where the most loving and who spent the most time caring for them when they were 4 and 5.
Pheromones may partly account for this effect. Exposure to the pheromones of biological fathers in childhood may inhibit sexual maturation of daughters. And exposure to the pheromones of unrelated adult males, such as stepfathers, may accelerate puberty.
Stepfathers can and often do give much of the love that children need to develop well. Because they are biologically unrelated, they don't supply the precise genetically tuned chemical signals that appear to put the brakes on pubertal development in daughters.
Fathers typically interact with children through play, a play that is more physical and unpredictable than that of mothers and helps kids develop in ways that compliment the influences a mother provides. Men who actively play with their children appear to instill in them emotional self-control and help them learn to recognize the emotional signals of others.
Because the play of fathers is wilder, more erratic and more physical, it requires a certain amount of unspoken coordination between father and child to keep the play within he bounds of pleasantness. Kids learn how to read the emotional response of others and how to then regulate their own levels of emotion.
And what children learn at home they deploy in other settings. The ability to get a grip on emotions, especially negative emotions such as anger, has payoffs in the classroom. Having a reasonable degree of control over their own emotional states also permits kids to focus attention on their peers in social situations. In fact, studies of hundreds of children have shown that the children of involved fathers make better, longer-lasting friendships throughout their lives and get along better with their peers.
There are some ways father involvement has a stronger impact on boys than on girls. The care of fathers seems to particularly curb aggressive impulses in boys and to broaden their ability to get along with girls as well as with boys.
"Kamikaze play," that extremely rough-and-tumble running around that fathers seem to have a knack for just as moms are trying to quiet things down for bedtime, is not a negative. If fathers do it with their sons, and then hold them as the boys calm down, it has measurably positive effects. Far from turning boys into violent little superheroes, it teaches boys better control mechanisms, so that they have fewer outbursts. They are also less like to act out and morel likely to be nurturing.
Fathers are more results-oriented and less sensitive to the pleadings of older children than mothers, so they tend to be more insistent that their kids work through a problem, even if doing so causes some emotional upset. This helps children learn how to cope with frustration and figure things out for themselves.
Fathers are also more likely than mothers to encourage physical exploration and take chances. When their children are climbing on the jungle gym, for instance, fathers are likely to urge them to climb to the top, while mothers are more cautious. Fathers' feedback to children seems to be a more potent predictor" of children's abilities to surmount difficulties.
Devoted dads are not simply men who spend time playing with their kids, but men who are attuned to their children whenever they spend time with them. They take time to understand what their children are up to and what their concerns are. When a kid needs to talk, they know that they need to listen.
When the relationship with their father is close and warm, kids do better on all measures that predict future successschool progress, academic achievement, highest grade completedas well as on all measures of socially and emotional well-being. To the degree that people perceive themselves as having been love by their father, they hit the psychological jackpot: Such individuals have a self-confidence and ability to adjust that sets the stage for achievements in many domains of life.
Creating a family in which Dad plays a strong nurturing role takes more than just a father who's up for the challenge: What mothers do as parents affects what fathers do as parents. Historically, women often have been gatekeepers to their children and managers of their schedules. Therefore, mothers have a special responsibility for creating devoted dads. It's important for mothers to actively encourage father involvement:
Give Dad time to be with the kids by himself
Even if it means finding excuses that get you out of the house, it's important that you leave your husband in charge of the kids and signal your confidence that everyone will be just fine without you. What you don't want to do is say, 'I'm going to be out for the evening, and here's a list of fifteen things you can do with the kids. That communicates lack of confidence and won't help build his comfort level as a caregiver.
Let fathers figure things out for themselves
If your husband is trying unsuccessfully to comfort the crying baby, for instance, dont' come to his rescue with directions about just how the baby likes to be jiggled. This could be interpreted as criticism and could make your husband less willing to comfort the baby the next time.
Let Dad be Dad
When your husband is with the kids he'll probably do things differently than you mighthe may have odd-seeming ideas about how to color-coordinate the children's outfits, for instance, or of what constitutes a nutritious lunchand mothers have to remember that that's okay. Mothers and fathers have different frames of reference and it's wrong to hold him to your standards. the important thing is that Dad is feeding the kids or helping them get dressed. That's what you want.