By Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Photo: Arin Yoon, The Wall Street Journal, March 4, 2023
Until a few decades ago, American parents generally fell into specific gender roles, with fathers as providers and mothers as nurturers. Though many more mothers are also providers today, research suggests that fathers still lag behind as responsive caregivers. A soon-to-be published survey of more than 1,600 teenagers by the Harvard Education School’s Making Caring Common project found that almost twice as many 14-to-18-year-old boys and girls feel comfortable opening up to their mothers (72%) as to their fathers (39%) about anxiety, depression or other mental-health challenges. The gap suggests that fathers can become much more involved at home, offering the kind of emotional support that many children today so urgently need.
Intimacy between a parent and a child acts as a protective buffer against the day-to-day challenges of life. Sociologists have found that warm, caring dads produce what they call the “good father effect.” A 2021 study published in the Journal of Family Psychology examined the at-home emotional support received by 388 adolescents over several years, measuring levels of “parental intimacy” by asking questions about how often they went to their mother or father for advice and how much they shared feelings and secrets with them.
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