The Unique Role of Father Involvement in Child Socioemotional Development

Abstract

The role of fathers in the modern households has significantly changed, prompting scholarly interest in the uniqueness of paternal influences. The early childhood development literature is thereby no longer limited to focus solely on the effects of maternal behaviors. In particular, father involvement is regarded to have distinct mechanisms of influence on children's early social-emotional development that relatively independent of motherhood. However, there is not even a consistent definition of father involvement yet, and the current literature has received little attention within the pathways of how its influence on early childhood development. To bridge this gap, this paper aims to explore aspects of father involvement and the mechanisms of its impact on children's social-emotional behavior. Grounded on attachment theory and activation relationship theory, this paper presents that father involvement can build high-quality father-child attachments both through sensitive affection engagement and the challenges and activations that common in physical play, thus having a unique impact on children's social-emotional behavior that is different from that of their mothers. This paper can serve as an inspiration for future directions in father involvement research and has potential practical implications for policymakers and families with newborns. There remains ambiguities and gaps in the research on the parenting literature, such as there are very few studies have yet considered the dynamic and reciprocal nature of the father-child relationship, which need to be addressed by future research.