A study from Penn State College of Health and Human Development suggests that the way new fathers interact with their infants may have long-term effects on their children's heart and metabolic health. The research, published in Health Psychology, found that fathers who were warm and supportive toward their 10-month-old babies contributed to more positive co-parenting relationships by the time the child was two years old. In these families, children displayed better markers of physical health at age seven.
Researchers did not find a similar link between mothers' warmth or co-parenting behaviors and children's later physical health. However, they emphasized that this does not mean mothers are unimportant to a child's development.
Previous studies have shown that children raised in high-conflict or unstable households face higher risks for health issues such as inflammation, impaired blood sugar regulation, and obesity. These earlier investigations mostly focused on mothers' roles within the family. The Penn State team aimed to assess how various family interactions—including those involving fathers—might affect child health outcomes.
The study used data from 399 U.S. families participating in the Penn State Family Foundations project, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health. Most families were non-Hispanic white with above-average education and income levels. Researchers visited families when children were 10 and 24 months old, recording videos of parent-child play sessions. Trained evaluators then coded parenting behaviors such as responsiveness and warmth.
They also observed co-parenting dynamics, noting instances where parents competed for their child's attention rather than collaborating during playtime. When one parent dominated these interactions, the other often withdrew.
At age seven, children's blood samples were analyzed for four indicators of heart and metabolic health: cholesterol; glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c), reflecting average blood sugar; interleukin-6 (IL-6), an inflammation marker; and C-reactive protein (CRP), another indicator of inflammation.
Analysis revealed that fathers who showed less sensitivity at 10 months tended to compete for attention or withdraw during family play at 24 months. Children whose fathers exhibited more competitive-withdrawal behaviors had higher HbA1c and CRP levels at age seven.
"No one will be surprised to learn that treating your children appropriately and with warmth is good for them," said Hannah Schreier, associate professor of biobehavioral health at Penn State Social Science Research Institute and senior author of the study. "But it might surprise people that a father's behavior before a baby is old enough to form permanent memories can affect that child's health when they are in second grade. It is generally understood that family dynamics affect development and mental health, but those dynamics affect physical health as well and play out over years."
Jennifer Graham-Engeland, Elizabeth Fenton Susman Professor of Biobehavioral Health and co-author, highlighted the study's methodology: "Researchers studying parenting are often forced to rely on parents' self-reports of their behavior," she said. "When any of us self-report something, we can be influenced by what we remember or how we want to be seen - which may not represent how we actually behaved. And, of course, children this young can't report on how their parents acted. The Family Foundations data made possible this intimate look into family lives as well as the connection of those interactions to later biological indicators of health. We believe this allowed us to create a more accurate picture of the influence of fathers than was possible previously."
The researchers noted they expected mothers' co-parenting behavior would show similar impacts but did not observe clear effects on child health measures from maternal factors in this sample.
"The lack of clear results based on the mothers' coparenting was not expected," said Graham-Engeland, associate director of the Penn State Center for Healthy Aging. "There could be many reasons for this, but one theory in the literature relates to the father's role in the family that may play out in different ways. In two-parent families like the ones in this study - the mother is frequently the primary caregiver; so, it is possible that whatever the mother's behavior, it tends to represent the norm in the family whereas the father's role tends to be one that reinforces the norm or disrupts it. It is also likely that mothers affect children's health in ways other than those specifically examined in this study."
The authors caution against generalizing too broadly since their research only included families with both a mother and father raising their first child together; other family structures may yield different results.
"What I hope people will take from this research is that fathers, alongside mothers, have a profound impact on family function that can reverberate through the child's health years later," said Aytuglu, one of the researchers involved in conducting this work. "As a society supporting fathers - and everyone in a child's household - is an important part of promoting children's health."
Other contributors include Mark Feinberg (Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center), Samantha Murray-Perdue (Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center), C. Andrew Conway (Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center). Funding was provided by National Institutes of Health.
