Focus on fathers: longitudinal, hormonal, and observational studies on fathers’ parenting in families with young children

Abstract

This dissertation contributes to the literature on fathers’ parenting in families with young children using longitudinal, hormonal, and observational data. The results in Chapter 2 demonstrated that fathers’ hostile and harsh behaviors were related to children’s bullying behavior in elementary school, whereas the effect of the mothers’ behavior was less pronounced. In Chapter 3, the results suggested that fathers’ testosterone is beneficial for the quality of fathers’ parenting (i.e., sensitivity) when fathers’ testosterone reacts in the expected direction given the context of the father-child interaction (i.e., a decrease during a harmonious interaction and an increase during a challenging interaction). The results in Chapter 4 unexpectedly showed that fathers’ sensitivity was largely independent of varying gender-typed contexts. Chapter 5 provided evidence for a specific role of religious fathers, but not mothers, in communicating implicit gender messages and in turn the development of children’s gender attitudes. The most important take-away from this dissertation is that fathers cannot be ignored in child developmental and parenting research, and consequently also in child and family interventions.