Role of the Father Flashcards
What did Schaffer and Emerson’s study reveal about role of the father?
Schaffer and Emerson found fathers were more likely to be a joint first attachment figure (27%) than an infant’s first attachment (3%). This may be because fathers spend less time with their infants. However, studies have shown little relationship between father accessibility and attachment.
Why may the father not be a primary attachment figure?
Fathers may lack the emotional sensitivity needed to form an intense attachment. Biologically, the female hormone ostrogen underlies caring behaviour making women more orientated towards interpersonal goals than men.
Socially, sex stereotypes may still affect male behaviour e.g. being sensitive to the needs of others is seen as a feminine trait.
What did Field (1978) find about role of the father?
Conducted research which compared the behaviours of primary caretaker mothers with primary and secondary caretaker fathers.
Face-to-face interactions were analysed from video footage with infants at 4 months of age.
Overall, it was observed that fathers engaged more in game playing and held their infants less.
However, primary caretaker fathers engaged in significantly more smiling, imitative grimaces, and imitative vocalizations than did secondary caretaker fathers and these were comparable with mothers’ behaviour.
What did Bowlby (1988) find about role of the father?
Reasoned that if patterns of attachment are a product of how their mother has treated them, it could be anticipated that the pattern he develops with his father is the product of how their father has treated them.
Bowlby suggests that fathers can fill a role closely resembling that filled by a mother but points out that in most cultures this is uncommon.
Bowlby argues that in most families with young children, the father’s role tends to be different. According to Bowlby, a father is more likely to engage in physically active and novel play than the mother and tends to become his child’s preferred play companion.
What did Brown (2012) find about role of the father?
Investigated father involvement, paternal sensitivity, and father-child attachment security at 13 months and 3 years of age.
Results demonstrated that involvement and sensitivity influenced father-child attachment security at age 3.
Involvement was a greater predictor of secure attachment when fathers were rated as less sensitive. This research indicates that the gender of a caregiver is not crucial in predicting attachment types/ quality, rather it is the extent of caregiver involvement.
What did Grossman (2002) find about role of the father?
Carried out a longitudinal study looking at both parents’ behaviour and its relationship to the quality of children’s attachments into their teens.
Quality of infant attachment with mothers but not fathers was related to children’s attachments in adolescence suggesting that father attachment was less important.
However, the quality of fathers’ play with infants was related to the quality of adolescent attachments.
This suggests that fathers have a different role in attachment - one that is more to do with play and stimulation, and less to do with nurturing.
Explain the economic implications of research into the role of the father.
- Fathers increasingly remain at home and therefore contribute to the economy less
- Mothers may return to work and contribute to the economy
- Changing laws on paternity leave: government funded so effects the economy
- Gender pay gap may be reduced of parental roles are regarded as more equal
- Early attachment research (e.g Bowlby) suggests that fathers should provide an economic rather than an emotional function
AO3 - Inconsistent findings on fathers
Research into the role of fathers in attachment is confusing because different researchers are interested in different research questions.
On one hand, some psychologists are interested in understanding the role fathers have as secondary attachment figures whereas others are more concerned with the father as primary attachment figure.
The former have tended to see fathers behaving differently from mothers and having a distinct role. The latter have tended to find that fathers can take on a ‘maternal’ role.
This is a problem because it means psychologists cannot easily answer a simple question the layperson often asks: what is the role of the father?
AO3 - Fathers may not have a distinct role
The study by Grossman found that fathers as secondary attachment figures had an important role in their children’s development.
However, other studies (e.g. MacCallum and Golombok 2004) have found that children growing up in single or same-sex parent families do not develop any differently from those in two-parent heterosexual families.
This would seem to suggest that the father’s role as a secondary attachment figure is not important.
AO3 - Fathers don’t generally become primary attachment figures
The fact that fathers tend not to become the primary attachment figure could simply be the result of traditional gender roles, in which women are expected to be more caring and nurturing than men. Therefore fathers simply don’t feel they should act like that.
On the other hand, it could be that female hormones (such as ostrogen) create higher levels of nurturing and therefore women are biologically pre-disposed to be the primary attachment figure (Taylor et al. 2000).
