Even Sometime Dads Confer Big Time Benefits on Kids
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Dads make a big difference to the healthy development of their children in myriad ways. A new study shows that even a father who bounces in and out of his daughter’s life is better than no father at all.
The presence of a “boomerang” father can mitigate the chance of depression in girls at adolescence, when their risk of the disorder suddenly doubles, says family researcher Daphne Hernandez of the University of Houston. While she and her colleagues did not examine how the effect comes about, she speculates that even a sometime dad lowers the level of stressfor young daughters, perhaps by keeping a mother from bringing non-related men into the household.
“We have a tendency to categorize dads as present, or absent or as deadbeats,” study co-author Hernandez reports in the Journal of Marriage and Family. But she finds there is a middle ground of psychological benefit for daughters from fathers “who are not necessarily absent all the time and not necessarily present all the time.”
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