Mothers need fathers, and fathers need mothers

We had been home with our first newborn for less than six hours when my husband started doing calisthenics with her. I looked at him in wonderment. “What are you doing?!” My protective mother’s heart wanted to swaddle up her 6.5 pounds and hold her close, while he couldn’t wait to bounce her around and play with her.

That pattern persisted. Two years later, I was sitting on the couch reviewing research on parenting. The author described how the oxytocin “bonding hormone” that floods mothers in childbirth and breastfeeding is also active (at smaller amounts) in the bonding processes of fathers.

Only with dads, the hormone doesn’t elicit “cooing and cuddling.” It elicits “tickling and tossing.”

The pattern was striking. My husband (who is an only child and had interacted rarely with infants) wasn’t just acting strangely. We were complementing each other in how we nurtured early development, a complementarity shaped by our uniquely gendered biological and psychological orientations. Those reciprocal patterns, I came to learn, went far beyond bonding.

It goes without saying there is significant overlap in how mothers and fathers influence children. Both parents can provide nurturing, feeding, stimulation, teaching and guidance crucial for children to become competent adults. But research also shows that mothers and fathers have distinct physiologically and psychologically influenced predispositions that contribute to different strengths and styles of interaction with children. When combined, the distinctions create a oneness that uniquely fosters the optimal development of children.

With Mother’s Day this weekend, and Father’s Day next month, it’s worth bringing more attention to some of this. From birth, infants are primed to seek out their mother to form a bond of emotional communication, already knowing her smell, voice and heartbeat. Without any specific training, mothers intuitively match their infants’ emotional state and provide the optimal level of stimulation needed to lay the foundations of personality, self-awareness, attention, empathy, regulation of stress, ability to understand emotions and capacity for intimacy. Maternal sensitivity, a measure of a mother’s responsiveness, attunement and nonintrusiveness, has been identified as the strongest, most consistent predictor of a child’s cognitive, social and emotional development.

The father-child bond is also important, shaping brain development beginning in the toddler years. But fathers more often use playfulness and stimulating physical activity to connect with their children, orienting their children to the outside world, even in the way they hold them like a football. This paternal orientation likewise addresses important developmental needs in children.

In fact, a father’s influence on social-emotional capacity complements a mother’s in critically important ways. Women tend to express all emotions — other than anger — stronger than men, but also tend to be better able to regulate emotions, which bolsters specific nurturing capacities by, for instance, delaying personal gratification and inhibiting aggressive responses.

Throughout their lives, children consequently tend to go to their mothers for comfort in times of pain or stress. When fathers respond to children’s emotional hurts, by comparison, they are more likely to focus on fixing the problem rather than addressing the hurt feeling.

This seeming “indifference” to the emotion may not appear nurturing but becomes very useful — particularly as children grow older. Indeed, children tend to seek out and share things with their dads precisely because of their measured, problem-solving responses. The less emotional response actually becomes a strategic form of nurturing in emotionally-charged situations.

Fathers also strengthen children’s social-emotional capacity through their more intuitive encouragement of risk-taking. Whether on the playground, in schoolwork or in trying new things, they often guide children in deciding how much risk to take while encouraging them in it.

Fathers tend to be particularly attuned to developing children’s physical, emotional and intellectual independence — in everything from children making their own lunches and tying their own shoes to doing household chores and making academic decisions.

In observing these differences, Canadian scholar Andrea Doucet wondered if fathers just weren’t as “nurturing” as mothers. Their behaviors didn’t seem to fit the traditional definition of “holding close and sensitively responding.” But a key part of nurturing also includes the capacity to “let go.” It is this careful “letting go” that fathers can be particularly good at. In fostering independence and risk-taking, while ensuring safety and protection, fathers prepare their children to face the world, develop confidence, learn to stand up for themselves and be braver in unfamiliar situations.

Mothers and fathers also influence children’s cognitive and academic capacities in complementary ways. From the beginning of life, mothers lay the foundation for mental processing, shaping IQ, capacity for shared attention, referential communication and social learning through the relatively simple yet profound process of “mutually responsive interaction” with their child. As children grow, mothers tend to engage in more teaching-oriented, didactic interactions with children, which shape memory, problem-solving, and language advancement.

Fathers’ unique contributions to children’s cognitive development build on the foundation of mothers, and an involved father has been identified as the strongest predictor of college graduation. This is partly because involved fathers are more likely to help with homework and provide financial support. But it’s also the case that involved fathers effectively monitor and guide children’s actions, helping them avoid behaviors that might negatively impact school achievement.

As summarized by a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report, “Fathers often push achievement while mothers stress nurturing, both of which are important to healthy development.”

This is also shaped by the fact that mothers tend to intervene and correct children more frequently than fathers. But when fathers discipline, they tend to “hold the line.”

Fathers’ willingness to confront their children and enforce discipline appears to engender a sense of authority and boundary that can shape children’s sense of social stability, order and even self-governance. In fact, fathers’ distinct ways of expressing encouragement, giving instruction and providing assistance, as well as their involvement in rules, monitoring and supervision seems to provide the right mix of engagement and monitoring that strengthens children’s academic achievement and helps them steer clear of various kinds of trouble.

As with all research, there are limitations to what can be concluded. First, there is tremendous variation within gender. Not all mothers and fathers are going to parent the ways these studies found to be typical. Even in these situations, however, mothers and fathers still tend to take complementary approaches that are valuable to children.

As a second qualification, parenting behavior is influenced by biological processes, including what mothers experience through pregnancy, giving birth and sustaining life, and what fathers experience through closeness with their partner and child. Yet these biological processes happen within a social and cultural ecology that may undermine the valuing of equal partnership in nurturing life together as father and mother.

Role-based descriptions of mothering and fathering can sometimes be used to distort the ways that mothers and fathers can both provide, protect and nurture in meaningful ways. If overly rigid, these understandings can also limit an appreciation for the diverse ways families honor differences while strengthening equal partnership.

Regardless of the distinctions, parents’ devotion to one another and their children is an incomparable gift. On a wide variety of measures, the average child growing up with married parents is at an advantage compared with single-parent or cohabiting-parent peers. Parenting is ideally a work designed for two.

In 2006, fathering scholar Andrea Doucet shared an illuminating moment from her extensive research with single dads. After a long evening discussing these fathers’ experiences, she asked, “In an ideal world, what resources or supports would you like to see for single fathers?”

Doucet expected to hear that they wanted greater social support and societal acceptance, along with perhaps more programs and policies directed at single dads. Instead, after a period of awkward silence, one dad stood and said, “An ideal world would be one with a father and a mother. We’d be lying if we pretended that wasn’t true.”

Nods of agreement and expressions of approval followed from the other dads. Although many had had bitter experiences of separation and divorce, they could not ignore the inherent connectedness of paired mothering and fathering — and the real challenges experienced when one or the other is not there. They knew because they lived it.

Both a father and a mother are needed to create life, and both are needed to best facilitate the nurturing of that life. A culture that embraces that reality is more likely to do all that is possible to ensure that is a likelihood for children.

Jenet Jacob Erickson is a fellow of the Wheatley Institute and a professor in the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University. Jason S. Carroll, Family Initiative Director at BYU’s Wheatley Institute, also contributed to this article. For those interested in learning more, the above observations drawn from social science are described in greater detail in our academic work.