How a new father treats his baby can change family dynamics in a way that affects the child’s heart and metabolic health years later, according to a new study by researchers at the Penn State College of Health and Human Development.
In the study, recently published in Health Psychology, the research team found that fathers who were warm and developmentally supportive with their babies at 10 months of age had more positive coparenting with the child’s mother when the child was two years old. In families where this pattern played out, the child’s blood test showed better indicators of physical health at age seven. In contrast, neither maternal warmth when the child was 10 months old nor positive or negative coparenting when the child was two predicted the child’s physical health at age seven.
That doesn’t mean mothers don’t matter, the researchers said.
Everyone in the family is very important. Mothers are often the primary caregivers and children experience the most growth and development. The bottom line here is that in families with a father in the household, fathers influence the environment in ways that can support—or undermine—the child’s health for years to come.”
Alp Aytuglu, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Biobehavioral Health, Penn State
Previous research by other scientists has shown that children who grow up in high-conflict or unstable households may be at greater risk for health problems, including increased inflammation, lower blood sugar regulation and obesity. These studies mainly looked at the effects of mothers on children, according to Aytuglu. In this study, the researchers wanted to look at the whole family and the various interactions within a family.
Using data from the Penn State Family Foundations project, funded by the National Institutes of Health, the researchers reviewed video and other information from 399 families in the United States, including a mother, father and first child. The families in the study were 83% non-Hispanic white and had higher than average levels of education and income.
When each child in the study was 10 and 24 months old, Family Foundations researchers visited the families’ homes and recorded 18-minute videos of the parents playing with their child. The researchers then reviewed the video and observed individual and co-parenting behaviors.
For both videos, trained raters assigned codes to the mother’s and father’s parenting characteristics, including whether the parents responded to the child in a timely manner, how warmly the parents treated the child, and how appropriate the parents’ responses were for a child of this age.
The raters also reviewed the behavior together with the parents in the video. Specifically, they identified instances where parents competed for the child’s attention – rather than playing with the child or taking turns with the child more naturally. The researchers observed that when one parent competitively gained the child’s attention, the other parent often withdrew from the interaction, disengaged from the play.
When the child was seven years old, Family Foundations researchers collected a dried blood sample from the child. From this sample, the researchers in this study measured four established markers of heart and metabolic health: cholesterol; glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c), which reflects average blood sugar over two to three months. interleukin-6 (IL-6), a messenger in the immune system that represents inflammation; and C-reactive protein (CRP), a marker of inflammation produced by the liver.
Using structural equation modeling, the researchers in this study discovered a link between a father’s behavior at 10 months and their child’s health indicators at age seven.
Fathers who showed less sensitivity to their child at 10 months were more likely to compete for the child’s attention and/or withdraw from family play when the child was 24 months. When fathers showed higher levels of competitive parental withdrawal behavior at 24 months, these children showed higher levels of HbA1c and CRP at age seven, completing the link from father engagement at 10 months to child health more than six years later.
“No one would be surprised to learn that treating your children appropriately and warmly is good for them,” said Hannah Schreier, associate professor of biobehavioral health, co-sponsored member of Penn State’s Institute for Social Sciences and senior author of this study. “But it may surprise people that a father’s behavior before a baby is old enough to form lasting memories can affect a child’s health when they’re in second grade. It’s generally understood that family dynamics affect development and mental health, but these dynamics also affect physical health and play out over the years.”
Much of what made this research novel, according to the researchers, was their ability to use observations of actual parent-child interactions at home.
“Researchers studying child rearing are often forced to rely on parents’ self-reports of their behavior,” said Jennifer Graham-Engeland, Elizabeth Fenton Susman Professor of Biobehavioral Health and co-author of this study. “When any of us report something, it 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 can’t report how their parents acted. The Family Foundations data made it possible to take this intimate look at family life as well as link these interactions to later biological markers of our health.”
The researchers said they expected that mothers’ coparenting behavior would have an impact similar to that of fathers, but the results of this study did not reveal a specific impact of maternal warmth at 10 months or competitive withdrawal at age two or on measures of child health at age seven.
“The lack of clear results based on maternal consanguinity was unexpected,” said Graham-Engeland, associate director of Penn State’s 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 which can play out in different ways. In two-parent families like those in this study – the mother is often the primary caregiver. So it’s possible that whatever the mother’s behavior is, it tends to represent the norm in the family, while the father’s role also tends to disrupt the norm. Mothers influence children’s health in ways other than those examined. especially in this study.”
According to the researchers, it’s important to remember that every family is different and everyone in a family affects others more than they may know. This study was limited to families with a father, mother and their firstborn child, but the research team noted that there are many other family structures that may include grandparents, single parents, same-sex parents, and more. Additionally, they said family dynamics change if more children are added or if parents separate.
“What I hope people take from this research is that fathers, along with mothers, have a profound effect on family functioning that can reverberate in a child’s health years later,” Aytuglu said. “As a society, supporting fathers – and everyone in a child’s household – is an important part of promoting children’s health.”
Other Penn State researchers contributing to this study include Mark Feinberg, research professor of health and human development and affiliated with the Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center; Samantha Murray-Perdue, assistant research professor at the Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center. and C. Andrew Conway, a postdoctoral fellow at the Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center.
The National Institutes of Health funded this research.
