Daddy In the Cat-Bird’s Seat

January 12, 2016

norman-rockwellOvercast with fairly-strong wind gusts this Tuesday afternoon on California’s north coast we we get set to launch into another round of storm fronts.
The NWS calls for one-to-three-inches of rain with winds maybe gusting up to 45 mph here along the shoreline for later today.

As a single parent of five kids — four girls and a boy — the traditional family operation is no longer the pearl of an upbringing.
Apparently, us guys have more to offer…

(Illustration: Norman Rockwell’s ‘Reading,’ found here).

Influence of the dad has always been on the outside, but new research indicates different.
Via the UK’s Telegraph:

Strong fatherly involvement in their early life can also improve a child’s future career prospects, the research shows.
Academics at the University of Newcastle, who carried out the study, also found that men tended to pay more attention to their sons than their daughters.
The researchers warned that it was not enough for parents to live together, but that a father should be actively involved in a child’s life to benefit their development.

The findings, published in the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour, show that those children whose fathers spent more time with them had a higher IQ and were more socially mobile than those who had received little attention.
The differences were still detectable by the age of 42.

And this, also from the Telegraph last September, with an eye to the Rockwell image above:

Children benefit more from their father reading them bedtime stories than their mother, new research has revealed.
Questions posed by men when reading to children were found to have sparked “imaginative discussions” in the study at Harvard University in the US.
Researchers said it was therefore better for children’s language development because they tend to be challenged more.
After a year of being read to by parents to determine the effect on infants’ language, girls in particular were found to have benefitted more when read to by a male.
Elisabeth Duursma, who conducted the research, said: “The impact is huge, particularly if dads start reading to kids under the age of two. Reading is seen as a female activity and kids seem to be more tuned in when their dad reads to them — it’s special.”

And we’re ‘special’…

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