Study: Spending time with Dad good for teen self-esteem

[seabeyond]

"The stereotype that teenagers spend all their time holed up in their rooms or hanging out with friends is, indeed, just a stereotype," said Susan McHale, director of the Social Science Research Institute at Penn State. "Our research shows that, well into the adolescent years, teens continue to spend time with their parents and that this shared time, especially shared time with fathers, has important implications for adolescents' psychological and social adjustment."

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"In two-parent families, the mother's role as caregiver is so scripted that her involvement can easily go unnoticed and unacknowledged," researchers note. Meanwhile, kids whose fathers spend one-on-one time with them "may develop higher general self-worth because their fathers go beyond social expectations to devote undivided attention to them." Also, time with dad often involves "joking, teasing, and other playful interactions," the study says. "Fathers, as compared to mothers, were more involved in leisure activities" and had more "peer-like interaction" with their children, which is "crucial for youth social development."

There's also the possibility that time with dad goes hand-in-hand with self-esteem for another reason: Some fathers may be more "drawn to" their children who "have higher self-worth and social competence," the researchers suggest. They point to another study that found dads are more affected by their kids' personalities than moms are in how they parent. So in some cases, dads spending more time with certain kids may be the result of the kids being more social -- not the cause of it. "This doesn't mean that mothers aren't important!" McHale said. "The youth in this sample were in general well-adjusted, suggesting that there were good things going on in their families on the whole." Another previous study found that children who spent more one-on-one time with their mothers were less often depressed; that correlation was not there with fathers.

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Other studies have busted stereotypes about dads, including how much time they spend with their children. The Families and Work Institute found (PDF) that dads spend substantially more time with their kids under age 13 than they did decades ago. As of 2008, employed fathers spent about three hours a day with their children, while employed mothers spend nearly four hours.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/24/living/dads-and-self-esteem/index.html?hpt=hp_bn11
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i spend so much friggin time with the kids, not really threatened by this as a mother. and all homes are unique. quality rather than quantity matters.

fathers matter, too, hence me sharing the article.

[ismnotwasm]

1. Interesting

A small sample of middle class white folks, but still--common sense tells us fathers matter for every one right? I'm not sure what stereotypes about fathers they are talking about though. I saw one about teenagers. Father as distant disiplinarian?
It seems to be talking about what i would consider great progress-- fathers talking an active role in nurturing, loving, forming a positive role model, along side of the mother, hence the 'scripted' comment. Mothers have always been expected to be nurturers. Fathers, not so much.

Are they saying Fathers are perceived as mostly uninvolved, leaving all the parenting to the Mom? Or are they saying that the role of father is expanding, busting out of the gendered role of social expectations? Is it not so much a stereotype, as social progress?