A paternal bond is the human bond between a father and his child. [1]
A paternal bond is the human bond between a father and his child. [1]
Infants can become attached to their fathers. Mother-infant bonding has been a common focus in household research; however, more studies in the United States and Europe have been focused on the details of father-children attachments. [2] In the book, Gender in cross-cultural perspective, Barry S. Hewlett showed that infants do create bonds with their fathers. She explained how recently born children bond with their fathers at similar ages during development. [2] Researchers question how father-infant bonding occurs because fatherhood has many different roles in various cultures. Questions arise about how fathers have the ability to bond with children if they do not have the same kind of role that mothers do in the baby's development.
The father of a child can develop the bond during the pregnancy of his partner, feeling attachment to the developing child. Research indicates that this may have some biological basis. [3] Statistics show that fathers' levels of testosterone tend to decline several months before the birth of the child. Since high testosterone levels are linked to more aggressive behaviour, low levels may enhance the ability to develop a new relationship bond. [4] [5]
Fathers also have an important bonding role after the child is born. Fathers find many ways to strengthen the father-child bond with their children, such as soothing, consoling, feeding (expressed breast milk, infant formula, or baby food), changing diapers, bathing, dressing, playing, and cuddling. Carrying the infant in a sling or backpack or pushing them in a baby transport can build the bond, as can participating in the baby's bedtime routine. These are broad activities that fathers share to develop their father-infant bond. Fathers also have specific bonding roles that develop from their different cultures and societies.
European and American fathers are seen to have more of an aggressive and vigorous relationship with their child. This does not mean harmful; however, it means there is physical and highly stimulating interaction between the father and child. [2] This gave the child emotions that reflected an exhilarating and fun-loving experience that allowed them to create a father-infant bond different from a mother-infant bond. It is shown that an infant's facial expressions and emotions towards their father is significantly different from their emotions towards their mothers, even at a very young age. [6] This shows that a father being present gives the child a variety in the way they interact with different people. The rough housing does not just have importance towards the bonds the children make with the father, but also helps to teach them life lessons. Rough play helps to teach self control, helps children understand appropriate social roles, helps them realize when certain emotions should be used, and helps them understand others emotions and facial expressions. [6] This form of bonding between the father and infant creates a bond that is unique. It allows the child to learn valuable lessons, while also being in an environment that enhances all of their senses and allows them to intensify their relationship with their father.
The Aka's are a hunter-gatherer society in the southern Central African Republic and northern Congo-Brazzaville. [2] The way they form their father-infant bond is very different from that of the Europeans and Americans. While Europeans and Americans focus on rough playing, the Aka's do not allow this high stimulating environment to develop with their children. Aka fathers are always around their infants when they are born. They always sleep with their infants and are always in close proximity of them for more than half a day. [2] Overall, Aka fathers are more relaxed and intimate during fatherhood than those in the United States. [7]
The four factors that are key for Aka father-infant bonding:
The Aka foragers in the Central African Republic do not hunt with bows. Their main source of hunting is through nets. In Hillary N. Fouts cross-cultural research, she had statistical data that supported the claim that different roles in foraging populations had an impact on the amount of time a father spent with their children. Fouts took different foraging populations in Africa and compared their type of hunting and the percentage of time these fathers were seen holding their child. Her first foraging group was the Aka population. They were a net hunting group that held their children aged 1–4 months 22% of the day, held their children 8–12 months 11.2% of the day, and held their children 13–18 months 14.3% of the day. [7] The other net hunting population was the Bofi. [7] They had fathers hold babies aged from 36-47 and 48–59 months for 5.4% of the day. [7]
In contrast, the foraging groups that participated in bow hunting had fathers hold babies for significantly less time. [7] The Hadza foraging population had fathers hold babies from the ages 0–9 months for only 2.5% of the day. The other bow hunting foragers, the !Kung, had fathers hold babies from 0–6 months for 1.9% of the day and babies 6–24 months 4.0% of the day. [7]
This statistical data shows that different roles in a society influences how much time the father spends holding and interacting with his children. This is important because it shows that each culture is different regarding father upbringings and father bonding.
In the U.S., legal paternity is presumed for the husband of the mother unless a separate action is taken; an unmarried man may establish paternity by signing a voluntary recognition of paternity or by taking court action. [8] Paternity may also be established between a man and a younger person, commonly in adoption, without the two being biologically related.
Developmental psychology is the scientific study of how and why human beings change over the course of their life. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to include adolescence, adult development, aging, and the entire lifespan. Developmental psychologists aim to explain how thinking, feeling, and behaviors change throughout life. This field examines change across three major dimensions, which are physical development, cognitive development, and social emotional development. Within these three dimensions are a broad range of topics including motor skills, executive functions, moral understanding, language acquisition, social change, personality, emotional development, self-concept, and identity formation.
An infant is the more formal or specialised synonym for the common term baby, meaning the very young offspring of human beings. The term may also be used to refer to juveniles of other organisms. A newborn is, in colloquial use, an infant who is only hours, days, or up to one month old. In medical contexts, newborn or neonate refers to an infant in the first 28 days after birth; the term applies to premature, full term, and postmature infants.
A father is the male parent of a child. Besides the paternal bonds of a father to his children, the father may have a parental, legal, and social relationship with the child that carries with it certain rights and obligations. An adoptive father is a male who has become the child's parent through the legal process of adoption. A biological father is the male genetic contributor to the creation of the infant, through sexual intercourse or sperm donation. A biological father may have legal obligations to a child not raised by him, such as an obligation of monetary support. A putative father is a man whose biological relationship to a child is alleged but has not been established. A stepfather is a male who is the husband of a child's mother and they may form a family unit, but who generally does not have the legal rights and responsibilities of a parent in relation to the child.
Attachment parenting (AP) is a parenting philosophy that proposes methods aiming to promote the attachment of parent and infant not only by maximal parental empathy and responsiveness but also by continuous bodily closeness and touch. The term attachment parenting was coined by the American pediatrician William Sears. There is no conclusive body of research that shows Sears’ approach to be superior to "mainstream parenting".
Babywearing is the practice of wearing or carrying a baby in a sling or in another form of carrier. Babywearing has been practiced for centuries around the world. In the industrialized world, babywearing has gained popularity in recent decades. Part of the reason for this shift is due to the influence of advocates of attachment parenting. Babywearing is a form of baby transport which can be enjoyed for as long as mutually desired, often until toddlerhood and beyond.
Attachment theory is a psychological, evolutionary and ethological theory concerning relationships between humans. The most important tenet is that young children need to develop a relationship with at least one primary caregiver for normal social and emotional development. The theory was formulated by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby.
Partible paternity or shared paternity is a cultural conceptualization of paternity according to which a child is understood to have more than one father; for example, because of an ideology that sees pregnancy as the cumulative result of multiple acts of sexual intercourse. In societies with the concept of partible paternity this often results in the nurture of a child being shared by multiple fathers in a form of polyandric relation to the mother, although this is not always the case.
Human bonding is the process of development of a close, interpersonal relationship between two or more people. It most commonly takes place between family members or friends, but can also develop among groups, such as sporting teams and whenever people spend time together. Bonding is a mutual, interactive process, and is different from simple liking. It is the process of nurturing social connection.
In psychology, an affectional bond is a type of attachment behavior one individual has for another individual, typically a caregiver for her or his child, in which the two partners tend to remain in proximity to one another. The term was coined and subsequently developed over the course of four decades, from the early 1940s to the late 1970s, by psychologist John Bowlby in his work on attachment theory. The core of the term affectional bond, according to Bowlby, is the attraction one individual has for another individual. The central features of the concept of affectional bonding can be traced to Bowlby's 1958 paper, "The Nature of the Child's Tie to his Mother".
Attachment in children is "a biological instinct in which proximity to an attachment figure is sought when the child senses or perceives threat or discomfort. Attachment behaviour anticipates a response by the attachment figure which will remove threat or discomfort". Attachment also describes the function of availability, which is the degree to which the authoritative figure is responsive to the child's needs and shares communication with them. Childhood attachment can define characteristics that will shape the child's sense of self, their forms of emotion-regulation, and how they carry out relationships with others. Attachment is found in all mammals to some degree, especially primates.
Stranger anxiety is a form of distress that children experience when exposed to strangers. Stranger anxiety and stranger fear are two interchangeable terms. Stranger anxiety is a typical part of the developmental sequence that most children experience. It can occur even if the child is with a caregiver or another person they trust. It peaks from six to 12 months but may recur afterwards until the age of 24 months. As a child gets older, stranger anxiety can be a problem as they begin to socialize. Children may become hesitant to play with unfamiliar children. Foster children are especially at risk, particularly if they experienced neglect early in their life.
A father figure is usually an older man, normally one with power, authority, or strength, with whom one can identify on a deeply psychological level and who generates emotions generally felt towards one's father. Despite the literal term "father figure", the role of a father figure is not limited to the biological parent of a person, but may be played by uncles, grandfathers, elder brothers, family friends, or others. The similar term mother figure refers to an older woman.
Maternal deprivation is a scientific term summarising the early work of psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby on the effects of separating infants and young children from their mother although the effect of loss of the mother on the developing child had been considered earlier by Freud and other theorists. Bowlby's work on delinquent and affectionless children and the effects of hospital and institutional care led to his being commissioned to write the World Health Organization's report on the mental health of homeless children in post-war Europe whilst he was head of the Department for Children and Parents at the Tavistock Clinic in London after World War II. The result was the monograph Maternal Care and Mental Health published in 1951, which sets out the maternal deprivation hypothesis.
Anne Fernald is an American psychologist. She serves as the Josephine Knotts Knowles Professor in Human Biology at Stanford University and has been described as "the leading researcher in infant-directed speech".
The concept of nurture kinship in the anthropological study of human social relationships (kinship) highlights the extent to which such relationships are brought into being through the performance of various acts of nurture between individuals. Additionally the concept highlights ethnographic findings that, in a wide swath of human societies, people understand, conceptualize and symbolize their relationships predominantly in terms of giving, receiving and sharing nurture. The concept stands in contrast to the earlier anthropological concepts of human kinship relations being fundamentally based on "blood ties", some other form of shared substance, or a proxy for these, and the accompanying notion that people universally understand their social relationships predominantly in these terms.
Maternal sensitivity is a mother's ability to perceive and infer the meaning behind her infant's behavioural signals, and to respond to them promptly and appropriately. Maternal sensitivity affects child development at all stages through life, from infancy, all the way to adulthood. In general, more sensitive mothers have healthier, more socially and cognitively developed children than those who are not as sensitive. Also, maternal sensitivity has been found to affect the person psychologically even as an adult. Adults who experienced high maternal sensitivity during their childhood were found to be more secure than those who experienced less sensitive mothers. Once the adult becomes a parent themselves, their own understanding of maternal sensitivity will affect their own children's development. Some research suggests that adult mothers display more maternal sensitivity than adolescent mothers who may in turn have children with a lower IQ and reading level than children of adult mothers.
Studies have found that the father is a child's preferred attachment figure in approximately 5–20% of cases. Fathers and mothers may react differently to the same behaviour in an infant, and the infant may react to the parents' behaviour differently depending on which parent performs it.
Evolutionarily speaking, offspring have a greater bond to mothers than fathers; women are universally known to be the direct caregivers in a parent-offspring relationship, whereas males are seen as material resource providers or involved only with their own reproductive success. Women have the "maternal instinct" to aid, assist, embrace and invest in their offspring. Males are evolutionarily known to invest less due to paternal uncertainty and therefore seek as many sexual partners and seek for an increase of their genes amongst society.
In biology, paternal care is parental investment provided by a male to his own offspring. It is a complex social behaviour in vertebrates associated with animal mating systems, life history traits, and ecology. Paternal care may be provided in concert with the mother or, more rarely, by the male alone.
Social emotional development represents a specific domain of child development. It is a gradual, integrative process through which children acquire the capacity to understand, experience, express, and manage emotions and to develop meaningful relationships with others. As such, social emotional development encompasses a large range of skills and constructs, including, but not limited to: self-awareness, joint attention, play, theory of mind, self-esteem, emotion regulation, friendships, and identity development.
