Photo credit: Gwenael Piaser, Flickr
There is no question among researchers that fathers who spend time with their children instill self-control and social skills in their offspring.
Exactly how dads do that, however, is largely a mystery.
Thousands of studies have sliced and diced the benefits for children of a close, nurturing bond with Mom. Researchers have a harder time analyzing the ways fathers interact with children, such as rough-and-tumble play.
Some scientists are inventing new scales and laboratory procedures to try to measure the father factor. One researcher watched fathers and children playing games like "Get Up," in which fathers try to get up from the floor while the children try to hold them down, and "Sock Wrestle," in which father and child try to snatch each other's socks. Other researchers had toddlers climb down stairs in fathers' presence, in a process dubbed "Risky Situation."
"Most people have a pretty well-defined sense of what it means to be a good mom, but for dads, that role is much less scripted," says University of Georgia researcher Geoffrey Brown, lead author of a 2012 study in the Journal of Family Psychology on fundamental questions about how fathers bond with children.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/roughhousing-lessons-from-dad-1402444262
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