Father Love and Child Development: History

CURRmT DlRECaONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
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Father Love and Child Development:
History and Current Evidence
Ronald P. Rohner^
Center for the Study of Parental Acceptance and Rejection, School of Family
Studies, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut
f-ii\ lv|H's ol ^liiaie« SIHUV rnat tatner love sometimes explains as much or
more cil the \aiiation m spetilK (hiki and adult outcomes as does mother
lo\e. Sometinu"~ liowexei, onl\' lather IOA e is siatislicailv associated Avith
bpixilK aspi\ ts ol oflsprings' i.le\ elopini.>nt and a(.i|ustment, alter cotitrolliuv', lor \hv mlhiiMKe o\ mother IOA e, Re^ o;j,nition ot Itu-se facts Avas
cloudt'd histoiK.ilK hA the I uitural constrtiction ot fatherhood and tather111 /Vmei'u a
ler love, paternal .uiejitance; parental acceptance-rejectiiin theory
Copyright © 1998 American Psychological Society
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Research in every major ethnic
group of America (Rolrner, 1998b),
in dozens of nations internationally, and with several hundred societies in two major cross-cultural
surveys (Rohner 1975, 1986, 1998c;
Rohner & Chaki-Sircar, 1988) suggests that children and adults everywhere—regardless of differences in race, etlinicity, gender, or
culture-—tend to respond in essentially the same way when tliey experience themselves to be loved or
unloved by their parents. The overwhelming bulk of research dealing
with parental acceptance and rejection concentrates on mothers' behavior, however. Until recently, the
possible influence of father love
has been largely ignored. Here, I
VOLUME 7, NUMBER 5, OCYOmiii.
concentrate on evidence showing
the influence of fathers' loverelated behaviors—or simply, father love—in relation to the social,
emotional, and cognitive development and functioning of children,
adolescents, and adult offspring.
Moreover, I focus primarily, but
not exclusively, on families for
which information is available
about both fathers and mothers—
or about youths' perceptions of
both their fathers' and mothers'
parenting. My principal objective is
to identify evidence about the relative contribution to offspring development of father love vis-^-vis
mother love,
I define father love in terms of
paternal acceptance and rejection
as construed in parental acceptance-rejection theory (Rohner,
1986, in press). Paternal acceptance
includes such feelings and behaviors (or children's perceptions of
such feelings and behaviors) as paternal nurturance, warmth, affection, support, comfort, and concern. Paternal rejection, on the
other hand, is defined as the real or
perceived absence or withdraw^al
of these feelings and behaviors. Rejection includes such feelings as
coldness, indifference, and hostility
toward the child. Paternal rejection
may be expressed behaviorally as a
lack of affection toward the child,
as physical or verbal aggression, or
as neglect. Paternal rejection may
also be experienced in the form of
undifferentiated rejection; that is,
there may be situations in which
Recommended Reading
Biller, H,B. (1993). Fathers and families:
Paternal factors in child development.
Westport, CT: Auburn House.
Booth, A,, & Crouter, A.C, (Eds,),
(1998), Men in families: When do they
get involved? What difference does it
make? Mahwah, NJ: Eribaum,
Lamb, M.E, (Ed,), (1997). The role ofthe
father in child development. New
York: John Wiley & Sons.
Rohner, R.P, (1986), (See References)
individuals feel that their fathers
(or significant male caregivers) do
not really care about, want, or love
them, even though there may not
be observable behavioral indicators
showing that the fathers are neglecting, un affectionate, or aggressive toward them. Mother love
(maternal acceptance-rejection) is
defined in the same way.
specific child outcomes, over and
above the portion explained by
mother love. In fact, a few recent
studies suggest that father love is
the sole significant predictor of
specific outcomes, after removing
the influence of mother love.
STUDIES SHOWING THE
INFLUENCE OF FATHER
LOVE
FATHERHOOD AND
MOTHERHOOD ARE
CULTURAL
CONSTRUCTIONS
The widely held cultural cons t r u c t i o n of fatherhood in
America—especially prior to the
1970s—has two strands. Historically, the first strand asserted that
fathers are ineffective, often incompetent, and maybe even biologically unsuited to the job of childrearing. (The maternal counterpoint
to this is that women are genetically endowed for child care.) The
second strand asserted that fathers'
influence on child development is
unimportant, or at the very most
peripheral or indirect, (The maternal counterpoint here is that
mother love and competent maternal care provide everything that
children need for normal, healthy
development.) Because researchers
internalized these cultural beliefs
as their own personal beliefs, fathers were essentially ignored by
mainstream behavioral science until late in the 20th century. The
1970s through the 1990s, however,
have seen a revolution in recognizing fathers and the influence of
their love on child development.
Three interrelated lines of influence I have discussed elsewhere
(Rohner, 1998a) seem to account
for this revolution. The net effect of
these influences has been to draw
attention to the fact that father love
sometimes explains a unique, independent portion of the variation in
Published by Cambridge University Press
Six types of studies (discussed at
greater length in Rohner, 1998a)
demonstrate a strong association
between father love and aspects of
offspring development.
Studies Looking Exclusively at
Variations in the Influence of
Father Love
Many of the studies looking exclusively at the influence of variations in father love deal with one of
two topics: gender role development, especially of sons, and father
involvement. Studies of gender
role development emerged prominently in the 1940s and continued
through the 1970s, Commonly, researchers assessed the masculinity
of fathers and of sons, and then
correlated the two sets of scores.
Many psychologists were surprised at first to discover that no
consistent results emerged from
this research. But when they examined the quality of the father-son
relationship, they found that if the
relationship between masculine fathers and their sons was warm and
loving, the boys were indeed more
masculine. Later, however, researchers found that the masculinity of fathers per se did not seem to
make much difference because
"boys seemed to conform to the
sex-role standards of their culture
when their relationships with their
fathers were warm, regardless of
CUllRENT nilUXllONS
how 'masculine' the fathers were"
(Lamb, 1997, p. 9).
Paternal involvement is the second domain in which there has
been a substantial amount of research on the influence of variations in father love. Many studies
have concluded that children with
highly involved fathers, in relation
to children with less involved fathers, tend to be more cognitively
and socially competent, less inclined toward gender stereotyping,
more empathic, psychologically
better adjusted, and the like. But
"caring for" children is not necessarily the same thing as "caring
about" them. And a closer examination of these studies suggests
that it was not the simple fact of
paternal engagement (i.e., direct interaction with the child), availability, or responsibility for child care
that was associated with these
positive outcomes. Rather, it appears that the quality of the fatherchild relationship^—especially of father love—makes the greatest
difference (Lamb, 1997; Veneziano
& Rohner, 1998).
Father Love Is as Important as
Mother Love
The great majority of studies in
this category deal with one or a
combination of the following four
issues among children, adolescents, and young adults: (a) personality and psychological adjustment problems, including issues of
self-concept and self-esteem, emotional stability, and aggression; (b)
conduct problems, especially in
school; (c) cognitive and academic
performance issues; and (d) psychopathology. Recent studies employing multivariate analyses have
allowed researchers to conclude
that fathers' and mothers' behaviors are sometimes each associated
significantly and uniquely with
these outcomes. The work of
Young, Miller, Norton, and Hill
IN PS\CI1OL,OGICAI, SCtENCFi
(1995) is one of these studies. These
authors employed a national
sample of 640 12- to 16-year-olds
living in two-parent families. They
found that perceived paternal love
and caring was as predictive of
sons' and daughters' life satisfaction—including their sense of wellbeing—as was maternal love and
caring.
Father Love Predicts Specific
Outcomes Better Than
Mother Love
As complex statistical procedures have become more commonplace in the 1980s and 1990s, it has
also become more common to discover that the iiifluence of father
love explains a unique, independent portion of the variation in specific child and adult outcomes,
over and above the portion of
variation explained by mother
love. Studies drawing this conclusion tend to deal with one or more
of the follow^ing four issues among
children, adolescents, and young
adults: (a) personality and psychological adjustment problems, (b)
conduct problems, (c) delinquency,
and (d) psychopathology. For example, evidence is mounting that
fathers may be especially salient in
the development of such forms of
psychopathology as substance
abuse (drug and alcohol use and
abuse), depression and depressed
emotion, and behavior problems,
including conduct disorder and externalizing behaviors (including
aggression toward people and animals, property destruction, deceitfulness, and theft) (Rohner, 1998c).
Fathers are also being increasingly
implicated in the etiology of borderline personality disorder (a pervasive pattern of emotional and behavioral instability, especially in
interpersonal relationships and in
self-image) and borderline personality organization (a less severe
form of borderline personality dis-
Copyright © 1998 American Psydiological Society
order) (Fowler, 1990; Rohner &
Brothers, in press).
Father love appears to be
uniquely associated not just with
behavioral and psychological problems, however, but also with health
and well-being. Amato (1994), for
example, found in a national
sample that perceived closeness to
fathers made a significant contribution—over and above the contribution made by perceived closeness
to mothers—to adult sons' and
daughters' happiness, life satisfaction, and low psychological distress (i.e., to overall psychological
well-being).
Father Love Is the Sole
Significant Predictor of
Specific Outcomes
In the 1990s, a handful of studies
using a variety of multivariate statistics have concluded that father
love is the sole significant predictor
of specific child outcomes, after removing the influences of mother
love. Most of these studies have
dealt with psychological and behavioral problems of adolescents.
For example. Cole and McPherson
(1993) concluded that father-child
conflict but not mother-child conflict (in each case, after the influence of the other was statistically
controlled) was positively associated with depressive symptoms in
adolescents. Moreover, fatheradolescent cohesion was positively
associated witli the absence of depressive symptoms in adolescents.
These results are consistent with
Barrera and Garrison-Jones's (1992)
conclusion that adolescents' satisfaction with fathers' support was
related to a lowered incidence of
depressive symptoms, whereas satisfaction with mothers' support
was not. Barnett, Marshall, and
Pleck (1992), too, found that when
measures of the quality of both
motlier-son and father-son relationsliips were entered simultaneously
VOLUME 1, NUMBER 3, OC FOBER
into a regression equation, only the
father-son relationship was related
significantly to adult sons' psychological distress (a summed measure
of anxiety and depression).
Father Love Moderates the
Influence of Mother Love
A small but growing number of
studies have concluded that fathers' behavior moderates and is
moderated by (i,e,, interacts with)
other influences within the family.
Apparently, however, only one
study so far has addressed the issue of whether mother love has different effects on specific child outcomes depending on the level of
father love. This study, by Forehand and Nousiainen (1993), found
that when mothers were low in acceptance, fathers' acceptance scores
had no significant impact on
youths' cognitive competence. But
when mothers were high in acceptance, fathers' acceptance scores
made a dramatic difference: Fathers with low acceptance scores
tended to have children with poorer
cognitive competence, whereas
highly accepting fathers tended to
have children with substantially better cognitive competence.
Paternal Versus Maternal
Parenting Is Sometimes
Associated With Different
Outcomes for Sons, Daughters,
or Both
Many of the studies in this category were published in the 1950s
and 1960s, and even earlier. Many
of them may be criticized on methodological and conceptual
grounds. Nonetheless, evidence
suggests that serious research
questions should be raised in the
future about the possibility that associations between love-related
parenting and child outcomes may
depend on the gender of the parent
and of the child. Three different
kinds of studies tend to be found in
this category.
First, some research shows that
one pattern of paternal love-related
behavior and a different pattern of
maternal love-related behavior
may be associated with a single
outcome in sons, daughters, or
both. For example. Barber and
Thomas (1986) found that daughters' self-esteem was best predicted
by their mothers' general support
(e,g., praise and approval) but by
their fathers' physical affection.
Sons' self-esteem, however, was
best predicted by their mothers'
companionship (e,g,, shared activities) and by their fathers' sustained
contact (e,g., picking up the boys
for safety or for fun).
Second, other research in this
category shows that a single pattern of paternal love-related behavior may be associated with one outcome for sons and a different
outcome for daughters. For example, Jordan, Radin, and Epstein
(1975) found that paternal nurturance was positively associated
with boys' but not girls' performance on an IQ test. Finally, the
third type of research in this category shows that the influence of a
single pattern of paternal loverelated behaviors may be more
strongly associated with a given
outcome for one gender of offspring than for the other. For example, Eisman (1981) reported that
fathers' love and acceptance correlated more highly with daughters'
than with sons' self-concept.
thers (and other significant males,
when appropriate) as well as mothers in future research, and then to
analyze separately the data for possible father and mother effects. It is
only by separating data in this way
that behavioral scientists can discern when and under what conditions paternal and maternal factors
have similar or different effects on
specific outcomes for children. This
recommendation explicitly contradicts a call sometimes seen in published research to merge data
about fathers' and mothers' parenting behaviors.
Finally, it is im.portant to note
several problems and limitations in
the existing research on father love.
For example, even though it seems
unmistakably clear that father love
makes an important contribution
to offsprings' development and
psychological functioning, it is not
at all clear w^hat generative mechanisms produce these contributions.
In particular, it is unclear why father love is sometimes more
strongly associated with specific
offspring outcomes than is mother
love. And it is unclear why patterns of paternal versus maternal
parenting may be associated with
different outcomes for sons,
daughters, or children of both genders. It remains for future research
to inquire directly about these issues. Until then, we can know only
that father love is often as influential as mother love—and sometimes more so.
Note
DISCUSSION
The data reported here are but a
minuscule part of a larger body of
work showing that father love is
heavily implicated not only in children's and adults' psychological
well-being and health, but also in
an array of psychological and behavioral problems. This evidence
punctuates the need to include fa-
Published by Cambridge University Press
1. Address correspondence to
Ronald P. Rohner, Center for the Study
of Parental Acceptance and Rejection,
School of Family Studies, University of
Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269-2058; emaii: rohner@uconnvm.uconn.edu or
http://vm.uconn,edu/~rohner.
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fathers' and mothers' supportive behavior: A
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Bamett, R.C., Marshall, N.L., & Pleck, J.H. (1992).
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Cole, D., & McPherson, A.E. (1993). Relation of
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Forehand, R., & Nousiainen, S. (1993). Maternal
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Learning and Representing Verbal
Meaning: The Latent Semantic
Analysis Theory
Thomas K, Landauer^
Department of Psychology, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado
Abstract
'
Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a theory of liow word meaning—and
possibly other knowledge—is derived from statistics of experience, and of
how passage meaning is represented by combinations of words. Given a
large and representative sample of text, LSA combines the way thousands
of words are used in thousands of contexts to map a point for each into a
common semantic space, LSA goes beyond pair-wise co-occurrence or correlation to find latent dimensions of meaning that best relate every word
and passage to every other. After learning from comparable bodies of text,
LSA has scored almost as well as humans on vocabulary and subjectmatter tests, accurately simulated many aspects of human judgment and
behavior based on verbal meaning, and been successfully applied to measure the coherence and conceptual content of toxt. The surprising success
of LSA has implications for the nature of generalization and language.
lates of parental acceptance-rejection: Review of
cross-cultural and intracultural evidence. Manuscript submitted for publication.
Rohner, R.P. (in press). Acceptance and rejection.
In D. Levinson, J. Ponzetti, & P. Jorgensen
(Eds.), Encyclopedia of human emotions. New
York: MacMiUan.
Rohner, R.P., & Brothers, S.A. (in press). Perceived
parental rejection, psychological maladjustment, and borderline personality disorder.
Journal of Emotional Abuse.
Rohner, R.P., & Chaki-Sircar, M. (1988). Women
and children in a Bengali village. Hanover, NH:
University Press of New England.
Veneziano, R.A., & Rohner, R.P. (1998). Perceived
paternal warmth, paternal involvement, and
youths' psychological adjustment in a rural,
biracial southern commxmity. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 60, 335-343.
Young, M.H., Miller, B.E., Norton, M.C., & Hill,
J.E. (1995). The effect of parental supportive
behaviors on life satisfaction of adolescent offspring. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 57,
813-822.
tent mysteries of verbal meaning.
We have been exploring a mathematical computer model and corresponding psychological learning
theory called Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). Although far from perfect or complete as a theory of
meaning and language, LSA accurately simulates many aspects of
human understanding of word and
passage meaning and can effectively replace human text comprehension in several educational applications. Among other things, it
mimics the rate at which schoolchildren learn recognition vocabulary from text, makes humanlike
assessments of semantic relationships between words, passes college multiple-choice exams after
"reading" a textbook, and makes it
possible to automatically assess the
content of factual essays as reliably
as expert humans.
Kei/words
latent semantic analysis; latent semantic indexing; LSA; learning; meaning;
lexicon; knowledgt?; machine learning; simulation
By age 18, you knew the meaning of more than 50,000 words that
you had met only in print. How
did you do that? My colleagues
and I think that we may have
cracked this and some other persis-
Copyright © 1998 American Psychological Society
THE LATENT SEMANTIC
ANALYSIS THEORY
The formal LSA model relies on
sophisticated mathematical and