KEVIN BALDEOSINGH
Consider the headline of this column. If it had been “Why Mothers Matter,” you would probably not be reading this sentence since you would have figured, rightly or wrongly, that you already knew why mothers are important to a child. But fathers? Hmm. Do they matter at all?
I myself had this same bias. In preparing to write this series, I read the best general books on parenting I could find. Yet it never occurred to me to seek out a book specifically about fathers. And it probably wouldn’t have occurred to me, except that two weeks ago I spoke to social anthropologist Professor Jaipaul L Roopnarine, co-author along with UWI child education expert Dr Carol Logie, at the launch of their study Child-Rearing Practices in the Caribbean at the Family Development Centre in St Augustine.
This is the most important survey of the Caribbean family in over 40 years, and the first about children in T&T. Professor Roopnarine specialises in studying fathers across different societies, and only then did it occur to me that I had not sought out father-specific information. And, when I did go searching, I found that my perception was justified: I found only one general book on fatherhood—indeed, all the other general books had the usual female bias, being about fathers relating to their daughters (presumably, the publishers figured women would buy this for their partners). There wasn’t even one similar book on fathers relating to their sons.
At any rate, the book I did eventually get is called Do Fathers Matter? and it’s written by Paul Raeburn who is a “blogger, media critic, writer,” according to his bio note. So he’s not even a traditional journalist. Nonetheless, the book comprehensively covered the latest research on fathers and Raeburn seems to understand his science, since he was cautious to note the limits of observational data and extrapolating from animal studies to human beings.
But nearly all the existing studies on parenting have an even more fundamental flaw: Raeburn interviewed American psychiatrist Kyle D Pruett who has studied fathers for over 30 years and who says: “Not looking at the impact of fathers and children on one another has given the entire field (and the best-selling parenting books it produces) a myopic and worrisomely distorted view of child development, a view with staggering blind spots.”
I’ll be referring to Raeburn’s book often in future columns but, for now, here are a few titbits:
The children of fathers who are obese are more likely to be obese. You might think, well duh. But the researchers also found that children of fathers who eat high-fat diets are more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes—which suggests that such a diet actually changes the father’s sperm.
And the obverse side is even weirder: the grandchildren of men who had not had much to eat in their lifetime were less likely to die from heart disease or diabetes. This would make an interesting basis to survey the generational health of the descendants of indentured labourers.
The bottom line? Fathers’ influence on their children, biologically and psychologically and socially, is more extensive than popularly believed.
