Boys brought up by their fathers during their early years are less well prepared for school, claims a Bristol University study.

The controversial finding comes as more men are taking on childcare responsibilities and schools, politicians and newspaper pundits are united in urging fathers to get more involved in their children’s upbringing.

After looking at the early childcare experiences of over 6,000 children born in the Bristol area in the early 1990s who lived at least their early lives in a household with both parents, Elizabeth Washbrook concludes that some fathers appear not to provide the same quality of intellectual stimulation to their young sons as the children’s mothers do.

Washbrook says there is “robust” evidence that boys who spent at least 15 hours a week in their fathers’ care as toddlers perform worse on academic assessments when they start school, she reports in the latest issue of the journal Research in Public Policy…

She speculates that when in charge, fathers may be more inclined to see their job as monitoring the child and seeing to their physical needs, and be less inclined to devise creative activities that develop the child’s intellectual skills.

But why do girls seem immune to the ill-effects of being looked after by dad? Washbrook says fathers may interact differently with sons and daughters, or daughters may simply be less sensitive to the degree of cognitive stimulation in the home environment…

To her surprise Washbrook found no significant effects on children of paternal involvement in childcare in the first year of life – she had expected breastfeeding and the formation of mother-infant attachments to be of key importance in this very early period.

“Rather, it is when children pass their first birthdays - and presumably become more sensitive to the nature of their environments - that parenting differences between mothers and fathers start to matter,” she adds…

Source: Guardian Unlimited, UK
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2007/nov/23/children.schools