Finally a woman author stepping up to write about men’s importance as Fathers. The Wall Street Journal, the same paper that published a headline asking “Where Have all the Good Men Gone,” published a great piece by SUE SHELLENBARGER, “The Secret of Dads’ Success: How Fathers’ Teasing, Tickling, Wrestling Teach Kids to Whine Less and BeMore Independent.”
Shellengarger points out that fathers tend to play with their kids more often in ways that are positive to their development. Dads even have a way with babies that have been until now not always acknowledged:
Beyond rough-and-tumble play, men tend to challenge crying or whining children to use words to express themselves. Men are more likely to startle their offspring, making faces or sneaking up on them to play. Even the way parents hold babies tends to differ, with men cradling infants under their arm in a “football hold” and moms using the “Madonna position” seen in Renaissance artwork—tucked under their chins face-to-face, says Kyle Pruett, co-author of “Partnership Parenting” and a clinical professor of child psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine.
The benefits of strong and involved fathering have been scientifically proven again and again:
The benefits of involved fathering are known: improved cognitive skills, fewer behavioral problems among school-age children, less delinquency among teenage boys and fewer psychological problems in young women, based on an analysis of 16 long-term studies of father involvement, published in 2008 in the scholarly journal Acta Paediatrica.
So let’s stop bad-mouthing dads, and men, and focus on the benefits of men engaging in their kids’ lives as some 70 million dads are today.