Fathers in the Blood

“Do Fathers Matter?” is the title of a new book by Paul Raeburn, an accomplished science journalist and father of five. I read it, this past week, in anticipation of Father’s Day. It’s an odd reading experience. As you make your way through the scientific studies that Raeburn has assembled—the book touches on everything from prairie voles and Neanderthals to “the caudate, a deep brain structure associated with feelings of love”—you can’t help but notice the weirdness of the question it poses. Asking whether a father “matters” to a child verges on nonsense; it’s like asking whether the radius matters to the circle, or whether the root matters to the branch. Fathers matter to children in a simple way—without them, they wouldn’t exist—and in a way that is too complicated to explain. Like it or not, our families are part of who we are, in ways we can and cannot know.

It turns out, though, that for a long time researchers didn’t think too much of, or about, fathers. Instead, Raeburn argues, they focussed almost entirely on the mother-child relationship. Even today, Raeburn writes, mothers enjoy most of the attention (or suffer most of the scrutiny) of psychologists, sociologists, and other experts; on PubMed, you’ll find that fathers are studied only one-sixth as often. The assumption, in short, has been that fathers don’t play a decisive role in shaping their children’s lives. (Raeburn describes a typical study, in which a researcher, having kept a detailed log of a mother’s behavior, simply writes “Baby given to father” when the dad takes over.) This one-sidedness, Raeburn says, has warped our approach to parenting. “Our failure to acknowledge fathers’ importance is now reflected in the shape of the American family,” he writes. “Fathers are disappearing,” he says; “anti-father sentiments” are commonplace. Raeburn points to a legal newsletter, released by the National Organization for Women, in 2012, devoted to the case against joint custody. It links to a Web site about “the myths and the facts” of fatherhood, where the first “myth” is that “a father’s involvement is crucial for the well-being of a child.” Meanwhile, as many as half of American children with divorced parents “never, or almost never” see their fathers. Even in stable, two-parent households, fathers are unsure of what they bring to the table, now that the nineteen-fifties idea of teaching sons what it means “to be a man” has come off it.

Raeburn’s book aims to dispel this uncertainty about fathers’ roles in their children’s lives. It turns out, for example, that, just as the healthfulness and mental state of a pregnant mother can influence her child’s health and wellness, a father’s health at the time of conception can affect his children’s health: stressed-out fathers tend to produce more stressed-out children. (The implication is that fathers, just like mothers, ought to be more careful with themselves when they’re trying to conceive a child.) Fathers, Raeburn says, also have a unique role to play in their children’s psychological development. While mothers, on the whole, work to create security and stability, fathers do the opposite, engaging in “rough and tumble” play, encouraging risk-taking, introducing new words, and bringing home strange toys; they can be “unpredictable,” “destabilizing,” and “challenging,” in a good way. (At swimming lessons, one study finds, “fathers were more likely to stand behind their children, so that the children faced the water, while mothers tended to stand in front of the children, the better to make eye contact.”) Fathers seem to play a special role in helping children to enter the wider world: sons and daughters with more engaged fathers tend to be better with language, and to be more popular at school. There are even areas in which fathers are more influential than mothers. One study shows that, while children value the feeling of being “accepted” by both parents equally, “the influence of father’s rejection can be greater than that of mother’s.” (No pressure.) On the flip side, time spent with fathers predicts, more than any other factor, how empathetic children will be as adults.

As the studies pile up, an unspoken theme emerges: fathers matter, but in simultaneous and contradictory ways. As a result, it’s hard to say how any given father’s influences might add up. In the chapter on “older fathers,” Raeburn cites, over the course of a few pages, studies showing that the children of dads in their forties or older have an increased incidence of autism and schizophrenia, probably because mutations in the genes carried by their fathers’ sperm proliferate over the years. (Perhaps, he suggests, men ought to worry about their biological clocks, too.) Then, in the very next paragraph, he cites another group of studies showing that the children and grandchildren of older fathers tend to live longer (it has to do with telomeres, the dangly bits on the end of our DNA strands); he continues by noting that “the children of older fathers … can grow to be slightly taller and slimmer than the children of younger fathers.” What to make of all this? “Men may have biological clocks, but biology is complicated, and those clocks seem to keep erratic time,” Raeburn concedes. “Biology is complicated” could have been the book’s subtitle. But, of course, it is complicated. And, social-science whiplash notwithstanding, Raeburn’s broad argument—that fathers have been maligned, even though they matter as much as mothers—is convincingly made.

As the book draws to a close, the subjects Raeburn writes about become less biological and more biographical. He tells the story of how he became an older father. (He and his second wife had their first child when she was forty and he was fifty-five; he wrote the book in part, he says, so that he could avoid repeating the mistakes he’d made the first time around.) He speaks with children who never knew their fathers, to try to measure the gaps in their lives. (One woman, the daughter of an untraceable sperm donor, is a musician: she tells Raeburn that “she hopes to become famous enough through her music that one day her father will spot her face on an album cover, see that she resembles him,” and get in touch.) The book’s chapters proceed, roughly, from conception through adolescence, and it’s heartening to read about the ways in which fathers can help their teen-agers grow into confident, prudent adults, often simply by being available and open-minded. The confusions of adolescence feel reassuring compared to the complexities of neurochemistry and epigenetics.

It’s the biology, though, that I find myself still thinking about. “Do Fathers Matter?” is a strange book, because it tries to answer a question about families in mainly statistical, biological terms. But the truth is that we inherit from our parents a mixture of the personal and the impersonal. It matters that our fathers were kind to us when we were children or teen-agers—that they loved us—and, on Father’s Day, we’re grateful for those kindnesses. But other, more uncontrollable things also matter: whether our dads were stressed out about money thirty, forty, or fifty years ago; whether they ate well, smoked, or had lots of telomeres. You can’t really be grateful for (or mad about) those impersonal elements of chance. And yet they’re written into us, too; they make up the arbitrary, contradictory continuities out of which families are composed. In a way, that randomness marks the depth of the bond we share with our parents. How do you know you matter to someone? When you affect one another despite yourselves.

[#image: /photos/590951306552fa0be682bbfd] See more Father’s Day posts from The New Yorker.

Photograph: Richard McGuire