role of the father

• Schaffer and Emerson found that 75% of the infants in their study formed a secondary attachment to their father by the age of 18 months, with 29% doing so within a month of forming a primary attachment. This suggests that the father is important, but is unlikely to be the first person to which the child develops an attachment to
• Tiffany Field observed interactions between infants and their primary caregiver mothers or fathers, and found that primary caregivers, regardless of gender, were more attentive towards the infant and spent more time holding and smiling at them
• MacCallum and Golombok demonstrated that children growing up in homosexual or single-parent families were not different compared to children with two heterosexual parents. If the father was so crucial in the development of an attachment with the infant, then we would not expect these findings. This suggests that the exact role of the father is still disputed
• gender of the primary caregiver is largely dictated by society, where women in particular are expected to be caring and sensitive, and biology, where women have higher levels of oestrogen and lower levels of testosterone compared to men. Therefore, this suggests that there are social and biological constraints on who the primary attachment figure is.