The Role of the Father

• Father as a primary attachment:

  Field (1978) - filmed 4 month old babies in face to face interaction with primary caregiver mums, secondary caregiver dads and primary caregiver dads.

  It was found that primary caregiver dads + mums spent more time smiling, imitating and holding babies then 2nd caregiver fathers

  
  

  • Fathers only provide this responsiveness when given the role of primary caregiver
• Distinctive role for fathers:

  Grossmann et al (2002) carried out a longitudinal study where babies attachments were studied into their teens.

  Found that quality of a babies attachment with mothers was related to attachment in adolescence however this wasn’t the case for attachments to father.

  They also found that the quality of fathers play and stimulation with babies was related to quality of adolescent attachments
• Peels - Role of the father:

  1. Weakness - May be bias in research - male researchers that know the aims of the experiment which limits the methodology as they may look out for certain behaviours.

  results may not be valid
• Peels - Role of the father:

  2) Weakness - confusion over the research question and lack of clarity to what's being researched - some researchers are concerned with primary attachment and others secondary which causes confusion

  
  

  May be unreliable as its hard to replicate
• Peels - Role of the father:

  3) Strength - Real life application - can be used in court when looking at divorce and care for a child

  Research gains explanatory power
• Peels - Role of the father::

  4) Weakness - Lacks temporal/population validity as role of the father has changed overtime and across cultures

  loses explanatory power as cant be applied to all of society
• Remembering the PEELs - Role of the Father

  1. Biased Research (males)
  2. Confusion over research question
  3. Real life Application
  4. Lack validity (temporal and population)
• Father - in attachment research, the father is anyone who takes on the role of the main male caregiver - can be but is not necessarily the biological father
• In most cases, mothers are the the primary attachment for babies and fathers were the sole primary attachment in 3% of cases
• 75% of babies studied by Shaffer and Emerson (1964) formed an attachment with their father by 18 months old