Role of the father

• Most attachment research has focused on mother and baby attachment, and the role of the father in the development of attachment has often been neglected
• There is research on the specific roles that fathers play in development
• Father


  A child's closest male caregiver
• Attachment to fathers


  • Babies are much less likely to become attached to their father compared to their mother
  • 75% of babies studied formed an attachment with their father by 18 months
• Attachment to fathers holds some specific value in a child's development and plays a different role from attachment to the mother
• Quality of a baby's attachment with mothers but not fathers was related to attachments in adolescence
• Quality of fathers' play with babies

  Related to the quality of adolescent attachments
• Fathers' role


  More to do with play and stimulation, and less to do with emotional development
• Primary attachment figure


  A baby's primary attachment has special emotional significance and forms the basis of all later close emotional relationships
• When fathers take on the role of primary caregiver they are able to adopt the emotional role more typically associated with mothers
• Primary caregiver fathers


  • Spent more time smiling, imitating and holding babies than secondary caregiver fathers
• Fathers have the potential to be the more emotion-focused primary attachment figure
• Outline Grossman’s study

  carried out a longitudinal study where babies' attachments were studied until they were into their teens. The researchers looked at both parents' behaviour and its relationship to the quality of their baby's later attachments to other people. Quality of a baby's attachment with mothers but not fathers was related to attachments in adolescence.
• Outline Grossman's findings

  This suggests that attachment to fathers is less important than attachment to mothers.

  However, Grossmann et al. also found that the quality of fathers' play with babies was related to the quality of adolescent attachments. This suggests that fathers have a different role from mothers - one that is more to do with play and stimulation, and less to do with emotional development.
• Outline Schaffer and emersons study

  Schaffer and Peggy Emerson (1964). They found that the majority of babies first

  became attached to their mother at around 7 months. In onlv 2% of casps the father was. the first sole object of attachment. In 27% of cases the father was the joint first object of attachment with the mother.
• Outline Schaffer and Emerson’s findings

  However, it appears that most fathers go on to become important attachment figures. 75% of the babies studied by Schaffer and Emerson formed an attachment with their father by the age of 18 months. This was determined by the fact that the babies protested when their father walked away — a sign of atlachment.
• Outline Tiffany Fields study

  filmed 4-month-old babies in face-to-face interaction with primary caregiver mothers, secondary caregiver fathers and primary caregiver fathers. Primary caregiver fathers, like primary caregiver mothers, spent more time smiling, imitating and holding babies than the secondary caregiver fathers. Smiling, imitating and holding babies are all part of reciprocity and interactional synchrony which, as we saw on page 75, are part of the process of attachment formation
• Outline Tiffany fields findings

  So it seems that fathers have the potential to be the more emotion-focused primary attachment figure - they can provide the responsiveness required for a close emotional attachment but perhaps only express this when given the role of primary caregiver.
• Outline heteronormativity in the role of the father research

  This line of research focusing on the role of the father in infant development is based on the assumption that babies have two opposite-gender parents. This is of course not always the case Although the research reported here concerns fathers in two-parent heterosexual partnerships there is no suggestion from respectable psychologists that having a single parent or two same-gender parents has any negative impact on children's development.