Child Father Relationship - Strong Family Bonds Are Important

The child father relationship is one that has been receiving progressively more attention over the last few decades. While traditional wisdom and research studies focused on mother child relationships as the most important, the recent research suggests the relationship between fathers and their children is significantly more important than previously believed.

The child father relationship is one that is fundamentally important to the developmental progress of a child. The impact that a father has on a child begins while the child is still a baby. The play that a father engages in, which tends to be more physical and spontaneous, contributes to healthy brain development in infants.

By the time infants grow into small children, the role of play that a father engages in with the child takes on broader meaning and value. At this stage, the play takes on the role of teaching children problem solving, exploring limits, and goal oriented behavior. This is also a stage when fathers begin to help children learn to limit emotional outbursts and develop empathy through emotional involvement and modeling the appropriate behaviors.

Fathers have a profound impact on their school age children. At this stage, fathers help their children to learn to assume responsibility, encourage taking on challenges, and help to direct moral development. The father may wield more power to help or hinder their child at this point of development than any other.

The child father relationship changes during adolescence. The role of the father at this point is more passive than in previous times during the aging process of their children. Rather than engaging in teaching roles, or encouraging skill development, the father takes on a more advisory role. His task, as it were, is to be more an adviser and friend. The child will be more focused on the mother child relationship but still seek out the father for advice or reassurance about decision making, advice about managing personalities in their lives, and for simple time spent together.

The absence of a father can be a profound problem. In the lives of children who had absent fathers they tend to be more prone to be unable to form healthy, emotionally intimate relationships with their peers. There is significantly greater risk of drug abuse, smoking, alcohol abuse and other risk-seeking behaviors. There also tends to be problems managing social situations requiring empathy. Over their educational careers, children with poor or non-existent relationships with their fathers tended to have worse academic achievement than their peers with positive relationships with their fathers.

The effects of the child father relationship reaches far into adulthood. Those with positive relationships with their fathers tend to be more likely to be in intimate relationships and have fewer problems developing healthy, physically intimate relationships. Those with poor relationships with their fathers tend to be less likely to be involved in relationships, have more difficulty maintaining them, and demonstrate significantly more trouble in adapting to changing social circumstances.