I grew up playing football, my parents coming to watch me play football and cricket . . . I can’t wait to experience those things with my son. I’m looking forward to teaching him things and influencing his life by being around. I want to be around him as much as I can, support him in every way I can.
Zac, dad to Aidan (six months)
Fathers love to teach. I learnt many skills and life lessons from my father that are still vital to me today. Among many other things, he taught me that you should treat others how you want to be treated, that a willingness to work hard and try your very best is more critical for success than mere intelligence and that today’s seemingly overwhelming problem will seem inconsequential in a day, a month or a year. Add to this the ability to lay bricks and the warning never to trust a man in brown suede shoes, and I was set for life. When I ask the fathers in my studies what they look forward to in their future relationship with their children, it is overwhelmingly the case that their vision includes the passing on of knowledge, the teaching of values, the coaching of a sport or the playing of a favourite game. Some are counting the days until their treasured toys from childhood – usually Lego, trains or Meccano – can be liberated from the loft and put to good use in a father–child celebration of play.
In this chapter, I want to look at the unique role fathers play in teaching their children. Alongside their drive to protect their children, it is universally the case that fathers play a key role in teaching and guiding their children towards adulthood and independence. But education is not just what we learn in school. Humans exist in a complex world where there are many behaviours to learn, skills to master and beliefs to interrogate and adopt. A child’s future success rests not only on their intellectual and academic capabilities but on their ability to negotiate their social and physical environment, building healthy relationships with those close to them, productive alliances with those with whom they work and ensuring they cooperate to acquire the basic essentials for survival. And we know from previous chapters that fathers appear to have a unique role to play in this socialization.
Humans gain practical and intellectual knowledge by a process of social learning – put simply, they learn from other people. The world is a terribly complicated and confusing place and to learn everything we need to know to ensure survival – technological, economic, practical and social – would be impossible if we each approached gaining this knowledge by a system of trial and error. Instead, we use the fact that others have gone before us to tap into their experience, learn from them and then build on their knowledge to go forward and innovate. This may sound rather obvious and not such a big deal, but perhaps if you knew that we are the only species that actively teaches its young, you might grasp what a feat of neural and behavioural development this ability actually is. It is true to say that some animals learn by watching their parents – baby chimps can spend five years at their mother’s elbow watching how she cracks a palm nut – but the parent provides no tailored guidance or feedback; the child is left to find their own way through the learning maze. There is no allowance made by the chimp parent for the different abilities that Chimp A might have from his sister, Chimp B, and identifying and nurturing his individual interests and strengths is not a priority. In contrast to your chimpanzee mother, human parents are capable of assessing their child’s abilities and interests, recognizing their individual motivators, understanding the need to tailor their communication to individual learning styles and provide appropriate levels of carrot and stick to make sure skills are embedded. This all requires immense cognitive ability and, as with so much of our behaviour, our unique ability to teach is due to our large brains. Remember the couple in Chapter Eight, watching their child on the TV screen? For both of them, this task involved engaging the area of the neocortex linked to mentalizing – the ability to understand what someone else is feeling or thinking. It is this area of the brain, and this ability to ‘mind-read’, that also allows us to teach. Only by understanding what someone else doesn’t know, what they want to know and whether they understand what we have taught them can we effectively teach them.
In many societies, the skills of a successful life are not taught in the formal setting of a classroom but out in the real world, often alongside your parents. So, Ota the Aka father ensures his children – boys and girls – learn the skills of net hunting by taking them with him deep into the Congo jungle on the daily search for food. Sigis, our Kipsigis father, ensures his sons understand the complexities of the tea trade by asking them to accompany him into the fields and to the male-only social gatherings where alliances are forged, knowledge is exchanged and deals are made. Even our apparently hands-off Bostonian lawyer, Mike, ensures that education is a priority. Beyond his financial investment in their private education, he spends his weekends introducing his children into the social world of the Bostonian business elite, ensuring they develop the networking skills that will see them in good stead in their future professional careers.
But here in the West there is an overwhelming focus on formal academic learning and achievement, often to the detriment of the attainment of other key life skills. And there is an ongoing debate about the extent to which a father has an independent influence on his child’s academic achievements. The evidence for a parental influence is overwhelming – parents who are actively involved in their child’s education at home and in school contribute positively to a child’s academic success. This means providing the space and structure at home to study, taking time to read with your child, supporting their completion of homework and taking them on educational outings. But whether dad has an independent and separate role from mum has been an issue of some controversy for years. Because mums generally spend the majority of time with children, the assumption has been that this ‘parenting effect’ is, in fact, a ‘mothering effect’. The evidence for an independent role for fathers is less strong. But absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence, and with a growing focus on this aspect of dad’s role comes the recognition that fathers have the potential to play an equal but critically different role in their child’s academic success. And most, like Colin, are highly motivated to get involved:
Reading books, I love books, and we’ve already got her a Beatrix Potter collection upstairs and Roald Dahl. I was read to a lot as a kid at bedtime and stuff, and I want to do that as well, I’d love to do that. That is what I am looking forward to, seeing her become something special and being there to support her in what she does.
Colin, dad to Freya (six months)
My colleagues Eirini Flouri and Ann Buchanan are leading the quest for the all-important evidence to support the fact of a father’s unique role in influencing their child’s academic attainment. Working from the Department of Social Policy and Social Work at Oxford University, they believe that fathers who are involved with their children, and in particular already push their developmental and cognitive boundaries through play, must have a separate and equally significant influence on their children’s school careers as the mother. In their 2004 study, they used data taken from the National Child Development Study (NCDS) to try to find firm evidence for their hunch. This invaluable UK-based dataset has followed 17,000 children who were born between 3 and 9 March 1958 for over forty years. Its long-term nature has meant that researchers like Flouri and Buchanan can understand what factors – socio-economic, environmental, physiological, educational and parental – have an impact on the trajectory of a child’s development. Using the data regarding educational attainment, they found that, as with previous studies, the extent to which both parents were involved with their children at age seven had a significant impact on their child’s academic achievements at the age of twenty. Involvement was defined by the frequency with which they read to or with the child, took him or her on outings, took an interest in his or her education and managed his or her behaviour. But if this parenting team were split into mum and dad, dad was found to have a separate and highly significant impact on the extent of his child’s academic success by late adolescence. Further, this impact did not depend on the level of mum’s involvement – low or high, his influence could still be felt. And despite some suggesting that fathers may have more to teach sons than daughters, his influence was the same regardless of the gender of his children.
All important and significant stuff. But what Flouri and Buchanan’s study didn’t manage to clear up was what this particular aspect of the dad’s involvement with his child’s education was. What was he doing that was different but so effective? It was left to Californian educationalist William Jeynes to explore this question. Looking at data from thousands of people across the globe, Jeynes focused his analysis on four key potential areas of influence: fostering academic achievement, fostering psychological well-being, encouraging positive behavioural outcomes and fostering other healthy outcomes, such as being motivated to play with their kids.
What Jeynes found was wonderful and, for those of us who study dads, made total sense, because it reflected what we now know a key dad role to be: supporting his child’s entry into the wider world by encouraging the development of appropriate behaviours. First, Jeynes confirmed Flouri and Buchanan’s finding that dad had a significant influence on his kids’ educational attainment that was separate to mum’s. So that is now a given. But it was what dad contributed that was particularly great. Yes, he had some influence on his child’s actual academic attainment, but his real power sat with the influence he had on his child’s attitude to learning. Jeynes found that fathers had a profound impact on their children’s behaviour and their psychological outcomes. Dads who were involved with their children – who fostered good behaviour, strong psychological health and a healthy attitude to life and school – taught their kids to have a good learning attitude, allowing them to reap all the benefits they could from their schooling. Jeynes argued that while the job to foster academic success was shared between mum and dad, only dad was the one who had a focus on moulding and modelling the correct learning mindsets and behaviours. He provided the foundations, the scaffolding on which a child could build their academic journey.
The role of a father in his child’s academic life appears to reach its most critical point with early adolescence. At this time of whirling hormones, changing bodies and new challenges, it is often the case that a child’s perception of their abilities and strengths takes a knock. But a recent study of 11,297 young American adolescents has shown that with the right sort of father involvement, a child’s ability to achieve can survive this time of personal turmoil intact. It is all down to the father’s power to influence his child’s self-esteem, and this power lies in the relationship he builds with his developing child. American developmental scientist Mellissa Gordon, who headed the study, found that where fathers worked to build quality relationships with their adolescent child – one that was supportive, warm and lacking in criticism – not only did dad’s school involvement increase but their child’s sense of self was more robust and, as a consequence, they were able to achieve their full potential. It was about working to maintain that secure bond that is the foundation of all the interactions between father and child.
In contrast, Lucia Ciciolla led a team of American scientists to explore the influence that a parent’s emphasis on the overwhelming importance of academic excellence had on their academic attainment. Using data from 506 early adolescents from across three American schools, she explored to what extent an emphasis on academic achievement, rather than social ability, and a high level of criticism relating to academic performance influenced a child’s ability to achieve at school. What she found is a salutary lesson for all parents who, in an increasingly competitive world, may believe that academic achievement at any cost is the most important survival lesson to teach your child. Ciciolla found that where a parent placed little emphasis on educational attainment at all costs and taught that kindness and sociability were equally, if not more, important, children reported less perceived criticism, had higher self-esteem and, in fact, achieved better grades and were perceived to be academically stronger than those children who believed that their parents placed a disproportionate emphasis on achieving high grades. Now these results stood whether the parent was mum or dad. But the key issue for fathers is that where children reported that their parents did place undue pressure on them to achieve, fathers generally exhibited this behaviour at a higher rate than mothers.
So, the message for dads is this: if you want your child to achieve all they can at school, you do need to try to ensure your relationship with them is the warmest and most supportive it can be. So, take the time you have to nurture their self-esteem, involve yourself in their daily school life, teach them the value of having the right learning mindset and emphasize that academic achievement alone is of little use if you do not have the equivalent social skills – kindness, emotional intelligence and the ability to cooperate – to sit alongside those exceptional grades. Although his son Christopher is only six months old, Will seems to be on the right track:
I think there is something about being a role model. We have talked about what type of person he might be and all the rest of it, and we want him to be his own person, but there are certain things in terms of how he treats other people, how he respects himself and, for me, that is about being the best person that I can be. So, I’m thinking about a lot of the things I do or that I let slide. I’m changing the way I do a lot of things and trying to step up my game, because I know you can do a lot of the big one-off gestures – the big ‘oh, let’s take you out and have a really fun day’ – but the thing that is going to make the difference in terms of how he lives his life and who he becomes is actually how I am living my life, day to day.
We all know education is about more than learning, about more than mastering your ABC or the intricacies of long division. And teaching is about more than going to school. We have already encountered in previous chapters the idea that one of the key roles for a father is to fit their children for the big wide world. To encourage them towards independence and self-reliance so they can make a success of their life. Jeynes’s finding that fathers ‘scaffold’ their children’s school experience is yet another example of this phenomenon. Dads deliver the strong foundations that enable you to get the most out of your life and build a successful future. But fathers also have much to impart outside the classroom, and for many this means an important role in teaching moral and religious values and life skills. And many dads find that to achieve this they must become, like Will, their child’s role model.
I want to introduce you to a fragment of poetry:
The mother looked up in the father’s face,
And a thoughtful look was there,
Jack’s words had gone like a lightening flash
To the hearts of the loving pair –
‘If Jack treads in my steps, then day by day
How carefully I must choose my way!
For the child will do as the father does,
And the track I leave behind,
If it be firm, and clear, and straight,
The feet of my son will find.
He will walk in his father’s steps and say,
“I am right, for this was my father’s way.”
Of fathers leading in life’s hard road,
Be sure of the steps you take,
That the sons you have when grey-haired men
Will tread in them still for your sake.
Jack is a 6-year-old boy and this excerpt is from a poem called ‘Following Father’. Researchers don’t know who wrote it, but we do know it was published in an English temperance journal in the late 1800s, towards the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, when fathers were significantly more hands-off than today. But despite not joining in the bathing and dressing, feeding and soothing, this poem makes it clear that Victorian society’s vision of the ideal father still had at its core the idea that fathers should shape their children into morally upstanding members of the world. To convey a set of fundamental life lessons that were crucial in a world where even piano legs were a bit too risqué to be on general view. The quotes from fathers that have filled this chapter show this wish still motivates dads today. If you are a father, then regardless of where you live it is likely that you, like John, who shares his aspirations below, want to influence who your children become by communicating values, broadening their life experience and being their role model for life.
I think what is important is creating an environment in which [my son] feels secure to make good decisions and think things through properly. But it is difficult. How do you help shape an individual so they are prepared to live on their own? So that they know that there is safety if they make wrong choices, that it’s not the end of the world, but that they have to go through the process of coming to their own decisions? My job is guiding, influencing . . . being someone that he will turn to for advice.
John, dad to Joseph (six months)
But within some modern societies, the need for a father to set an example and transmit these values is fundamental not only to their child’s success but also, possibly, their survival. All fathers are involved in the socialization of their children; passing on their values and perspectives with respect to the world in the hope that their child will be better fitted to succeed in it. They achieve this through talking, teaching and modelling good behaviours and beliefs. But for some groups of fathers, the desire to do this is grounded in the knowledge that their child will inevitably experience a particular life hurdle, which, if not traversed correctly, could send them on a downward trajectory, even threaten their survival.
In their 2016 paper, ‘Don’t Wait for It to Rain to Buy an Umbrella’, a team of American social workers, psychiatrists and behavioural scientists, led by Otima Doyle, reported on the conversations they had had with Afro-American fathers of pre-adolescent sons. They interviewed thirty fathers and asked them to respond to the question ‘What values do you aim to instil in your son?’ Their responses, covering themes such as culture, education, responsibility and respect, were overwhelmingly informed by their understanding that the world’s response to their sons would be impacted by their race. From their own life experience, they understood that their sons would be subjected to racism and harassment, and they felt it was their duty to school them in the correct and most constructive response to these incidents. They emphasized that there was a need to furnish their sons with a set of tools to manage racism and to make them understand that they would have to work harder and achieve more than the white guy next to them to prove the racial stereotype wrong. In the words of one father, ‘ . . . the path is hard . . . And we’ll have to also let him know that he’s gonna have to work harder than the other person beside him. And their expectation is that you do not know how to talk. We do not know how to act and behave. And just make sure he knows, you can have your fun, you can talk slang . . . but there is a time and place for it.’ But alongside these doses of harsh reality, there was a real desire to encourage sons to have pride in their heritage and to use it as a motivation to be better. Reggie described telling his son about the history of black struggle within the US: ‘ . . . they died and fought for both you and I. And so it would desecrate them if you fall short of anything other than being a man and who you are, particularly, a black man . . . not only [do] you owe yourself, but you owe them as well. So, stand up and be a man.’
For these Afro-American fathers, their job was not only to bring up a son who was fully able to succeed in the outside world but to nurture and support a man who could fight the long-held stereotypes and be a proper and true figurehead for their entire ethnic group. Ultimately, as with all dads, these fathers wanted to produce an adult child who was a hard worker, had strong self-worth, respect for others and could be proud of what they achieved in life. Despite many of them not completing school, they instilled in their children the benefits of education, the need to be exposed to many different experiences and the power of formal education as a key to freedom. They wanted them, through both formal and informal education, to escape the bounds of their neighbourhood and become responsible and independent members of society. They just knew that to do this they, as fathers, had an added responsibility to furnish their sons with a set of values and life skills that equipped them to navigate an, at times, difficult and unfair world.
The majority of academic work on dads and education focuses on the biological father. But as we know from previous chapters, a father is not necessarily defined by his genetic relatedness to the child he nurtures. Indeed, due to cultural practices or life circumstance, a significant number of children grow up without the involvement of their biological father in their life. Who then provides the necessary scaffolding to support these children on their educational journey towards adulthood?
In 1998, Rebekah Coley was a graduate student from the University of Chicago. She wanted to explore how important biological and social fathers were in the education of the children of single-mother households. She could have gone down the usual route of asking mum or sitting in a corner and observing the family’s daily life, but instead she did something very simple. She asked the child. She gathered together 111 8–10-year-old children, both boys and girls, and asked them to list all the people in their life to whom they were especially close. She then asked them a series of twenty-one questions about their interactions with these people, such as who teaches you, who disciplines you and who takes you out to have fun. Children were allowed to pick as many people as they wanted in answer to each question. Finally, she assessed the children’s behaviour in school and gathered data about their academic attainment.
What Rebekah found was that, beyond the biological father, none of the children listed more than one other man with whom they had a close relationship, and in the majority of cases, this was their mum’s boyfriend. But these men had a significant impact on the child’s life. While it was the non-resident biological father who had more impact on his child’s academic achievements – and remember, mum has the same impact as dad here – where a social father was actively involved in the regulation of a child’s behaviour, the child demonstrated much better behaviour at school. Despite not being biologically related to the child, these men took on the established fathering role of scaffolding the child’s psychological and behavioural development, allowing them to get the most out of their time at school.
Coley’s work, and that of others, such as Rukmalie Jayakody, who look at the impact of social fathers in Western families, is important because it acknowledges that there is life beyond the biological dad, particularly in single-mother households. This can be a hard issue for biologically orientated Western minds to grasp, where it is common for biological dad still to be labelled as the ‘real’ father and the social father to be seen as very much the second choice, the reserve option. But just because a child is not brought up by a biological father, this does not mean they do not have a father in their life. Indeed, while it is often accepted that the lower developmental attainments of children from single-mother families is a result of a lack of a male role model, such conclusions often overlook the role of social fathers. Jayakody knows that, particularly within the Afro-American families that make up his study population, the regular absence of the biological father is often counterbalanced by a team of social fathers whose daily presence allows them to pass on vital values and morals, provide educational books and outings and support the mother in her role. These men can be a boyfriend or partner, an uncle, grandfather or close male friend. What both Jayakody and Coley know is that the father as educator comes in many guises.
* * *
Yes, we are learning with Joseph and that is changing all the time, but then you can’t really apply that same learning to the second one because you’re still learning as they grow up. I guess there are the general parenting skills you pick up, but then [there is the question of] how you apply that to different ages and characters. The learning doesn’t come to an end.
John, dad to Joseph (four) and Leo (two)
This chapter is entitled ‘The School of Dad’, but it could quite easily have been called ‘The School for Dad’. The relationship between a father and their child is not one-way, from parent to child, but mutual, and this allows for the possibility that as a father influences his child’s development, so a child influences his father’s. Having children sets you on a course of learning that will last as long as your lifetime, as Dylan acknowledges:
So, the whole parenting thing evolves day to day to day. I’m sure over the next several years there will be more, it will just be ongoing. The learning curve is not as steep as when you first have them, because it was so new and so different, and your life changed immeasurably at that point. There is still an incline, but it is less of a slope. I don’t think I am ever going to be able to put my feet up and say, ‘That’s my parenting job done.’
Dylan, dad to Freddie (four)
Many men see the transition to fatherhood as an opportunity to reassess their life, to up their game and reorder their priorities. But once their baby arrives, this process of change continues. The new fathers in my studies comment regularly on the lessons that being a parent has taught them; the value of patience, the power of living in the present and the acknowledgement that lack of sleep is, indeed, an effective form of torture. But these are all the indirect results of having a child. When your child tells you that your behaviour is embarrassing or that those trousers do not go with those shoes, they are directly asking you to change your behaviour or alter your opinion. And this input, welcome or not, will continue throughout your relationship and will become more significant the older your child gets, as they hone their skills of persuasion and coercion.
Leon Kuczynski, Robyn Pitman, Loan Ta-Young and Lori Harach, from the University of Guelph in Canada, carried out a role reversal and assessed the influence that a group of 8–14-year-old children had on their parents’ development. They asked the thirty couples involved to reflect upon when they had taken on board requests for behavioural change from their children, what this request had been about and which skills or behaviours their children used to persuade them to change. Unsurprisingly, the lessons that children most often imparted to their parents were about fashion and music, health and safety, appropriate behaviour (largely related to not being cripplingly embarrassing in public) and values or beliefs. Parents were largely comfortable with receiving these lessons, more so as the child aged and was deemed to be more competent, and thought they were a valuable opportunity to reflect on their own behaviour and beliefs. Children used a range of techniques to get their parents to change, from thoughtful and eloquent argument to the tried and tested practice of incessant whining or nagging. And the power of your 8-year-old’s large pleading eyes to instigate change should not be underestimated. As one dad of a 10-year-old in Leon’s study put it, ‘What particularly caught my attention was . . . she did put [on] this rather important face and very serious tone in her voice. It was obvious that she was speaking from a position of authority, that she had something important to tell me. Her approach, her manner, made me listen intently.’ While another father was simply bowled over by his daughter’s oratorical skills: ‘ . . . [her] eloquence, her ability to be very descriptive and passionate about her feelings, about what she would see, what she would experience, what she would think . . .’ In being open to their children’s influence, these fathers were taking a step towards allowing their children to be that all-important independent being, the encouragement of which is central to dad’s role. They were showing their children that they respected their opinions, that they acknowledged the need for give and take in any relationship, regardless of the relative status of its members, and that their children were powerful and influential people within their relationship. By doing this, they were continuing the cycle of learning that flows between father and child but also raising their child’s self-esteem and firming up the foundations of their relationship for the long term.
I think of some of the bad choices I have made in my life! And how difficult that must have been for my parents at times . . . How do you cope with that? How do you enable someone to make their own choices, even when that is hard for you to accept sometimes? I guess it is that tension between shaping an individual, wanting to see all of that good potential come to fruition, but also being nervous that there is only so much you can do. He is an individual who will have his own thoughts, so how can I be a helpful influence, but allow him to make his own decision? I think that must be one of the hardest things about being a parent. Caring enough but giving enough freedom [for him] to make his own choices and mistakes.
John, dad to Joseph (six months)
Debates about the extent to which intelligence is inherited continue to rage. But the influence of a father on their child’s knowledge and skills goes way beyond any genes he may provide. Both mothers and fathers contribute to the success or otherwise of their child’s formal education, but in this, as in so much else, their roles are complementary. Fathers have a specific role in modelling the behaviour, passing on the knowledge, boosting the self-belief and creating the environment in which the child can learn. And beyond the classroom, dads are there to provide the skills, beliefs and mindsets that are vital in empowering their children to ride the peaks and troughs of their life’s experience and remain mentally strong, hard-working and valuable members of society. And dads are not immune to receiving a lesson in personal grooming in return.