Father involvement, child health and maternal health behaviorDataFather involvement measuresHealth measuresConclusionReferencesWhite, non-HispanicFather involvement, child health and maternal health behaviorJulien TeitlerSchool of Social WorkColumbia UniversityJuly, 2000An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the Urban Seminar on Children's Health andSafety, April 23-24, 1999 at Harvard University. This research was supported in part by theLowenstein Foundation, the National Institute of Health (HD08221) and the Office of PopulationResearch (5P30HD/AG32030). I am grateful to Patricia Fondrie, Irv Garfinkel, I-Fen Lin, SaraMcLanahan and Nancy Reichman, for their valuable suggestions.2Introduction:Until recently, academic and public interest in the contributions of fathers to theirchildren was limited to their role as breadwinners. Fathers were primarily portrayed as providersof financial support, and the departure of fathers from the family unit, by separation or divorce,was seen as detrimental, primarily because of the resulting financial loss to the women andchildren of those unions. Only in the past 10 years has public and academic interest begun to lookat fathers as potentially important in other ways.The new focus on fathers and fatherhood has developed among academics and socialpolicy advocates. Among the former, the focus on fathers has been enlarged to take into accountfather involvement or contact with children and, to some extent, the quality of relationshipsbetween fathers and children. The theory behind this more inclusive movement is that, inaddition to bringing in economic resources, fathers may provide parenting and communityresources (Lamb, 1997). Single parents may not be able to provide the child with as much timeand attention as can two parents. The additional time provided by two-parent families could beallocated a number of different ways, and some of these, (e.g., time spent reading) can promotepositive child development. Increased time may also lead to increased supervision and to moreconsistent enforcement of rules.Social advocates see the father as a moral guardian and argue that the loss of fathers fromthe family unit has detrimental effects on the socialization of our children. As such, fathers areportrayed, not so much as providers, but as critical elements of the key regulatory socialinstitution.3Finally, fathers themselves are claiming rights and responsibilities towards their children.Father rights groups are lobbying to insure or increase fathers’ access to their children afterseparations and grassroots movements and organizations, such as the Million Man March, theNational Fatherhood Initiative and the United Fathers Forum, are claiming social and moralresponsibilities of fatherhood.Despite the increased interest in fatherhood and the widespread belief that fathers’involvement with their children is important, there is little evidence to support this belief. Theempirical research has lagged behind the public forum, perhaps because of the limited dataavailable on father involvement. The primary focus on mothers and children in national surveys,to the detriment of fathers, means that most available data are, at best, limited to information onwhether the father was in the household, the frequency of non-residential father-child contact orthe financial contributions of fathers. Additionally, questions about father involvement arealmost always asked of the mother, which presents a one-sided and potentially incomplete pictureof the relationship between fathers and children (or between mothers and fathers) and of effortsto be involved. When fathers are included in national surveys, they tend to under-represent nevermarried father (Garfinkel, McLanahan and Hanson, 1998)Investigations of the limited data on father involvement have shown wide variation infinancial contributions and contact with children. About one-third of fathers do contributefinancially and maintain regular contact with their children and the remainder of fathers are muchless involved (Garfinkel, McLanahan and Robbins, 1994). Child support does appear to havepositive effects on children’s educational attainment (Garfinkel, McLanahan and Robbins, 1994)but there is little evidence that contact between non-residential fathers and children makes a4difference (Furstenberg, Morgan and Allison, 1987; King, 1994; McLanahan, Seltzer, Hansonand Thomson, 1994).Findings on the effects of parental separation on children has also been mixed. Someclinical studies have show severely detrimental effects of marriage dissolution on children,(Wallertein and Kelly, 1980) but the evidence from national surveys is much more ambiguous(Carlson, 1999a 1999b; Cherlin et al., 1995; McLanahan and Sandefur, 1994).Another limitation of survey-based studies of father involvement is that they have beenlimited, in most instances, to separated and divorced fathers, and they have looked at childoutcomes when the children were in middle childhood or adolescence. Few studies have eitherlooked at the contributions of never married fathers or to the effects of father involvement onhealth development. Most have focussed instead on achievement and problem behaviors.In contrast to the quantitative studies, ethnographic research on fatherhood has focussedprimarily on never married fathers. These studies have painted mixed pictures of fatherinvolvement. Some have portrayed fathers as very uncommitted (Anderson. 1989), whereasothers paint a more benevolent picture of fathers, who may lack the ability to contributefinancially but find other ways to be involved and help out (Furstenberg, 1995; Edin and Lein,1997; Stack, 1974; Waller, 1997). The focus of the ethnographic studies has been limited,mostly, to financial and material contributions of fathers, and on the levels of contributions ratherthan on the consequences of these contributions to children. They have helped us to understandthe variety of ways in which fathers can contribute (many of which have not been captured by ourlarge national surveys), but they have not shown what effect these contributions have on children.In this paper, I use a new data set of parents to look at the relationships between financialand non-financial contributions of fathers prior to the birth of the child, the health of the newborn5child, and the health behaviors of the mother during pregnancy. More specifically, I show 1) thedemographic characteristics and levels of involvement of