We’ve known for a long time now that reading stories to your children can have huge benefits. The benefits of play are also not new but sometimes overlooked. This report examines more specifically the role of fathers in this.

Why fathers? The report describes two reasons:

1) Two heads are better than one – Having two involved parents rather than one exposes a child to more varied stimuli, which will foster better cognitive outcomes because of the exposure to different behaviours, vocabulary, and parenting styles.

2) Fathers bring something different – Fathers’ input to their child’s learning and development may bring particular and unique benefits, as highlighted by previous research that shows fathers tend to engage with their children in different ways to mothers.

What did the researchers find:

• Greater father involvement in structured, educational activities (like reading and playing) provides an educational advantage to children in the first year of primary school.
• Fathers’ involvement operates differently from mothers’ involvement because it helps to increase children’s educational attainment, whereas mothers’ involvement enhances children’s cognitive behaviour. Specifically, mothers’ involvement helps to reduce hyperactivity in children and enhance their peer socialisation skills, as well as their emotional, conduct, and pro-social behaviour.
• Fathers’ involvement has lasting effects on children. Fathers’ pre-school involvement (at age three) helps to increase a child’s educational attainment at age five; and a fathers’ involvement at age five helps to increase a child’s educational attainment in their Key Stage Assessments at age seven.
• The earlier a father gets involved in the child’s life, the more likely he is to be involved later when the child is older. In other words, once early paternal involvement is established, it sets up a pattern of involved caregiving that is likely to continue as the child gets older – which has benefits for a child’s educational progression.

From the press release:

Research led by the University of Leeds has found that children do better at primary school if their fathers regularly spend time with them on interactive engagement activities like reading, playing, telling stories, drawing and singing.

Analysing primary school test scores for five- and seven-year-olds, the researchers used a representative sample of nearly 5,000 mother-father households in England from the Millenium Cohort Study — which collected data on children born 2000-02 as they grew up.

According to the research, dads who regularly drew, played and read with their three-year-olds helped their children do better at school by age five. Dads being involved at age five also helped improve scores in seven-year-olds’ Key Stage Assessments.

Dr Helen Norman, Research Fellow at Leeds University Business School, who led the research, said: “Mothers still tend to assume the primary carer role and therefore tend to do the most childcare, but if fathers actively engage in childcare too, it significantly increases the likelihood of children getting better grades in primary school. This is why encouraging and supporting fathers to share childcare with the mother, from an early stage in the child’s life, is critical.”

Dads’ involvement impacted positively on their children’s school achievement regardless of the child’s gender, ethnicity, age in the school year and household income, according to the report.

There were different effects when mums and dads took part in the same activities — the data showed that mums had more of an impact on young children’s emotional and social behaviours than educational achievement.

The researchers recommend that dads carve out as much time as they can to engage in interactive activities with their children each week. For busy, working dads, even just ten minutes a day could potentially have educational benefits.

They also recommend that schools and early years education providers routinely take both parents’ contact details (where possible) and develop strategies to engage fathers — and that Ofsted take explicit account of father-engagement in inspections.

The research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and led by Dr Helen Norman, Research Fellow at Leeds University Business School, in collaboration with co-author Dr Jeremy Davies, Head of Impact and Communications at the Fatherhood Institute, and co-investigators at the University of Manchester.

Dr Jeremy Davies, Head of Impact and Communications at the Fatherhood Institute, who co-authored the report, said: “Our analysis has shown that fathers have an important, direct impact on their children’s learning. We should be recognising this and actively finding ways to support dads to play their part, rather than engaging only with mothers, or taking a gender-neutral approach.”

Andrew Gwynne MP, Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Fatherhood, said: “This study shows that even small changes in what fathers do, and in how schools and early years settings engage with parents, can have a lasting impact on children’s learning. It’s absolutely crucial that fathers aren’t treated as an afterthought.”