DadTalk

The Role of the Father

Men often feel like a spare part when babies come along. But fathers do have a purpose – and there's scientific research to prove it.

Gerard Gilbert reports in the Independent:

Dads – do you feel a bit of a spare part? Do you see yourself in relation to your kids as about as useful as a stick of furniture – one of the lesser used pieces, like the side table in the guest bedroom? Well, the good news, delivered in a BBC documentary just in time for Father's Day, is that those traditional dad activities, such as talking over your children's head with long words and complex sentences, or swinging them around so that their shoulders threaten to come out of their sockets, are biologically useful. Fathers make evolutionary sense – and not just as reconstructed pseudo-mummies, or "new dads".

"There's a lot of talk at the moment about the absence of fathers, and a curiosity about what it is that fathers actually do," says child psychologist Laverne Antrobus, presenter of "The Biology of Dads", a one-off documentary in BBC Four's Fatherhood season. "In some ways, parenting has been merged. Fathers have been invited to be like mothers rather than to be like fathers – this idea of everything being about nurture. So I wondered what it must be like for fathers who think, 'What do I do that's unique and a bit different?'" Antrobus has collated the latest academic research on the subject, including the already well understood role of the kind of rough-and-tumble games preferred by fathers, which teach toddlers the boundaries of aggression and discipline.

Read more from the Independent