Past Articles

The Daddy Shift

More men becoming single dads

The Faces of Stress

A Manifesto In Support of Parents

A Dream List of Parents' Rights

Decline of traditional American Family slows in 90's

Quality Makes Big Difference to Child Care

Bringing up Boozers

Following Father's Footsteps

California Court Decision

The Daddy Shift

By H.J. Cummins

As more men stay home, more questions arise: Are fathers pretty much the same as mothers? How do thheir children turn out?

CARING FOR TWIN babies meant that Joe Kelly was too busy to ponder what an anomaly he was. It was almost 19 years ago that Kelly emerged as the more comfortable parent with his daughters, Nia Kelly and Mavis Gruver. He had a natural instinct, said his wife, Nancy Gruver. He had the touch. To her, the babies were like some stubborn mystery. "When he would hold them, they would calm down," the mother said. "When I would hold them, they would scream. Because I was tense. I couldn't figure them out. I thought, 'I can go to my job and there were problems there I could solve.'" That's how the father took over as the No. 1 parent for much of the girls' upbringing. Welcome to one through-the-looking-glass family, the Kelly-Gruver household in Duluth, Minn. Could this role flip be a modern thing? Does this mean that a Y chromosome doesn't disable the sensitivity genes after all? Those are questions with no easy answers, according to experts who try to get to the bottom of such things. Even in these days of paternity leaves and fathers' rights groups, it's not clear that dads are substantially more involved in their children's lives than before. Still, the current view of fatherhood is changing, both in the halls of science and on the home fronts. There seem to be two major camps in the fatherhood debate. One says fathers are not really different from mothers. The other says they are, but in a good way. At Yale University in New Haven, Conn., psychiatry professor Kyle Pruett is 10 years into a small, longitudinal study of more than a dozen families in which fathers are the primary parent. Along the way, Pruett collected research that finds no meaningful differences between mothers and fathers. For example, he cites these findings: In measures of their physical reactions when they see their babies, mothers and fathers show no difference. Fathers are just as anxious as mothers about leaving their infants in the care of others. Fathers respond as well as mothers to infant cues of hunger or satiation, discomfort or fatigue. "The evidence doesn't support gender as a premier influence in parenting," Pruett said. But other studies contradict that. Alan Sroufe, a professor at the University of Minnesota's Institute of Child Development in Minneapolis, cited one: Even in Sweden, the land of liberal parental work leaves, working mothers take over the baby care when they get home at night; working men do not. "With the stay-at-home fathers, as soon as the mother got home, she sort of took over," Sroufe said. "You could say that's only fair. But it isn't what happened when the dads worked and they came home." Pruett said he started his study because, as recently as 10 years ago, families were told that fathers are poor substitutes for mothers, that babies suffer in their care. He enlisted 17 families and still follows 14. After a year mostly in their fathers' care, the children were virtually indistinguishable from others raised mostly by their mothers, he reported. If anything, they showed a slightly more adventurous spirit. The same uniformity showed at ages 2 and 4, he said. Pruett just finished round four of his analysis, 10 years into the study, and says he believes he spotted two differences. The youngsters are more likely to have both boys and girls as "best friends," he said. This year, for the first time, their parents' gender seemed to matter to the youngsters. That's not surprising, Pruett said; this is an age at which youngsters generally read more meaning into the differences between boys and girls. Also true, and normal, to this age, youngsters were pulling away from their "at-home" parent in favor of the working parent, the one they see as better initiating them into the ways of the bigger world. The interesting twist in his families, Pruett said, was the youngsters were pulling away from their dads in favor of their mothers. All that rings true to Joe Kelly and Nancy Gruver, who remember taking turns in and out of favor with their daughters over the years. They may pay closer attention to such things than most couples because for the past seven years they've made a career of understanding girls' development. They are co-publishers of New Moon, an international, award-winning magazine written by girls about girls' lives and aspirations. And Kelly is director of Dads and Daughters, a national organization of fathers who want to strengthen their relationship with their daughters. Being male or female doesn't predetermine someone's ability to take good care of a baby, Sroufe said; the bottom line is picking up on babies' signals and responding so they feel safe and secure. Science does support some common family observations in parenting differences. As young as 6 weeks, Pruett said, babies relax when their mothers pick them up - their heart and breathing rates slow. When dads pick them up, those rates go up - they get excited. Fathers often begin connecting with their children as toddlers. Pruett believes it's because that's when dads can indulge their preference for play; also, toddlers are beginning to seek some independence from their moms, and dads are handy replacements. Sroufe said his research shows a couple of crucial roles for fathers over the years. They help enormously when they are good emotional supporters of mothers, he said. And they frequently play strong roles in monitoring the whereabouts of their children - keeping track of where they are, who they're with and what they're doing. And the more monitoring, the less likely it is that a child will fall into trouble. He said his studies make another strong connection: When a problem child gets better, it's often after a previously single mother has formed a stable relationship with a man. Nia Kelly and Mavis Gruver find it hard to analyze how - or if - they're different because their father was the main at-home parent during chunks of their childhoods. They just don't know any different way to grow up, they said. Nancy Gruver has one view: "To me, the biggest difference is that they really talk to Joe about real things. That's something I can't do with my father to this day." The girls do know one thing that already influences their choice of friends and that's likely to influence any choice of partners: "We operate on the concept that men can be feminists, too," Nia said. "Because Dad is." H.J. Cummins wrote these stories for the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

This article first appeared in Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune

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