A father's love is one of the greatest influences on personality development

Submitted by Matt on Thu, 2012-06-14 17:26

Article here. Excerpt:

'When it comes to the impact of a father's love versus that of a mother, results from more than 500 studies suggest that while children and adults often experience more or less the same level of acceptance or rejection from each parent, the influence of one parent's rejection -- oftentimes the father's -- can be much greater than the other's. A 13-nation team of psychologists working on the International Father Acceptance Rejection Project has developed at least one explanation for this difference: that children and young adults are likely to pay more attention to whichever parent they perceive to have higher interpersonal power or prestige. So if a child perceives her father as having higher prestige, he may be more influential in her life than the child's mother. Work is ongoing to better understand this potential relationship.

One important take-home message from all this research, Rohner says, is that fatherly love is critical to a person's development. The importance of a father's love should help motivate many men to become more involved in nurturing child care. Additionally, he says, widespread recognition of the influence of fathers on their children's personality development should help reduce the incidence of "mother blaming" common in schools and clinical setting. "The great emphasis on mothers and mothering in America has led to an inappropriate tendency to blame mothers for children's behavior problems and maladjustment when, in fact, fathers are often more implicated than mothers in the development of problems such as these."'

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... that society and its institutions have an obligation to make sure the relationship between dads and their kids is not forcefully destroyed by things like divorce. But that doesn't seem to come up in this article.

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Submitted by Matt on Thu, 2012-06-14 17:28

Off topic:

This comment has little to do with the article, but seems like an okay place to post my comment about Father's day and what I saw my cable company advertise.

On the Comcast cable menu channel, they have ongoing adds about their service. They were advertising their movie offerings for the month. It said in "honor" of father's day this month, they had a selection of the "worst movie dads of all time". Their movie list included "The Shining". They went on about how it is about a dad who becomes a killer. They also listed other movies that portray fathers as murderers, psychos, and idiots with questionable morals.

I started thinking about how wrong this is, and if I knew of any movies that portrayed good fathers. It was hard for me to think of any. I am not much of a movie buff and I also can't think of any movies with great moms (In most movies I see, the parenting isn't part of the storyline, so it doesn't stand out). However, I think the last few Owen Wilson movies I saw portrayed good fatherhood (Marley and Me, Hall Pass).

But shame on Comcast Cable Co. for choosing to dishonor fathers!

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Submitted by Kris on Thu, 2012-06-14 17:56

A comment that's also off-topic: Comcast describes the movie "Pretty Persuasion" as a "wickedly funny black comedy." It's about a high school girl who convinces two of her friends to help her file charges of sexual assault against a teacher. She's almost successful, but one friend confesses it was all a lie on the stand. The other friend commits suicide because of her involvement. And somehow this is all supposed to be "wickedly funny"? Wicked, yes. Funny, no. I could only conclude it was supposed to be funny because a teenage girl did all this to advance her acting career--you know, the harmless fun of a teenage girl destroying other people's lives.

As to movies that present fathers in a good way, I agree it's hard to find good recent examples. Some of the older Disney movies often portrayed fathers very positively. In general, however, Hollywood is not kind to fathers. I'm trying to think of some, and most I think of are only indirectly related to fathers.

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Submitted by el cid on Fri, 2012-06-15 13:48