The case for dads

Do fathers matter? what science is telling us about the parent we've overlooked; By: Paul Raeburn; Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Year Published: 2014; Price: $26; Pages: 272

When the pioneering researcher Michael E. Lamb became interested in the role of fathers, in the mid-1970s, "there wasn't much evidence for the irrelevancy of fathers"－it was just assumed, Raeburn writes. And "there wasn't a lot of data to suggest they were relevant, either".

Now, there is a growing, but still inadequate, interest in fathers' influence. Raeburn, a magazine writer and former chief science correspondent for The Associated Press, has contributed another entry to a category of books that has exploded in the past 20 years, in which a journalist compresses and enlivens scholarly articles, often mixing in reported anecdotes, to appeal to the curious, nonspecialist reader.

It's not for grad students, but it's also not for the beach. Keeping himself in the background, Raeburn is an ideal guide to tricky, uncertain research in a nascent field.

Nascent, but fascinating. Did you know that a healthy father can ease the impact of a mother's depression on the children, while a depressed father is a risk factor for excessive crying in infants? That fathers can suffer from hormonal postpartum depression?

Or that fathers' early involvement with their daughters leads to "a reduced risk of early puberty, early initiation of sex and teen pregnancy"? We're not sure exactly why, but Bruce J. Ellis, of the University of Arizona, has noted that exposure to fathers' pheromones can slow down pubertal development.

According to some research, fathers matter more than mothers in vocabulary development. One hypothesis is that mothers, who spend more time with their children, know their children's vocabularies and tailor their own word choice accordingly; dads, who know their children less well, end up introducing new words.