Father's involvement as a determinant of child health

The quality of the child’s environment is affected by such factors as the family income, the availability of social support for the child and the family unit, the availability of opportunities to become literate and to explore the environment, the quality of interactions among family members including such characteristics as affection, violence, guidance and discipline, and so on. [...] The development of measures of father’s involvement, in addition to measures of the impacts of father’s absence, has been a necessary step towards a program of research that will uncover the effects of varying qualities and amounts of father’s involvement on family functioning and on child health and development outcomes. [...] Conceptual and empirical frameworks that are sensitive to fathers’ roles in child health need to encompass the ways that fathers affect the quality of the child’s environment for survival, growth, health, and development, as well as the quality of the family environment in which the child is embedded. [...] While there is a body of research showing a range of impacts of parent-child relationship quality on the well-being of children and adult children, there is a paucity of focused research on the specific impacts of father’s involvement and child health outcomes. [...] Without measures of health outcomes in studies of the effects of father’s involvement, and without measures of father’s involvement in studies of health outcomes, links between the two constructs can at best be hypothesised based on the ‘theoretical blurring’ of the boundaries between the two fields alluded to elsewhere in this report.