Diagnóstico de Necesidades de capacitación

In this chapter, I investigated the effects of paternal direct investment on multiple child outcomes while taking account of maternal investment levels. Furthermore, I explored whether the effect of paternal direct investments depended on father’s education level and sex of child. This was carried out as part of the investigations into the childrearing system in the UK, specifically regarding the role of fathers as allomothers.

Firstly, paternal direct investments were associated with beneficial effects on all three outcomes considered, where higher father scores were associated with shorter height, higher academic attainment and lower behavioural difficulty. Furthermore, paternal direct investments were associated with greater positive effects on the academic attainment of boys than girls. Under low father scores, boys seemed to do much worse in

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p. 101 their academic attainment than girls. Under high father scores, however, this gap was reduced to the extent that boys did almost as well as girls.

Overall, these results indicate that paternal direct investments are associated with beneficial effects on multiple aspects of child development in stable, two-parent households in the UK. This could be a reflection of how fathers in the UK follow a slower life history strategy compared to fathers in more traditional contexts, optimising child quality over quantity. Furthermore, male and female sensitivities to paternal direct investments may differ on some developmental outcomes, especially those associated with cognitive development. The results suggest that boys are more sensitive to paternal investments in terms of educational attainment, and low investments are more detrimental to boys than girls. These sex differences in the benefits to child quality may provide some explanation for the observed trend where fathers tend to invest more in sons, and supports the HBE idea that trade-offs in investments can be context specific.

Contrary to my expectation, there was no evidence of paternal direct investments having different effects on child outcomes depending on the education levels of the fathers. This suggests that the quality/efficacy of paternal direct investments do not differ by paternal education levels, and highly educated fathers are not encouraged to invest more through higher returns to child quality. Why, then, do fathers tend to invest more if they are of “higher quality”? One possibility is that their higher quality equips these fathers with an ability to invest more: Compared to lower quality fathers, higher quality fathers may simply have more time and/or skill to be able to provide direct investments. As indirect support, education level has been found to have a positive association with economic productivity (Chevalier et al., 2004), and a similar process may be present in terms of parenting where highly educated parents are more “productive” with their parenting.

The greater importance of paternal direct investments over maternal direct investments on height and school test score is rather surprising, highlighting a possibility that studies finding significant effects of maternal investments on child development could be picking up on the confounding paternal effect. However, the current results do not necessarily suggest mothers are unimportant: In general, the levels of maternal investment do not vary as much as paternal investment in the current dataset, and most mothers tend to invest relatively highly (see Chapter 2). Therefore, what may end up making the biggest difference between these children is the level of additional paternal investment they receive.

p. 102 Overall, these findings suggest that fathers may be important allomothers within contemporary developed populations. Unlike the general trends seen in traditional contexts, paternal direct investments are associated with greater child quality in the UK (controlling for other household factors). This hints at the possibility that the childrearing system in developed populations such as the UK is different from high-fertility high- mortality populations: In line with the societal shift to lower fertility and optimising child quality (see Chapter 2), fathers may be following a relatively slower life history strategy by focusing on optimising child quality and parenting effort over child quantity and mating effort.

3.4.2 Limitations of the Current Analyses

There are several limitations which must be highlighted. Firstly, the current analyses focused on stable, biparental households where biological fathers and biological mothers were present. This was driven by the need to focus on biological fathers, where information on parenting scores was required for both parents. Furthermore, I wanted to minimise the confounding effects of family disruption often associated with father absence. It is important to note that the importance of paternal direct investments on child development could differ in households generally associated with greater family disruption, such as single-parent households. For instance, following life history theory, slower life history strategies are expected in more stable environmental conditions. Consequently, the role of fathers as allomothers in less stable households may be more similar to traditional populations, where paternal investments have minimal effects on child quality.

In addition, the assumption of the current study is that paternal direct investments increase child quality. However, the fine details of the proximate mechanism and the process in which this occurs have not been explored. It is not clear, for example, whether paternal direct investments increase educational attainment because it increases knowledge (e.g., knowledge of numbers and words), or whether it equips children with a greater ability to learn at school.

3.4.3 Conclusions: The Importance of Fathers as Allomothers in the UK

Despite limitations, the results presented within this chapter suggest that paternal direct investments are beneficial for multiple aspects of child development in the UK,

p. 103 though these effects may vary depending on the sex of child for cognitive development. The current methodology disentangled the effects of paternal direct investments from maternal direct investments and family disruptions, suggesting that paternal care is indeed important for offspring quality in the UK. We find that the benefits of fathers for child development do not solely stem from socioeconomic factors, as argued by some researchers. Furthermore, I find that fathers are not inferior caregivers compared to mothers in terms of the efficacy of direct investments. Finally, the results hint that the observed son-biases in paternal direct investments may, at least in part, be driven by the sex-differences in its effect on cognitive development. However, the greater levels of paternal investments by fathers with higher levels of education cannot be explained through differences in their effects on child quality.

To conclude, fathers are often presented as potential allomothers in the human cooperative breeding system. The current results suggest that fathers are indeed important allomothers in the UK childrearing system. This is in contrast to the general finding in high mortality, high fertility populations, where father presence is rarely associated with positive effects on child survival. As discussed in Chapter 1, when father presence is associated with positive effects in high fertility/mortality populations, it tends to be in environments where mothers and children are dependent on fathers. This dependency may emerge due to factors such as the economic reliance on males and/or lack of other allomothers. From this, we could infer that, mothers and children in stable, two-parent families in the UK may be relying on fathers as allomothers. Paternal input may be especially important due to the high costs of childrearing and the lack of other allomaternal kin.

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Chapter 4：Stepfather Effects on

Multiple Child Outcomes