Just what do fathers do? Do they have any direct effect on the developing child or is their effect due to their support or nonsupport of the mother? Does their role change over time as the child grows, or is a father's role, once assumed, constant? As society has come to offer some choices in what it is to be a father, do the different styles of fathering have different effects on the developing child? One would expect that answers to such basic questions would be available in the psychological literature. However, information on the process of fathering is almost totally absent. Even when some information is available, the father is a distant figure filtered through the eyes of the mother or, more rarely, the child. The information available is also narrow, both in terms of the age range of the children studied and the methods used to study the child. In this study, we hope to integrate, to complement, and finally, to go beyond the picture of the father we now have by taking up and completing the following specific tasks. 1. Fathers will be studied directly within the family interacting with all family members. 2. Fathers and mothers will be studied using multiple methods in three domains (behavior, affect, and cognitive). 3. The child will be studied outside of the home interacting with peers as well as testing to develop measures in the four tomains (prosocial behavior, intellectual competence, problem behavior, and peer relations). 4. The style of fathering process will be related to the child's scores in the four domains--in prosocial behavior, problem behavior, intellectual competence, and peer relations.
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