How a Dad’s Involvement Can Change His Children’s Future

How a Dad’s Involvement Can Change His Children’s Future

Rachel Sheffield June 06, 2014

Rachel Sheffield focuses on welfare, marriage and family, and education as policy analyst in the DeVos Center for Religion & Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation.

Children with involved fathers are more likely to graduate from college—particularly among middle- and upper-income families but also among those from lower-income backgrounds, a recent study found.

According to this new research by Brad Wilcox at the University of Virginia, the family structure that best promotes this involvement is a married, intact family. This is the case for youth from lower-educated homes as well as those from more highly educated homes.

Wilcox also found fathers are more involved with their children today than they have been in the past. The amount of time fathers spend with their children each week has increased from 4.2 hours on average in 1995 to 7.3 hours on average in 2011. The down side is that fewer teens live in intact families, particularly teens from working-class and lower-income homes.

On the other hand, their peers from college-educated homes are “triply advantaged,” according to Wilcox: “They typically enjoy more economic resources, an intact family, and an involved father.”

The question then is, how to keep youth connected with their fathers, or, as Wilcox puts it, how to “bridge the fatherhood divide between children from college-educated and less-educated families.”

Increasing the odds that more children are raised in homes with their married mother and father is a crucial factor in the equation.

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