Love to see Elena Bridgers writing about fathers! This is a great piece. It’s true that both animal and human fathers tend to show more vigorous, exploratory, risk-taking play with youngsters, whereas mothers are often more affectionate and comforting. This is both biological AND cultural, and we don’t want to overstate the role of gender (there are plenty of playful moms and anxious, snuggly dads).

When I interviewed Barry Hewlett, who studies fatherhood in the hunter-gatherer Aka society, he told me that out of thousands of parent-child interactions, he saw very few episodes of risk-taking play among fathers. That’s likely because fathers are so involved in routine childcare that they are the “everyday” parent and not just the “fun” parent. So there’s an important role for socialization here.

That said, there’s research out of Ruth Feldman’s lab in Israel finding that parental oxytocin release during parent-infant interactions is linked with more affectionate touch in mothers and more proprioceptive touch in dads (that is, physically moving the baby around in space). My lab replicated this last finding: we observed that when fathers engaged in more proprioceptive touch with their six-month-old infants, they subsequently had higher oxytocin levels when we did a blood draw following the play session.*

The bottom line is that kids enjoy father play and crave it — and it’s valuable for kids to get exposure to multiple kinds of interactions from multiple caregivers!

Citation: Morris, A. R., Turner, A., Gilbertson, C. H., Corner, G., Mendez, A. J., & Saxbe, D. E. (2021). Physical touch during father-infant interactions is associated with paternal oxytocin levels. Infant Behavior and Development, 64, 101613.