The father's role in the socialization of his infant

Although research on fathers and infants increased dramatically during the past decade, it did so largely in a theoretical vacuum. Theories of development emphasize mother-infant relationships, with little attention, if any, given to father-infant relationships. As a result, studies of father-infant interactions tend to replicate procedures that have been used in mother-infant research. While useful, mimicking mother-infant research paradigms may blind investigators to salient aspects of development that are unique to and critical for father-infant relationships. In traditional families, study of mother-father-infant triadic interactions may reveal more useful information about the father's role in infant socialization, than the study of father-infant dyadic interactions. However, the study of triadic interactions may yield little useful information about father-infant interaction in the single parent family. Until a number of methodological issues are resolved, the literature on the father's role in the socialization of his infant must be interpreted cautiously.     

The father's role in the facilitation of infant mental health

Many recent studies have focused on the nature and significance of father-infant relationships. These studies show that men are as capable of behaving sensitively as women are, although cultural sex-stereotypes usually prevent them from assuming a prominent role in child care. Nevertheless, most infants become attached to both their parents during the first year of life although they tend to establish primary relationships with their primary caretakers. During the second year of life, fathers encourage boys to focus attention on their fathers. This may facilitate the development of gender identity. In addition, the security of the father-infant attachment relationship may affect the infant's orientation to novel social situations. Fathers also affect infants indirectly via their influence on the children's mothers.     

Mother's versus father's role in causing delinquency

This study examines parent-child relationships and self-reported delinquent behavior in a sample of over 700 adolescents. Family structure is controlled, and males and females are examined separately. Results indicate that males are more delinquent than females, that the gender of the adolescent is not related to the strength of parental attachment, that both males and females are closer to their mother than to their father, but that closeness to father is the better predictor of delinquent behavior--especially among the males. Finally, it is suggested that a revision of the conceptualization of parental attachment may make it a more useful variable in explaining delinquency.     

A shadow concept

The author focuses on the signifi cance of preconscious thinking, and its relationship to what we think of as unconscious fantasies. He reopens Freud's forgotten struggle with preconscious thinking, while he explores preconscious thinking as the basis for thinking about psychoanalytic treatment. This includes our goals in bringing an idea to the analysand's attention, and the role of transitional space where thoughts and feelings can be played with.     

The third in the shadow of the fourth

The notion of the third in recent years is seen by noted psychoanalysts as the locus of healing. Jung explored the third beginning in 1916 in a way strikingly postmodern in its implications for clinical work and for understanding reality. This article(1) proposes that we cannot see the third except in the shadow of the fourth, and attempts to describe what the fourth is. The fourth remains shadowy (suggesting two meanings of shadow); it is only known by living it, for we are part of the larger reality it discloses. In experiencing this fourth, we are led to develop whatever we each leave out. Hence the aliveness of the fourth engenders a new kind of consciousness of the bigger surround, the moreness of reality as a whole that includes and transcends the psyche.     

The copycat solution to the shadow correspondence problem

Cast shadows (henceforth simply 'shadows') depicted in artworks can fulfil some of their perceptual roles, such as helping the retrieval of 3-D structure and of relative positions of objects, without having to be geometrically or physically accurate. The visual system displays a wide tolerance for shadows that are mostly inaccurate, at times making use of the scarce accurate but relevant information that can still be retrieved from them. However, the extent of the tolerable inaccuracy is at present still unexplored. I propose that inaccuracy can be not only totally acceptable but in some cases is even likely to be preferable to accuracy if the main perceptual role of shadows is to help locate in a scene the objects that cast them. I examined a small but effective historical corpus of pictorial endeavours, from which it appears that in some cases painters have used a copycat strategy for drawing the terminator of a shadow, ie they have produced a replica of the visible profile of the caster, which in the norm yields an impossible shadow. The copycat strategy is perceptually effective for solving the correspondence problem of associating a shadow with its caster; copycatting can be more effective than other solutions, including the depiction of the geometrically correct shadow, and is complementary to coarser solutions to the correspondence problem. These phenomena provide insight into the computations effectively used by the brain to deal with space perception. In particular, the brain is not relying on some sort of simplified physical model of the world, for the shadows produced by the copycat effect would correspond to a more complicated physical situation than the one encountered in real life.     

Challenging behaviors in young children: the father's role

In this study, the authors examined the parenting practices, developmental expectations, and stress levels of 136 fathers and the challenging and prosocial behaviors of their 1- to 5-year-old children. In addition, the authors systematically addressed fathers' qualitative concerns about their parenting. The authors divided the participants into 4 groups and controlled for family socioeconomic status (SES) and the focus child's gender. Results showed a significantly higher use of corporal and verbal punishment and parenting stress among lower income fathers. Secondary analyses demonstrated a significant effect of paternal disciplinary practices that emphasized the frequent use of corporal and verbal punishment on child behavior problems, regardless of SES level. On a positive note, fathers from both lower and higher SES groups had reasonable developmental expectations for their boys and girls, and they reported similar frequencies of their children's prosocial behavior. The authors discuss the need for early parent education programs that include fathers and that teach specific strategies to address child behavior problems.     

Early father's and mother's involvement and child's later educational outcomes

Background: Few studies have investigated the individual long‐term contributions that mothers and fathers make to their children's schooling. Aims: (1) To explore the role of early father involvement in children's later educational attainment independently of the role of early mother involvement and other confounds, (2) to investigate whether gender and family structure moderate the relationship between father's and mother's involvement and child's educational attainment, and (3) to explore whether the impact of father's involvement depends on the level of mother's involvement. Sample: The study used longitudinal data from the National Child Development Study. The initial sample were those 7,259 cohort members with valid data on mother involvement at age 7, father involvement at age 7, and school‐leaving qualification by age 20. Of those, 3,303 were included in the final analysis. Method: The measures were control variables, structural factors (family structure, sibship size and residential mobility), child factors (emotional/behavioural problems, cognitive ability and academic motivation), and father's and mother's involvement. Results: Father involvement and mother involvement at age 7 independently predicted educational attainment by age 20. The association between parents' involvement and educational attainment was not stronger for sons than for daughters. Father involvement was not more important for educational attainment when mother involvement was low rather than high. Not growing up in intact two‐parent family did not weaken the association between father's or mother's involvement and educational outcomes. Conclusion: Early father involvement can be another protective factor in counteracting risk conditions that might lead to later low attainment levels.     

Infant sensitivity to shadow motions

Preferential looking experiments investigated 5- and 8-month-old infants' perception and understanding of the motions of a shadow that appeared to be cast by a ball upon a box. When all the surfaces within the display were stationary, infants looked reliably longer when the shadow moved than when the shadow was stationary, indicating that they detected the shadow and its motion. In further experiments, however, infants' looking was not consistent with a sensitivity to the shadow's natural motion: They looked longer at natural events in which the shadow moved with the ball or remained at rest under the moving box than at unnatural events in which the shadow moved with the box or remained at rest under the moving ball. These findings suggest that infants overextend to shadows a principle that applies to material objects: Objects move together if and only if they are in contact. In a final experiment, infants were habituated to a moving shadow that repeatedly violated one aspect of the contact principle. In a subsequent test they failed to infer that the shadow would violate another aspect of the contact principle. Instead, they appeared to suspend all predictions concerning the behavior of the shadow.     

The organization of children's secure base behaviour in two-parent Portuguese families and father's participation in child-related activities

The organization of children's secure base behaviour was studied in two-parent Portuguese families, with 44 father–child and mother–child dyads, children's age was on average 31.91 months. An analysis of Attachment Q-sort (AQS; Waters, 1995 Waters, E. 1995. “Appendix A: Attachment Q-set (version 3.0)”. In Caregiving, cultural, and cognitive perspectives on secure base behavior and working models: New growing points of attachment theory and research Edited by: Waters, E., Vaughn, B. E., Posada, G. and Kondon-Ikemura, K. Monographs of the Society for Research in the Child Development, 60(2–3), 234–246 [Google Scholar]) data revealed no significant differences in security scores for mothers and fathers. Both parents independently responded to a questionnaire about their participation in child-related activities, relative to their spouse's participation in these activities. A traditional division in the Care/Organization tasks and a shared participation in the Play/Leisure activities emerged. Fathers with higher scores for both types of activities tended to have children with higher security scores. Fathers' participation in Play/Leisure activities was associated with children's AQS scores with their mothers. In this sample father's participation is positively associated with the quality of secure base relationships within the family context.     

The shadow of familiarity: a contributor to the intersubjective field

This paper examines the influence of familiarity on the progress of analysis. It is proposed that familiarity is a particular aspect of the intersubjective field which emerges over time and begins to shape and influence the behaviours, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings of the participants. It is also proposed that states of familiarity can have facilitative or defensive functions in an analytic relationship and that it is an influence co-created in the field. The experience of familiarity operates as background to our various foreground concerns in analytic work and therefore exists primarily as an implicit, rather than explicit, experience in analysis. Defensive familiarity often creates a feeling of relatedness that is subtly unrelated, a form of pseudo-intimacy. Parallels between defensive familiarity and related concepts are examined including defences against the unknown, role responsiveness, romantic love, the image of the stranger, and unformulated experience. This paper concludes with two case examples and a discussion of procedural knowledge in the implicit domain as an explanatory framework for the understanding of familiarity states in the analytic setting.