The Long-Term Effects of Prenatal Father Involvement

Purpose: Men have become increasingly engaged as fathers over the past several decades. Included in this increased involvement is the presence of men in the prenatal period. Prior research has shown that paternal prenatal involvement can have a positive impact on the wellbeing of their children and families. Prenatal involvement can be an emotionally intense time that can lead to strong bonding to the child and a shift in identity. Given this, a very small and limited body of research has addressed whether prenatal involvement translates into paternal involvement as children age. Furthermore, this literature is extremely limited in its measurement of father involvement. This is a significant question and issue, however; particularly as more and more social program emphasize prenatal involvement as a way to get men to take greater responsibility for and to become increasingly engaged with their children. Our paper addresses this gap in the literature by assessing the effect of prenatal involvement on four measures of father involvement.

Method: Data came from the Survey of Contemporary Fatherhood (SCF), a data source on the factors associated with father involvement and engagement collected in 2015. SCF is a quota sample of 2,300 biological fathers, stepfathers, and other social fathers with children between the ages of 2 and 18. The sample matches Census population estimates of racial/ethnic composition of men over age 18 and geographic regions. Developmentally appropriate measures of father involvement with 2-7 year old children were employed with biological fathers (n= 989). Our outcomes were four latent measures of paternal involvement: warmth, monitoring, caregiving, and engagement. The key endogenous variable was an index of 10 measures of prenatal involvement, each measured as yes/no questions, and summed together. Controls included education, child gender, race/ethnicity, current relationship status, income, child’s age, father’s age, and employment status. Structural equation modeling in Stata 14.1 was used to estimate the models.

Results: Our results indicated that there was an enduring effect of prenatal father involvement on all four measures of father involvement in the Pleck model. More specifically, warmth (β= 0.234, p<.001), monitoring (β= 0.129, p<.01), caregiving (β= 0.203, p<.001), and engagement (β= 0.071, p<.05) were all weakly to moderately associated with prenatal involvement. However, these effects weakened as children became older. These findings suggest that prenatal involvement does have enduring effects—particularly on emotional parenting practices—but that the impact of prenatal involvement may weaken over time. 

Implications: Our paper assessed the impact of 10 prenatal behaviors on various aspects of father involvement with young children. The results suggest that social services and public health campaigns focusing on prenatal father involvement may have a positive, long-term impact on paternal engagement with children—particularly in emotional parenting. Yet, it appears that these effects weaken over time. As a result, it may prove beneficial for social service programs to strengthen programs to follow-up with fathers and to offer programming that will produce stronger and more enduring long-term benefits.