Author: Armin Brott

For many decades, conventional wisdom told us that when it came to child development, mothers were the most important parent. Fathers, apparently, weren’t good for much more than piggybacks, reading an occasional bedtime story, and, of course, discipline. Researchers who studied child development bought into that conventional wisdom and rarely bothered to investigate whether dads might actually play a more important role.
Fortunately, a steady flow of more open-minded, intellectually honest research has discovered (and continues to discover) what fathers and children have always known: Dads play a role in their children’s life that is at least as important as the mom’s. Dads aren’t merely nice to have around; their presence is essential to their children in almost every area of their life: physically, psychologically, socially, developmentally, and even economically.

• For 6-month old babies, the more actively involved the father is, the higher the babies’ score on mental and motor development tests.
• Babies whose dads do a lot of basic, mundane childcare activities such as feeding, changing diapers, giving baths, and dressing handle stressful situations better than babies whose dads aren’t as involved.
• Some researchers have linked high levels of father involvement with higher math scores later on in school, and to generally higher-than-age-level scores on verbal intelligence tests. Kids with involved dads are also more likely to go to college.
• Active fathering seems to be positively correlated with children’s increased social adjustment and competence, having more friends, and to higher levels of self-esteem.
• Children with actively involved dads manage their emotions better, are less likely to act out violently, and are less likely to start smoking or drinking or to become a teen parent, according to studies by Columbia University’s National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse.
• Dad’s mental health affects his offspring. Fathers’ parenting-related stress when their children are infants negatively affect those children’s cognitive and language development at age two or three, according to research just published in the journal Infant and Child Development. In addition, toddlers with depressed fathers have less self-control and are less cooperative in fifth grade than toddlers whose dads aren’t depressed, says Michigan State researcher Tamesha Harewood, the lead author of a new study published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly. Interestingly, the dad’s depressive symptoms seem to be more influential than the mother’s.

Two particularly masculine ways of expressing anger during fights with a significant other—letting it all out or shutting down emotionally—may take a toll on your health, but in very different ways. A team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and Northwestern University found that men who explode with rage are more likely than not-so-explosive men to develop cardiovascular problems. Meanwhile, men who bottle up their emotions are more likely to develop musculoskeletal problems such as muscle stiffness and back pain.
Robert Levenson, a psychologist at UC Berkeley, led the study. He and his team have been following a group of 156 heterosexual couples since 1989. Every five years, the researchers record the couples as they discuss their lives, focusing on sources of happiness and disagreement. The couples also fill out a detailed questionnaire about their health.
Experts in human behavior then watch the videos, carefully coding how the subjects express frustration and keeping specific track of their body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice. Some of the subjects display their anger more openly, knitting their brows, pressing lips together, tightening their jaw, and significantly raising or lowering their voice. Others do what the researchers call “stonewalling,” subtly stiffening their facial or neck muscles, giving their spouse the silent treatment, and avoiding or breaking eye contact.
Correlating the videos and health data, one thing became clear very early on: “We looked at marital-conflict conversations that lasted just 15 minutes and could predict the development of health problems over 20 years for husbands based on the emotional behaviors that they showed during these 15 minutes,” said psychologist Claudia Haase, who led the researchers from Northwestern.
Specifically, more volatile spouses had a higher risk of developing high blood pressure, chest pain, and other cardiovascular problems. And those who stonewalled were more likely as they got older to suffer from stiff muscles, back pain, and neck or joint stiffness.
Trying to identify the causes of specific physical ailments is notoriously difficult, so the researchers were very careful to exclude other factors that might affect health, including alcohol use, age, caffeine consumption, level of education, exercise level, and smoking.
The correlation between argument style and health is stronger in men, but according to Levenson, the overall results hold true for women as well. “Our findings suggest particular emotions expressed in a relationship predict vulnerability to particular health problems, and those emotions are anger and stonewalling,” he said in a UC Berkeley press release.
So what does this mean to you?
If you’re a hothead, you may want to think about meditation, therapy, or some other approach to managing your anger. Continuing to do what you’re doing might kill you.
If you’re a stonewaller, consider doing the opposite: Practice letting some of those bottled-up emotions out (but not so much that you cross into hothead territory). It’ll do you a world of good.
The study was published in the journal Emotion.

For more than 100 years, scientists have told us that marriage is good for our health (especially if you’re a man). It reduces stress levels, lowers the risk of heart attack and stroke, and generally leads to longer lives.
More recently, researchers have been looking at marital quality as a predictor of health, and the results are pretty much what you’d expect. Happy marriages generally lead to happier, healthier, longer lives, while unhappy ones lead to shorter, less healthy lives. There is, however, one exception.
If you’re a man with diabetes and your marriage isn’t everything it should be, you may want to resist the urge to get couples’ counseling. According to researchers at Michigan State University and the University of Chicago, your rocky relationship could be what’s keeping you alive.

Wait, what?

That sounds completely counterintuitive, if not downright crazy, doesn’t it? But the way it works is pretty simple. A woman whose husband has diabetes frequently pays more attention to his health than he does, regulating his diet, encouraging him to do plenty of exercise, monitoring his blood glucose levels, and reminding him to take his medication. Some men would characterize this sort of behavior as micromanagement or nagging.
But according to Michigan State sociologist Hui Liu, “sometimes, nagging is caring.” That irksome wife may actually be keeping her husband from developing diabetes in the first place and reducing the severity of the disease if he gets it anyway.
According to the American Diabetes Association, more than 29 million Americans have diabetes—that’s about 9 percent of the population. It’s the seventh leading cause of death in the U.S., killing 70,000 of us every year and contributing to the deaths of 230,000 more.
Liu and her colleagues analyzed health data from 1,228 married couples who were interviewed in 2005–2006 and again in 2010–2011. The team assumed going into the study that they’d find high levels of marital happiness to be associated with lower diabetes risk. Instead, they found some fascinating differences between men and women.
For men, “an increase in negative marital quality lowered the risk of developing diabetes and increased the chances of managing the disease after its onset.” This creates a rather ironic situation, where the more a man perceives that his wife harangues him, the lower the quality of his marriage—but the greater his odds of managing and surviving his diabetes
For women, however, the opposite was true: “For women, a good marriage was related to a lower risk of being diabetic five years later,” said Liu in a press release. Specifically, the happier the marriage, the lower her risk. “Women may be more sensitive than men to the quality of a relationship and thus more likely to experience a health boost from a good-quality relationship,” she added.
The study was published online May 23, 2016 in the Journals of Gerontology.