Did You Know? – Dads as parents

A father tends to:

• Bond with children in short bursts of connection, both physical and emotional
  (“short-touch” bonding, rough-and-tumble play).
• Focus on teaching children order, pattern thinking, and ritualized action, (Dads will tend
  to care less about the minutia of the child’s needs, but care more about larger structures and tools
  the child might need for future survival.)
• Downplay
  emotion, even at the risk of hurt feelings, in order to “up-play” performance. (Males are chemically and neurally directed toward immediate
  rewards from performance, and they prod children in this direction.)
• Promote risk taking and independence in the growing child. (Many moms
  promote independence, but in general, dads push children toward separation from caregivers and
  encourage them to “grow up!” faster than moms do.)
• Expect and enforce discipline and provide contests and tests of skill. (Dads tend to be more
  competitive than moms, especially in their assertion to children that being able to compete in tests
  of skill against others is the key to future success.)
• Teach the child to fight against personal and group vulnerability. (With less of the
  male brain’s blood flow devoted to emotional processing than the female, fathers tend to deny any
  emotional vulnerability or try to problem-solve quickly to avoid such vulnerability.)
• Guide
  the child to sacrifice his or her own thinking in deference to “authority thinking” until the child has proven his or her own core nature to be mature enough to become authoritative.
  Although there are certainly exceptions to this, fathers tend to employ more authoritarian parenting
  styles than mothers and retain that authority well into the child’s adulthood, waiting for the child
  to prove himself (this generally applies more to sons) worthy of being respected as an
  adult.
• Direct the child’s search for self-worth toward the larger society (that is,
  encouraging less introspection and more immediate
  action).
• Try to help the child feel stronger in the
  long term even if the child does not feel better in the moment. Fathers tend to care less than
  mothers about whether a child “feels good.” Fathers tend to want obvious shows of strength from
  children. This is especially true in their attitude toward sons.