FEARLESS IDEAS
HDQM researcher Natasha J. Cabrera explores the dynamics of families and child development
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itting in her book-filled office on the third floor of the Benjamin Building, Professor Natasha J. Cabrera recounts one of the head-turning experiences that piqued her interest in the role fathers play in their children’s early development. She was interviewing an African American father on one of her many research ventures into a local low-income community, where she studies families and works on creating interventions for parents. “His son, a toddler of about a year and a half, was trying to climb over a low fence,” Dr. Cabrera recalls. “The boy tried and fell, tried and fell. He kept looking up at his dad, who stood there watching this for about ten or fifteen minutes. Finally the kid got over the fence, landed on his butt, and looked at his dad as if to say, ‘I did it!’ And the father said to his son, ‘See, I knew you could do it,’ then to me: ‘If his mama was here, she would’ve picked him up.’ And I realized that even I had felt compelled to pick him up. That was powerful for me: how he built his son’s confidence and pushed him to take a risk.” Such everyday moments are revelatory for Dr. Cabrera, a developmental scientist in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology and director of the Family Involvement Laboratory, housed at the university’s Maryland Population Research Center. Here, she studies the multiple dimensions of parenting: father-child and mother-child relationships, predictors of adaptive and maladaptive parenting, children’s social and emotional development in different types of families as well as cultural and ethnic groups, and mechanisms linking early experience to children’s later cognitive and social development and school readiness. Concerned with how both parents make unique contributions to their children’s development, much of her work has addressed a gap in knowledge about fathers. “When I went to school, ‘parents’ meant mothers, and fathers weren’t a part of parenting literature,” Dr. Cabrera says. “Most studies on parenting drew on one cultural group – white middle-class families – and these were mostly two-parent families. Sociology now tells us the normative view of families as ‘a mom and dad and a picket fence’ only represents a blip in time. Families are in fact much more diverse.” Most research about fathers’ roles in families in the 1980s and 1990s actually focused on their absence, because sociologists and demographers were seeking to understand the causes of the most troubling trends in child outcomes – teen pregnancy, crime, and high school dropout. But Dr. Cabrera was more curious about what fathers do when they are present in their families. As she observes
in a 2014 Journal of Family Theory & Review article that expanded her previous heuristic model of paternal behavior and influence, “In a rapidly changing world where the role of father is not tightly prescribed, we need a perspective that is not just a minor variation on the ‘maternal template’ that has historically helped guide research on parenting.” How do fathers, specifically, matter for children’s development? “Once, I was watching a video of a dad playing with his child at our lab,” Dr. Cabrera remembers. “Two of my fellow researchers were coding this father’s behavior. One of them said, ‘This dad is so intrusive and controlling,’ and the other replied, ‘No, he’s just being a dad. Look at the kid, he’s happy.’ Children may have different expectations of their fathers, of the play and engagement they receive from their fathers. Roughhousing, for instance, is more common with dads than with moms, and that quality of play creates contexts for kids to learn self-regulation. Fathers push their children to a limit and then bring them back, they encourage more risk-taking behaviors, and that’s important. We also found, in the studies we did with Dr. Meredith Rowe [now at the Harvard Graduate School of Education], that fathers talk differently with their kids, encouraging a different relationship with language skills.”
“Sociology now tells us the normative view of families as ‘a mom and dad and a picket fence’ only represents a blip in time. Families are in fact much more diverse.” In addition to learning about fatherhood, Dr. Cabrera specializes in low-income families, looking at poverty as a context for how children develop. One of her recent articles, penned for the European Journal of Developmental Psychology, found that the benefits of new employment – more money and less stress for working moms – eventually outweigh family disruption as less-regulated children settle into new routines. The study also emphasizes the importance of fathers to less-regulated children during transitions, such as entering school with its more rigid rules. In a Family Science paper, Dr. Cabrera asks whether low-income parents’ symptoms of depression, the conflict they experience as a couple, and the environmental chaos experienced by the family forecast the quality of parenting. Significantly, this study parses its findings both by the gender of parents and the gender of the child, revealing how low-income mothers’ and fathers’ parenting differs for sons and daughters. Among other eye-raising conclusions, the research suggests that, when they are in conflict with the mother, FALL 2015
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