Regular contact with a father figure leads to fewer psychological problems in girls and fewer behavioral problems in boys. For low-income children, this contact also leads to a lower chance of criminal activity and improved language and reasoning skills.
These findings come as the result of a Swedish review of 24 papers published on the study over the last 20 years covering 8,441 individuals of varying ages and nationalities. Twenty-two of these studies found that the involvement of a male parental figure had positive effects on children. While no particular form of parental engagement (for example, playing versus disciplining) was found to have better outcomes than another, father figures who lived with the family were found to have the strongest impact on mitigating behavior problems.
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