Wednesday, October 08, 2008

One of the benefits of having a father in a child's life - higher IQ

The Telegraph reports that Children who spend time with their fathers have a higher IQ:

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Strong fatherly involvement in their early life can also improve a child's future career prospects, the research shows.
Academics at the University of Newcastle, who carried out the study, also found that men tended to pay more attention to their sons than their daughters.
The researchers warned that it was not enough for parents to live together, but that a father should be actively involved in a child's life to benefit their development.
The study looked at more than 11,000 British men and women, born in 1958.

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It was surprising to read that the difference were still there even at age 42. I did a little Google searching, but I couldn't find exactly what the difference was.

(Hat tip: Homeschooled twins)


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Technorati tags: parenting, children

2 comments:

Crimson Wife said...

As my old college stats professor kept drumming into us, "correlation does not equal causation". I'd like to know more about the study to see which potentially confounding factors the researchers controlled for.

Even if they did a good job controlling for various factors, there's always the possibility that the direction of the causality runs the other way. Perhaps high-IQ kids do a better job at soliciting involvement from their dads than low-IQ ones. Smart kids can figure out at a very young age how to manipulate their parents...

Henry Cate said...

You make a great point. I tried to track down the study, but the only place I could find wanted me to pay money.

I think most events or processes involving humans will have more that one cause. It could easily be that fathers who spend more time with children will have smart kids, and smart kids would work out ways to get attention from their fathers.