hello everyone and welcome to attachment lesson three which is going to cover the role of the father now in attachment research a father is anybody who takes on the role of the main male caregiver and that can be but it doesn't have to be the biological father now research into the role of the father is often neglected an attachment with the majority of research actually focusing on the mother infant relationship that being said a lot of research has been done asking a variety of different questions and this is what we're going to be looking at in this video some of the questions that have been asked include whether babies actually attach to their fathers at all and if so when do they attach do fathers actually play a distinctive role in attachment and can fathers be primary caregivers and to answer these questions we're going to have a look at three different research studies so the first question is do babies attach to their fathers and if so when and to answer that we're going to have a look at shaffer and emerson from 1964. you've covered this study already in shaffer's stages of attachment however if you can't remember then the link to that video should be appearing on your screen now so you can check it out if you need to so in their research it was found that infants usually attached to their mothers first at around the age of seven months give or take also generally infants had formed a secondary attachment to fathers in the weeks following their first attachment and by around 18 months 75 of the babies had formed an attachment to their father and so the answer to the question as to whether or not they do attach to their fathers is yes they do form a secondary attachment to their fathers but generally they form their primary attachment to their mothers first okay so that's a nice simple one to uh to just kind of use it answers the question as to whether or not they attach to fathers or not um and you can reuse a study that you already know so moving on other research has focused on whether or not fathers hold some specific value in development or do they have a distinctive role or make some kind of unique contribution and to answer that question we are going to look at research conducted by grossman ettel in 2002 who conducted a longitudinal study looking at parents behavior and its relationship to the quality of their children's later attachments so on the one hand it was found that the quality of infant attachments with the mother was linked to children attachments in adolescence which suggests that father's attachments are actually less important however it was also found that the quality of father's play with their babies was related to the quality of adolescent attachments so research findings like that suggests that fathers do actually have a distinctive role but it's one that's more to do with play and stimulation rather than nurturing and emotional development and in a third and final piece of research it was looked into whether or not fathers can be primary caregivers and it was found that in the cases when fathers do take on the role of primary carers they very often adopt the emotional role that's generally more typical of mothers so for example in research by field etal in 1978 face-to-face interactions between infants and primary caregiver mothers primary caregiver fathers and secondary caregiver fathers were observed and compared and it was found that primary caregiver fathers spent more time like mothers holding smiling and imitating than secondary caregiver fathers did so effectively the primary caregiver fathers were displaying important behaviors like interactional synchrony and reciprocity which we know are crucial when building attachments so that shows that the father can be more nurturing and that actually gender is not the key but rather the level of responsiveness to the needs of the child so those were your three brief research studies into the role of father we're now going to have a quick look at a couple of evaluation points and then we're going to move on and just have a quick look at how you can put all of those studies into a six mark outline for an essay okay so first off we have a limitation of this research and that limitation concerns itself with confusion over the research question so a big issue with research into the role of the father is the lack of clarity over the question that's being asked the question of what the role of the father is is much more complicated than it sounds because as we've just seen some research is interested in their role as a secondary attachment like grossman and others are interested in their role as a primary attachment like fielder town and depending on what they're looking at the findings also vary as well some of the studies find the fathers behaving like primary carers and others find the father in a distinctive role like that of a playmate like engrossment study so having a lot of different research questions and the fact that a lot of different research questions actually brings with them a lot of different findings makes it very difficult to offer a simple answer to the question of what the role of the father actually is because really it depends on what specific role is being discussed and researched okay so not having a distinctive question means that we can't give a distinctive answer and that is a problem with the research into this topic another limitation of this research is the fact that there is a lot of conflicting evidence about the role of the father so on the one hand you've got studies like growthman which have suggested that fathers are a secondary attachment figure and have an important and distinct role in the children's development however if that is the case we would expect children growing up in single mother and lesbian parent families to turn out different in some way to maybe be a disadvantage or something like that but research shows that that is not the case as is suggested by mccallum and golembach in 2004 so that means that the question as to whether fathers actually have a distinctive and unique role still remains unanswered and as a final evaluation point i have a real world application for you and that is the fact that research into the role of the father can be used to offer advice to parents so parents and prospective parents sometimes agonize over decisions like who should take on the primary caregiver role and for some this can even mean worrying about whether or not to have children at all mothers could feel pressured to stay at home because of stereotypical views of mothers and fathers role equally fathers could feel pressured to focus on work rather than parenting and in some families that might just not be economical regardless of economics it might just not be what they want to do research into the role of the father can be used to offer reassuring advice to parents you can use it to explain that fathers are just as capable of being primary carers as mothers are and equally you can use the research to reassure single mother or lesbian parent families that not having a father around doesn't have any kind of negative effect on the children's development either way you can use the research to offer reassuring advice and reduce parental anxiety about the role of the father which is a good thing okay so those are your three evaluation points now just before we finish off the role of the father is named on the spec that means that technically you could get a 16 mark essay on this topic and so you need to be thinking about what you're going to use to structure a six mark outline now given that we've been using research studies in this video we're going to use some of those studies for that outline however we're not going to be using all three because that would be too much and so we're only going to use what we need to demonstrate what the role of the father actually is or more importantly what research has shown about the role of the father so this is what i would do if i was writing this outline i'd start off with a little bit of an introduction as always it sets the scene and it just means that you are easing the examiner in a little bit to your answer okay so we'll talk about the fact that it's focused on a variety of questions and what those questions are i'd then jump into my first study and my first study is going to be grossman and i'd tell them what that study was okay what they did what they were looking at and also very importantly what they found okay nice little paragraph on grossmannetal from 2002. i would then go on to talk about my second study and my second study is feel detail it's in direct contrast to the grossman study and it actually shows something very distinctive i've kind of cut it down a little bit because obviously giving all of the information is going to be a little bit too long but i've got the important things in there and importantly as well i've got a little bit of a conclusion which is that the research shows that fathers can be nurturing under the right circumstances and that gender is not key but rather the level of responsiveness now the reason i have left shaffer and emerson out is because in my opinion it doesn't really add anything to the outline it doesn't really show us anything about the role of the father it just tells us that children tend to attach their fathers second however these two studies show distinctively that fathers do something as an attachment figure whether it's in grossman's study and we're showing that fathers have a unique role surrounding play and stimulation or whether it's field study where we're showing that fathers can be primary caregivers and they can fulfill the role just as well as mothers do either way we are showing a role of the father in attachment okay so this is how i would do it this outline as it stands on the screen right now is about 187 words again it's a fairly long outline and you don't really want to be going much longer than that just in terms of time but 187 words is a nice amount just to kind of get the right amount of depth and breadth in your answer and show the examiner that you know what you're talking about okay so that is the end of the video and i am going to leave it there i hope it's been useful and i hope it's all made sense if you've got any questions please feel free to put them in the comment section below as always and i will do my best to get back to you thank you very much for listening and i'll see you in the next one