How Fathers Interact Differently With Daughters and Sons

If you could eavesdrop on a father at home with his 2-year-old daughter and another dad playing with his young son, what differences might you observe? In a study reported in Behavioral Neuroscience, researchers equipped fathers with wearable audio recorders to find out.

Along with other exploratory findings, the team noted that fathers were more likely to use achievement words such as "win" and "proud" with sons and body-related language like "foot" and "tummy" with daughters. The clearest difference: Fathers sang and whistled much more to daughters. "Notions of how one should interact with a boy versus a girl could be shaping the way these fathers interact with their children," as could differences in the type of cues boys and girls tend to send their dads, says co-author Jennifer Mascaro, a biological anthropologist at Emory University.

Scans of the fathers' brains revealed further patterns: Fathers of daughters responded more strongly to photos of their child's happy face in a part of the brain that is important for reward, and fathers of sons showed a greater response to neutral expressions. Fathers of sons are more likely to engage in emotionally ambiguous rough-and-tumble play, according to the researchers, and it's possible that reward-related brain activity in response to neutral expressions encourages such play between fathers and sons.