Mental health · Aug 9, 2026

I’m a father, how do I help my child feel secure?

Many fathers arrive at the office believing they are supporting actors in their children’s emotional lives, and that the real caring belongs to the mother. For Father’s Day, which falls in early August in Brazil, I gathered what the research shows about the effect a father’s presence has of its own, and where it counts for more than people assume.

A father I met recently came to his son’s appointment and sat in the corner chair, a step behind his wife, like someone who had come along as company. For most of the visit he kept his phone face down on his leg, attentive and quiet. When I asked what he had been making of the boy, he said he would not know how to answer, that his wife is the one who understands these things at home. Already on his feet, at the door, he said the line that made me open another slot just for him. Doctor, I help a lot, but I think I make little difference to him. I am writing this on Father’s Day, and that is the sentence I wanted to take apart, because the research answers the opposite of it.

What a father does has an effect of its own

I started where the evidence is firmest. In 2008, Anna Sarkadi and colleagues, at Uppsala University in Sweden, gathered 24 studies that followed children over time to measure the effect of father involvement, and in 22 of them that involvement was linked to better outcomes, with fewer behavioral problems among boys and less psychological distress among daughters already in young adulthood. It helps to understand what this kind of tally says and what it does not. It shows that the finding pointed the same way in almost every paper, which is a sign of consistency, and it does not measure the size of the gain inside any one family. The authors deliberately included both biological fathers and other father figures, because what reaches a child does not come from blood, it comes from whoever shows up.

There is a detail in that work I use a great deal in the office. Of all the forms of involvement the studies measured, the one linked to good outcomes was engagement, the technical name for interacting directly with the child. Living in the same house did little on its own, and providing was not enough. And no particular kind of interaction proved better than another, which lifts a weight off anyone who thinks they have to find the right game.

The bond with a father grows out of responding, not entertaining

The next question is how that bond forms. In 2011, Nicole Lucassen and colleagues, at the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, pooled 16 studies with 1,355 infants in which the father’s sensitivity was observed and the security of the attachment to him was measured through a standardized laboratory procedure, with brief separations and reunions, that looks at whether the baby turns to that adult to settle. The more sensitive the father, the more secure the bond, in an association of 0.12.

That number needs translating. It is a correlation, which runs from 0, when two things bear no relation at all, to 1, when one tracks the other perfectly. The 0.12 sits near the start of that scale, and I would rather say so than inflate the figure in front of a father who trusts me. What it means in practice is that sensitivity pushes the bond toward security when you look at many families at once, and that on its own it cannot tell you what is happening inside one particular home. It is one thread among several, not the key that opens everything. Numbers like this describe tendencies across populations, and none of them was built to tell a father how his own child is doing.

It is worth saying what researchers mean by sensitivity, because the everyday word suggests being emotional, and that is not what is at stake. In the research, sensitivity is noticing the signal a child is giving, understanding what it means, and responding promptly and adequately. It is a skill of reading, not a trait of temperament. In practice it is noticing that a baby who is active and exploring calls for a different response from one who is quiet and withdrawn, and acting on what you read. In the trials that measure this, nothing is asked of the father, everything is observed. In the Dutch study I come to shortly, for instance, trained raters watched 10 minutes of interaction and gave a score on a scale from 1, for the adult who does not register the baby’s signals, to 9, for the one who reads them and responds accurately. With an older child, I put it more briefly in the office. Sensitivity is the difference between answering what your child is saying and answering what you imagined they said.

The finding that interests me there is the other one. Lively, stimulating play, that picture of the father who throws the child in the air and gets everyone worked up, did not predict more security in the bond than sensitive interaction with no stimulation at all. What builds the bond is not entertainment, and that reading happens far more at bath time, while getting them dressed and in a question asked on the way to school than in any special Sunday outing.

Caring for yourself is part of caring for your child

There is a route by which a father reaches his child that is rarely discussed at home, and it is his own illness. In 2005, Paul Ramchandani and colleagues, at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, measured depressive symptoms in fathers 8 weeks after the birth of their child, with complete information on 8,431 of them, and went back to look at those children at age 3 and a half. The children of the men who were living with depression in that period were about 2 times more likely to show emotional and behavioral problems, and the effect held even after accounting for the mother’s depression.

That doubling deserves an honest reading too, because it frightens more than it should. It compares groups and does not describe the fate of any one child. Doubling a chance that was already small still leaves a small chance, and most of what decides the course of a family sits outside that calculation. The study also carries a margin of uncertainty, running from 1.42 to 3.08, and what gives the finding its footing is that this margin does not touch 1, since 1 would mean no difference between the groups.

In 2019, the same line of research followed 3,176 father and child pairs to age 18 and found more depressive symptoms in the young people whose fathers had lived with depression soon after the birth, with much of that path running through the maternal depression that came alongside. I do not tell this to blame anyone who fell ill, and I say that sentence out loud in the consultation. I tell it because it is the best argument I have for persuading a man to seek help, since treating what he feels is direct care for his child.

Sensitivity is not a gift, it is learned

What remains is the part that matters most to anyone who thinks they have missed the boat. In 2022, Renate Buisman and colleagues, at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, randomly assigned 73 men expecting their first child either to a brief video-feedback program, delivered during the pregnancy using the ultrasound images, or to a comparison group. The men who went through the program showed more sensitivity in interaction with their own baby after the birth. It is a small and recent study, and I say so plainly, but it supports what I see in practice, that paternal sensitivity is not an inborn talent, it is a skill that can be trained.

I say this often to one particular kind of father, the one who grew up with no one to copy. He arrives saying he cannot be what he never saw, and he is usually right about the past and wrong about the future. If the skill is learned, what was missing in the house he came from becomes a gap, not a sentence. I have watched men build, well into adulthood, a repertoire of care their own fathers never had, almost always with help and without hurry.

What I do in the office grows out of these findings put together, and it is less than fathers imagine. I call the father by name and offer him the chair beside me rather than the one in the corner, because where he sits tends to repeat the place he occupies at home. I ask which whole task he takes on alone, from start to finish, since helping in pieces keeps the adult in the position of assistant and teaches the child who to turn to. And I look after his mental health with the same seriousness I would give the mother’s, because a father in treatment is a more available father. None of this fits on one person, which is why I treat the home as a unit of care, not the father or the child in isolation.

The gesture I suggest to any father fits into ten minutes, and you can start today. Sit on the floor, let your child choose the game and follow whatever they do, without correcting, without teaching and without turning it into a lesson. If you feel like speaking, describe what you are seeing, something like you stacked them all up again. It looks small next to the size of the love you feel, and the difference lies exactly there, because children do not measure love by declaration, they measure it by repetition. Each of those ten minutes is a thread, and it is the sum of them that holds. None of this replaces the individual evaluation of whoever follows your family, and it is right beside that care that this conversation goes furthest.

Dr. Marcelo Gobbo Jr.
Family and Community Physician (CRM-MG 74.511 · RQE 69038), with a master’s degree in Psychology from the Federal University of Uberlândia and a Laboratory Associate appointment in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, based at the Program for Recovery and Community Health. He cares for neurodiverse families and people living with severe mental illness, in person and remotely.