In honor of Father’s Day coming up this weekend, our next segment is all about dads.
Now, in general, in the academic world, there’s been much more research done on men than women in almost every area, except for one: Parenting.
When it comes to mothers and fathers, not many researchers have taken a close look at dads.
That’s one of the reasons Jennifer Mascaro decided to study dads in some of her latest research. She’s a biological anthropologist at Emory University, and she did a study to find out how dads interact with their children and if it’s different when it comes to boys and girls.
This is the first study to combine the brain scans of fathers with behavioral data collected as they interacted with their children.
Mascaro explains most of it, but basically, they found that fathers with really young children — they were mostly ages 1 and 2 — interacted and spoke quite differently with their daughters than with their sons.
And these little boys may be getting the short end of the stick.
