With Father’s Day right around the corner, I find myself once again reflecting on the love, care, and guidance I’ve been shown by father over the 27 years of my life. I certainly would not be who I am now without his unconditional and unceasing concern and constant desire to ensure my well-being and good, even into adulthood.
As a child, my father expressed his love and care for my well-being in a variety of ways, from quality time, to providing my insightful guidance and care, to even more particular expressions.
For example, as a child (and perhaps as an adult), I was quite obsessed with Jurassic Park. This meant that I sought out to find every piece of Jurassic Park media or memorabilia I could find in the untamed jungled that was the mid-2000s internet. This exploration of the web often took familiar form: I would pull up a chair next to my father’s desk and we would explore every nook and cranny of the online world relating to Jurassic Park. Sometimes he would find my vintage Jurassic Park toys on eBay, while other times, we would simply just enjoy finding out some obscure piece of trivia about the franchise.
As I grew older, my father’s care for my well-being expressed itself in new ways. When, in late middle school and early high school, I became curious about studying theology in the Catholic tradition, both he and my mother were so committed to fostering this interest that I’m pretty sure they found every book, introduced me to every priest they knew who might engage with me on theology, and encouraged me to deep dive into my interests in every way possible. Throughout college and graduate school, when this interest matured into a real, life-long academic commitment to the study of the intellectual history of politics, law, and theology in Catholicism, this encouragement continued.
Even more, my father, still ever concerned about supporting my interest, realizing it brings me real joy, has developed an incredibly accurate eye for clocking books that might interest me at a bookstore. To this day, I know that when my father sends me a text with a picture of some obscure academic press book, I know he’s picked out something great, knowing it will further my own interests and our own mutual enrichment.
Besides quality time, support of my interests, guidance in life, and affection, listening has been perhaps an unusual way I’ve felt the love of my father. If you were to ask my parents what’s the highlight of any trip we take as a family, they will tell you it will either be a museum or some sort of cultural or historical site. At said site, they will also tell you that I will talk their ear off non-stop about some painting, statute, or old building. They aren’t passive or bored tourists (and I hope I’m not particularly annoying!), but rather engaged interlocutors. I cannot count the number of times I’ve had reflective and profound conversations with both of my parents, or even just my father, in such circumstances. These conversations have led to new insights for us both, either about the place we’re visiting or some larger principle or lesson in life.
These are but a few vignettes of my father’s love for his son, but as I reflect on Father’s Day, I find myself struck by how distinctive his demonstration of care and concern really is, and how critical it is to see the character and conscience of a father modeled up close. There is something irreplaceable about it. And the research agrees.
This reflection is not merely anecdotal. It is also measurable.
A growing body of evidence makes clear that fathers occupy a genuinely unique role in the lives of their children, one that is not simply duplicated by the presence of another caring adult. A meta-analysis of 34 studies encompassing more than 37,000 participants, published in Marriage and Family Review by professor William Jeynes found statistically significant effects tied specifically to fathering: stronger psychological well-being, greater emotional resilience, improved social relationships, and higher academic achievement, for both boys and girls, across different ages. Fathers, research further shows, are particularly inclined to encourage risk-taking while simultaneously ensuring safety, a combination that builds the kind of confidence children need to tackle unfamiliar terrain and new transitions.
The downstream effects of an engaged father are hard to overstate. Children who report a high-quality relationship with their father are measurably less likely to experience depression. Boys raised with involved fathers show significantly lower propensities toward criminal behavior. Girls with engaged dads are far less likely to experience early pregnancy.
These are not marginal findings. They are consistent, well-documented, and consequential. Fathers are not, as the research makes plain, simply a “second parent.” They are something specific.
Even in the earliest years, the texture of a father’s involvement shapes a child’s development in ways we are only beginning to fully understand. Fathers who nurture and play with their babies raise children with stronger language development and higher IQs. The particular kind of play fathers tend to engage in, rougher and more physically dynamic, actually helps children learn to regulate their own emotions and manage aggressive impulses in socially appropriate ways.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, recognizing all of this, released a landmark clinical report recently, its first on fathers in over a decade, affirming the unique contributions of fathers to healthy child development and actively encouraging pediatricians to involve and support dads more intentionally.
What is encouraging is that more young men seem to be taking notice. In contrast to attitudes prevalent just a decade ago, a 2024 Pew Research Center study found that among adults aged 18 to 34, men were more interested in becoming parents than women: 57% of young men hoped to become fathers someday, compared to 45% of young women.
Developmental psychologist Erik Erikson argued that the key to adult fulfillment is what he called “generativity,” the concern for establishing and guiding the next generation. Fatherhood is one of the most direct ways to realize that need. It is not a detour from meaning. It often produces it.
None of this surprises me. I have watched my father demonstrate it for as long as I can remember.
What the data captures in aggregate, I have had the privilege of seeing lived out in the particular: in quiet sacrifices, a steady presence, a hand extended in both help and celebration.
On Father’s Day, that is worth celebrating. And it is worth defending.