Paternal Parenting Behaviors and Children Development in Western Rural China

Understanding that fathers’ parenting activities improve children development, recently fathers’ roles in social and family activities have changed. Despite the increasing attention to fathers’ parenting behaviors globally, little is known about paternal parenting in rural China. Using a rich panel dataset of 1,145 infants aged 17-48 months from rural China, we describe the prevalence of paternal parenting behaviors and the correlation between fathers’ parenting behaviors with children’s cognitive and socio-emotional development. It’s worth mentioning that children’s cognitive development was measured using different scales according to their development stage: the Bayley Scales of Infant Development-Third Edition (BSID-III) at 6–24 months, and the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-Fourth Edition (WPPSI-IV) at 52–85 months. Overall we found that fathers’ parenting behaviors in rural China need to be improved considering the positive correlations between paternal behaviors with sampling children’s development outcomes. Specifically, less than a quarter of fathers had told stories, sung songs or played with toys with their children together in the past three days. Fathers’ reading books (picture books) with their children significantly positively relates to children's higher cognitive skills, and fathers singing songs and playing games outdoors with children positively correlates to the better social-emotional development of children. Based on our findings, we suggest providing more parenting courses targeting improving fathers’ awareness and participation in parenting activities in rural low-income areas. Additionally, creating more hometown working opportunities for fathers whose children aged 0-6 priority would benefit these children best