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The United Nations Missions in the Democratic Republic of Congo have faced heavy allegations of peacekeeper-perpetrated sexual exploitation and abuse. Reports indicate that sexual encounters between members of peacekeeping forces and female civilians have resulted in the birth of children; however, no conclusive information on these children exists to date. This is the first study to explore the perspectives of youth who were fathered and abandoned by peacekeepers. We analysed semi-structured interviews with 35 peacekeeper-fathered children (PKFC) regarding their perceptions of family in light of their fathers’ absence. The results show that PKFC’s lack of knowledge about their fathers significantly impacts their self-conception and social identity. Not relying on paternal support was perceived to exacerbate poverty while the inability to uncover paternal roots and family ties presented a barrier to cultural integration. Although increasingly reliant on their maternal family, PKFC received limited care from their mothers’ kin networks, causing some to compare their upbringing to that of orphans. The resulting divergence between participants’ ideals of family and their subjective life experiences created cognitive dissonance which was reduced through a situational attribution of neglect. PKFC without support mechanisms engaged in wishful thinking about relationships to their unknown fathers and increased the value of searching for them. Derived from their hope to overcome hardship, they saw the pursuit of ideal-typical family relations as the route to happiness and financial security. Based on the emotional presence of their absent fathers, we discuss family and identity-related challenges for PKFC and make recommendations for positive change.HighlightsExplores the perspectives of children born of war through data collected with child and adolescent PKFC.Analyses family relations via qualitative interviews and visual research.Illustrates youth’s mental scripts of fatherhood and family life in the Democratic Republic of Congo.Identifies wishful thinking as a form of coping with father absence and related challenges in patrilineal societies.Adds to the limited knowledge about paternal orphans in Sub-Saharan Africa.

BackgroundThis qualitative study was prompted by limited literature and knowledge around the psychosocial barriers associated with father absence among young women in South Africa and the enablers for overcoming these barriers.AimThe aim was to explore the psychosocial barriers and enablers faced by young women because of father absence in South Africa.SettingThe setting of this study was the Central Business District of Pretoria in the city of Tshwane, South Africa.MethodsFollowing exploratory and descriptive qualitative research and Norman Garmezy’s resilient theory, six young women who met the predetermined inclusion criteria were recruited through purposive sampling to participate in this study. Thematic analysis strategy proposed by Braun and Clarke was used to analyse the data that were collected through semi-structured interviews. The study followed relevant ethical principles and ensured trustworthiness through the principles of credibility, dependability, transferability and confirmability.ResultsThe findings demonstrated that these women encounter several barriers, including emotional, financial and relationship issues, attributable to father absence from their early lives.ConclusionDespite the various barriers encountered by these women, they demonstrated the ability to overcome them, with their resilience found to be anchored in both individual and environmental factors such as family support, a strong belief in education and self-awareness.ContributionThis study contributes to a pool of literature by adding the barriers and enablers for managing the challenges of growing up with an absent father and amplifying a call to provide psychosocial support to them and their families.

Associations have been shown between father’s absence and menarcheal age, but most studies have focused on absence resulting from divorce, abandonment or death. Little research has been conducted to evaluate the effect on menarcheal age of paternal absence through migrant work. In a sample of 400 middle school students, this study examined the association between paternal migrant work and menarcheal age against a backdrop of extensive rural-to-urban migration in China. Data were collected through a self-reported questionnaire, including social-demographic characteristics, aspects of family relationships, information about father’s migrant work and age at menarche. After adjusting for BMI, parent marital status and perceived relationship with mother, lower self-perceived quality of father–daughter relationship (both ‘father present, relationship poor’ and ‘father absent, relationship poor’) and lower frequency of contact with the father were associated with higher odds for early menarche. These findings suggest that the assumption that father’s absence for work influences the timing of menarche needs to be examined in the context of the quality of the father–daughter relationship and paternal care, which appear to play a critical role in the timing of menarche. These findings also emphasize the importance of enhancing paternal involvement and improving father–daughter relationships in the development of appropriate reproductive strategy in daughters.

This study zeroes in on the issue of left-behind children and draws on data from the China Family Panel Studies surveys to examine the impacts of parental absence on child development in psychological, physical and cognitive domains. The indicators of child well-being selected include child physical health measured by their likelihood of being sick, psychological wellbeing measured by reported happiness scores, and children’s cognitive abilities measured by their performance in word and math tests. Parental absence was differentiated as both parents absent, father absent, mother absent and both parents present. The results confirm the importance of parental guardianship and care for child healthy development in all domains. Policy findings and implications are discussed and summarized at the end of the paper.

The literature on father absence is frequently criticized for its use of cross-sectional data and methods that fail to take account of possible omitted variable bias and reverse causality. We review studies that have responded to this critique by employing a variety of innovative research designs to identify the causal effect of father absence, including studies using lagged dependent variable models, growth curve models, individual fixed effects models, sibling fixed effects models, natural experiments, and propensity score matching models. Our assessment is that studies using more rigorous designs continue to find negative effects of father absence on offspring well-being, although the magnitude of these effects is smaller than what is found using traditional cross-sectional designs. The evidence is strongest and most consistent for outcomes such as high school graduation, children's social-emotional adjustment, and adult mental health.

Research suggests that South African youth use silence as a sign of respect and gratitude and to maintain family and kinship bonds. There has not been much research to help us better our understanding of this phenomenon. This paper explores the strategic use of silence in narratives of absent fathers collected from the Mpumalanga province. Twenty-one-hour, one-on-one, fieldworker-respondent, semi structured interviews in their local languages, were conducted with women aged 15–26 years old. Interviews were gender-matched, audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim and translated into English. Thematic, and some elements of discourse analysis, were used to analyse the data focusing on motivations behind silence in familial relationships. Findings show that motivations for upholding silence within the home were to show respect and gratitude, and avoid upsetting a bothersome mother. The dynamics of silence reported here are similar to those found in narratives of psychological distress and abuse among young South Africans. A novel theme was that of avoiding speaking with a chronically ill mother lest this made her condition worse and recovery difficult. This research suggests a need to equip young women with ways of expressing themselves within families without fear of being seen as disrespectful, ungrateful and a burden to others.

To address the problem of fathers' absence from children's lives and the difficulty of paternal engagement, especially among lower income families, government agencies have given increasing attention to funding father involvement interventions. Few of these interventions have yielded promising results. Father involvement research that focuses on the couple/coparenting relationship offers a pathway to support fathers' involvement while strengthening family relationships. Relevant research is reviewed and an exemplar is provided in the Supporting Father Involvement intervention and its positive effects on parental and parent-child relationships and children's outcomes. The article concludes with policy implications of this choice of target populations and the need to develop new strategies to involve fathers in the lives of their children.

Fathers have been an important source of child endurance and prosperity since the dawn of civilization, promoting adaptation to social rules, defining cultural meaning systems, teaching daily living skills, and providing the material background against which children developed; still, the recent reformulation in the role of the father requires theory-building. Paternal caregiving is rare in mammals, occurring in 3–5% of species, expresses in multiple formats, and involves flexible neurobiological accommodations to ecological conditions and active caregiving. Here, we discuss father contribution to resilience across development. Our model proposes three tenets of resilience – plasticity, sociality, and meaning – and discussion focuses on father-specific contributions to each tenet at different developmental stages; newborn, infant, preschooler, child, and adolescent. Father’s style of high arousal, energetic physicality, guided participation in daily skills, joint adventure, and conflict resolution promotes children’s flexible approach and social competence within intimate bonds and social groups. By expanding children’s interests, sharpening cognitions, tuning affect regulation, encouraging exploration, and accompanying the search for identity, fathers support the sense of meaning, enhancing the human-specific dimension of resilience. We end by highlighting pitfalls to paternal contribution, including absence, abuse, rigidity, expectations, and gender typing, and the need to formulate novel theories to accommodate the “involved dad.”

Past research shows that time spent in developmental care activities has been increasing in the United States over recent decades, yet little is known about how this increase is distributed across parents with different levels of education. Have children born into different socioeconomic groups been receiving increasingly equal developmental care from their parents, or is the distribution of parental time investment becoming more unequal? To answer this question, the author analyzed the American Heritage Time Use Study (1965–2013) and showed that the gap between high- and low-educated parents' time investment in developmental child care activities has widened. An increasing absence of fathers in households with low-educated mothers has exacerbated the trend. This study documents growing inequality in parental time inputs in developmentally salient child care activities in the United States.

In an observational study of 31,257 children we investigated the effects of paternal age at the time of the child’s birth, paternal absence and non-biological fathers on children’s health. Results are per 5 year change in paternal age. Older fathers were associated with lower rates of unintentional injuries, odds ratio (OR)=0.966, P=0.0027. There was a quadratic association between paternal age and risk of hospital admission, β=0.0121, P=0.0109, with minimum risk at paternal age 37.7. Absent fathers were associated with increased risk of hospital admission, OR=1.19, P<10-3, lower rates of complete immunizations to 9 months, OR=0.562, P<10-3, higher Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) difficulties scores: β=0.304, P=0.0024 (3 year olds), β>=0.697, P<10-3 (5 year olds). Non-biological fathers were associated with increased risk of unintentional injury, OR=1.16, P=0.0319 and hospital admission, OR=1.26, P=0.0166; lower rates of complete immunizations to 9 months, OR=0.343, P=0.0309 and higher SDQ difficulties scores: β=0.908, P<10-3.