A recent study from Northwestern fatherhood expert Dr. Craig Garfield was published May 4 in JAMA Pediatrics. The study was focused on paternal mortality, and there was a silver lining to the findings: fatherhood appears to be protective.
The researchers looked at the death rate for fathers compared to men who were not fathers and found that at every age from 25-59, men who are fathers died at a lower rate than same-aged men who are not fathers.
But why?
More men would have died at each age if they were not fathers, the study found. Dr. Garfield said it could be that dads are maybe trying to avoid risky situations or are “cleaning up their act” because they now believe they have something more to live for as a dad. They don’t know exactly, but this research suggests these are the sorts of questions they can now start researching.
I had a chance to learn more in this interview.
Can you share a little bit about how and why this study was conducted?
In the last 5 to 8 years there has been really important work being done on maternal mortality and death that could’ve been prevented and are due to pregnancy related complications. The maternal mortality review committees are responsible for a lot of that success where in when a mother dies within a year after the birth of their child there is a very detailed deep dive into that loss. The hope is to identify preventive causes and also take a public health perspective on why this mother died. You can imagine the implications for that child of the loss of a mother are huge.
In my clinical experience where I’ve been a neonatal hospitalist for over 25 years, I’ve had more experiences where it’s actually the father of the new baby who has died rather than the mother. And I realize no one is looking at fathers but from a Pediatric perspective, where I focus on the health and well-being of the child within the family, the loss of either parent is devastating.
So because of the work we have been doing looking at the role of fathers and families and the prams for Dad‘s survey we started in Georgia and now have expanded 211 additional states, we had a relationship with the department of health vital records in Georgia. So that’s why we chose Georgia as a pilot state to see how could you actually get the data on fathers and deaths within five years after the birth of the child.
We hope that this research and defining the term paternal mortality will help scientist and public health practitioners think about the loss of a father in a family soon after the birth of a baby. What we did in Georgia could easily be reproduced in other states and then combined to look across the country. Since this publication has come out we have heard from colleagues in Australia and Japan and the United Kingdom that they are also interested in this type of population health approach to holistic family health and well-being.
What are some possible hypotheses for why fatherhood has a protective effect?
This really is the first study of its kind to take birth certificate data on all births in Georgia in one year and then look at death certificate data for the next five years and find fathers who are on both birth and then death certificates. As this is public health administrative data we cannot point towards any causes or direct relationships, that is an important thing to recognize with this sort of data. However, it is very clear from this data that fatherhood is protective from ages 25 to 59 because we see that when compared to nonfathers at the same age ages, the death rate for men who are fathers is lower than that of men who are not fathers. Our prior research has shown that fathers do try and clean up their act, avoid risky behaviors, and feel responsibility to be around for this new baby. It may be that that leads to some protective aspects. Certainly this is an area ripe for future research.
What are some of the implications of this study?
There are two clear implications from this research. First, from a healthcare system perspective, ensuring that fathers have access to healthcare and health providers is really important. In this way we can enact some of the preventive steps to support fathers as they transition to this role with new responsibilities. We can help Dad be as healthy as a possibly can. Second, from a public health perspective, we can think about how to change our systems to be inclusive of not only fathers but to think holistically about families and avoid simple dyadic conceptualizations of just a mother and a child in a family. Certainly there are families that are like that but there are even more families where we may be missing the inclusion of a key family member namely the father.
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