THAT'S MEN:How well do social fathers do compared to biological fathers? asks Padraig O'Morain
THE TERM "social father" refers to a man who is living with a woman and her children, but who is not the biological father of the children.
How well do social fathers do compared to biological fathers? A new piece of research from the US suggests that they do better than you might expect if you assume they wouldn't have the same interest in the children as the biological father.
Indeed, some social fathers who are married to the children's mothers seem to out-do the biological fathers when it comes to parenting skills.
The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Studytracked the parenting of 5,000 children from birth to five years of age in 20 large cities.
Most of the children had been born to unmarried parents. About one-third of births in Ireland are outside marriage, so the research, reported in the Journal of Marriage and Familyis particularly relevant to us.
The basic finding was that married social fathers were at least as good as, and sometimes better than, married or cohabiting biological fathers, when it came to parenting skills.
The married social fathers were more involved with the children and were likely to take on more of the parenting responsibilities.
The mothers also trusted them more than they did the biological fathers to take care of the children.
In particular, the mothers said married social fathers were far more co-operative than the biological fathers when it came to parenting. They saw the social fathers as particularly good parents.
Marriage got a boost in the study too: married social fathers displayed better parenting behaviours than social fathers who were living with, but not married to, the mothers.
The researchers concluded that when it comes to parenting, marriage provides a good indication of how well a man will look after children who are not his own.
What are we to make of all this?
First of all, about three- quarters of the children were born to unmarried mothers. These mothers and their children are described in the research as "fragile families", because they are more at risk than others of breaking up or living in poverty.
Therefore, it could be argued that they are not representative of the average or traditional family.
Secondly, we don't know what the results would be if all the children had been born to married parents.
And thirdly, we have to take into account the huge cultural differences between the United States and Ireland.
That's all very well, but the fact remains that the outcome of this study is very good for social fathers and perhaps rather annoying for biological fathers. It may be that the commitment of some biological fathers of children in the study was low to begin with. On the other hand, a man who is marrying the mother of children who are not his own has to make a choice that he wants to be a social father to these children.
In other words, the level of commitment of social fathers may be relatively high to begin with. Some unmarried biological fathers may never have wanted to have children in the first place.
It may also be that the mothers "select" the social fathers for marriage more carefully than they might have selected the biological fathers, especially where a child was the result of an unplanned pregnancy.
Research some years ago among young, unmarried mothers in Dublin found that in many cases they remained unmarried because they saw the biological fathers as totally unsuitable partners. They didn't have the sense to avoid getting pregnant, but at least they had the sense not to let them get their feet under the table.
None of this, of course, means that children are ecstatic about the arrival of their mother's husband into their lives. It can take a lot of work by the social father to gain acceptance from the children.
Yet if this research is applicable across cultures and across countries, its findings are a cause for optimism given the prevalence of childbirth outside marriage and, indeed, of marriage breakdown with the subsequent creation of "new" families.
And it also seems to suggest that marriage is a good indicator of how well children will be treated.
Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor