It's Friday, February 6, 2026.

I'm Albert Mueller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

A recent study undertaken by researchers at Pennsylvania State University makes a pretty astounding claim,

and that is that the interaction of

biological fathers with infants may have effects that exceed some of the interactions of mothers

with infants. Now, I recognize we could be in all kinds of difficult terrain here, and frankly,

I'm in no position to tell you

whether this research is conclusive.

I have a larger worldview purpose in bringing this up.

Ellen Berry reporting for the Times tells us, quote,

for a study published recently in the journal Health Psychology,

the scientists observed three-way interactions

between 10-month-old infants, their fathers and their mothers,

and then checked in on the families when the children were two and seven.

They found that fathers who were less attentive to their 10-month-olds were likely to have trouble co-parenting, instead withdrawing or competing with mothers for the child's attention.

And at age seven, the children of those fathers were more likely to have markers of poor heart or metabolic

health, such as inflammation and high blood sugar. A lot of it came down to how fathers behaved

with these infants in what were described as, quote, three-way interactions. And they started

seeing how this has an effect. One of the researchers said, quote, we of course

expected that family dynamics, everybody in the family, fathers and mothers would impact child

development. But in this case, he says it was only fathers. Okay. So again, there is no claim here

that fathers have more impact on the child's health over time than the mother.

...