Connecting Fathers: Fathers' Impact on Adult Children's Social Networks. 2023

Christopher Soria, and Leora Lawton
Department of Demography, 1439University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA.

We examine the relationship between having an emotionally close and active father in an adult child's social network compared to having a father who is not close, or a father who was not named. We hypothesize that fathers provide both essential and important contributions to their children's psychosocial development, and those contributions continue into active adulthood. Using the 2015 UC Berkeley Social Networks Study (UCNets), we find that adult children who name an emotionally close father in their network tend to have more males as social ties, but not more female ties. We conclude that fathers continue to play an important and active role in their children's lives long after childhood.

UI MeSH Term Description Entries
D008297 Male Males
D005220 Fathers Male parents, human or animal. Father
D005260 Female Females
D006801 Humans Members of the species Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens,Man (Taxonomy),Human,Man, Modern,Modern Man
D000328 Adult A person having attained full growth or maturity. Adults are of 19 through 44 years of age. For a person between 19 and 24 years of age, YOUNG ADULT is available. Adults
D016487 Parenting Performing the role of a parent by care-giving, nurturance, and protection of the child by a natural or substitute parent. The parent supports the child by exercising authority and through consistent, empathic, appropriate behavior in response to the child's needs. PARENTING differs from CHILD REARING in that in child rearing the emphasis is on the act of training or bringing up the children and the interaction between the parent and child, while parenting emphasizes the responsibility and qualities of exemplary behavior of the parent.
D060756 Social Networking Individuals connected by family, work or other interests. It also includes connectivity facilitated by computer-based communications. Social Networks,Network, Social,Networking, Social,Social Network
D032721 Adult Children Children who have reached maturity or the legal age of majority. Adult Offspring,Children, Adult,Offspring, Adult,Adult Daughters,Adult Sons,Adult Daughter,Adult Son,Daughter, Adult,Daughters, Adult,Son, Adult,Sons, Adult

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