This Father’s Day, a seismic shift is underway. On June 2, 2025, the Family Balance Act marked a new era, granting working fathers across the U.S. up to 12 weeks of paid paternity leave.
It’s a breakthrough moment, honoring well studied and documented crucial impact that fathers’ role plays in children’s lives and family bonds during kids’ formative years but also its long-term impact on health and wellbeing throughout their children’s adult lives.
While society celebrates fathers’ newfound freedom to be present with their newborns, one cannot help but ask: Are fathers equipped with the same emotional support, tools, and societal backing as mothers to navigate the complexities of parenting during these 12 weeks and beyond?
Alarming statistics highlight a troubling reality regarding modern fatherhood.
We have embraced that the involvement of fathers is important for the development and welfare of their children yet the impact from less-informed parenting of generations before us specifically on physical and emotional wellbeing of modern dad’s is less known. Specifically, unhealthy relationships with fathers have deeper consequences for sons (future fathers) than for daughters.
The Invisible Emotional Burden: Numbers Don’t Lie
A groundbreaking study in Developmental Psychobiology revealed that the amount of father involvement during childhood directly correlated with sons’ diurnal cortisol patterns nearly 30 years later.
Childhood trauma appears to have a particularly negative impact on males as the risk of suicide is higher for males than females in these circumstances.
This Father’s Day let’s highlight how a father’s own emotional readiness, shaped by his upbringing, influences his ability to be an engaged and present parent.
Researchers found that first-time fathers who had experienced childhood maltreatment had significantly higher levels of parenting stress compared to those who did not. This stress is a known risk factor for impaired early parenting and even child maltreatment perpetration, which can prolong the vicious cycle of negative impacts for several generations.
Here what is fascinating, the quality of relationships with your father goes beyond conditioning of your parental style; it impacts your pattern for success and life choices.
A study in the American Journal of Qualitative Research compellingly demonstrates that the absence of a father or a strong father figure neurobiologically impacts cognition, emotional regulation, and behavior, directly correlating with heightened risks of poverty, behavioral problems, substance use, and incarceration.
The memories, the unresolved traumas, and the unexamined relationship with their own fathers – these are not relics of the past that can be harmlessly stored away in our “mental attics” as emotional distress. They are active forces, measurable disadvantages that shape a man’s capacity to parent, his ability to manage stress, and his emotional and economic well-being.
This evidence underscores a critical point: for a father to leave a legacy of being present, engaged, and an effective parent, he cannot afford to ignore his own childhood narratives.
A Shift in Fatherhood Ideals: Evidence That Change is Possible
Over time, throughout Western countries there has been a shift in the ideals surrounding fatherhood which gives assurance that wounds of the past can be released to reduce the number of generational cycles that endure effects of harmful parenting styles of the past.
We likely can all relate to the description of the shift shared by Pleck E. and Pleck J. in “Fatherhood ideals in the United States: Historical dimensions.” The traditional view of a father as a moral teacher and disciplinarian gave space to the father’s role as the main breadwinner and later to a gender-role model and ‘buddy’, then shifted once more to the new modern model of nurturing, a co-parenting, father.
A qualitative exploration of intergenerational transmission on fathers’ discipline methods and involvement in child-rearing (Columbia Academic Commons, 2024) confirms an intergenerational shift towards more emotive, communicative, and contemporary fathering involvement, and a move towards constructive discipline methods.
Moreover, one in five stay-at-home parents in the U.S. were fathers as of 2021, compared to just 4% in 1989? The shifts in parenting as well as the rise of stay-at-home dads suggests that while patterns can be transmitted, there’s also potential for conscious change.
Supporting Fathers in Their Journey to Healthy Fatherhood
Despite the increasing acknowledgment of fathers’ roles in parenting, societal support for fathers as they navigate this journey remains limited. Limitation is not due to absence of supply but rather lack of demand. As a society we are yet to shift to accepting for a man to seek support resolving his emotional debt as a sign of purposeful masculinity rather than weakness.
One can see the overwhelming number of the typical Father’s Day cards celebrating the role of a provider: “Master of the Grill” or “King of Beers.”, promoting and celebrating father’s roles from a distant past. While these humorous stereotypes are harmless, they contribute to the perception that fathers should remain emotionally self-sufficient, without the need for support or guidance.
This unspoken stigma reinforced by cliché quotes in the social media creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: men steer away from openly discussing their “limitations” as parents and or engaging in self-awareness, presence, and meditation practices to empower themself to define their unburdened by the past. Thus, the cycle of unaddressed emotional patterns continues until the burden of socio-economic factors become unmanageable and they seek self-medication or support.
Seeking Wound Healing Transforms Fatherhood
As a clarity life coach dedicated to working exclusively with men, I focus on releasing the invisible strings, the inner child wounds, in my clients’ emotional, energetic, cognitive and shadow work programming that block the potentiality to living desired lives fully and on their terms. Not surprisingly, the emotional imprint of their fathers’ surfaces as the root cause to many limiting and sometimes damaging behavioral patterns that men experience in their business and family lives.
What many do not know is that the release of emotional language can be a very quick process (15 – 60 min) yet we guard our pain from exposure for years, concerned that the process of letting it all go will be just as painful as accumulating it.
This process of self-awareness and emotional healing is essential for professional growth, abundance liberation, and fostering stronger relationships with our children.
A Call to Action for Fathers
For new fathers or those preparing to become fathers, the call to action is clear: In order to break the cycle of generational trauma, they need to actively engage and re-write their childhood narrative not just for self-care but as an essential act of responsible fatherhood.
I hope that with more light on conclusions from research-backed studies we will witness a wide-spread acceptance of emotional self-care as an integral part of responsible fatherhood where impacts of parental actions are weighted across multiple generations to come.
An emotionally unburdened man knows that he has a choice to continue the patterns embracing the mistakes of the past or to become the legacy of the future. This is the transformation that is needed to truly embrace the new era of fatherhood.
Article Contributed by
Natasha Clower
Clarity Coach for Men | Best-Selling Author | MBA | Founder of P.E.A.K. Method
Free resources to father wounds liberation for men YouTube@NatashaClower
Ways to connect: NatashaClower.com
References:
- PubMed National Library of Medicine. “Long-term effects of father involvement in childhood on their son’s physiological stress regulation system in adulthood.” Developmental Psychobiology, 63(6), e22152 PMCID: PMC8923429 Epub 2021 Jun 14.
- Journal of Interpersonal Violence (Önder, A. & Turan, A., 2023). “Does Gender Really Matter: Childhood Trauma, Trait Anger, and Suicide Risk in Early Adulthood.”
- Granner, J., Lee, S. J., Burns, J., Herrenkohl, T. (2023). “Childhood maltreatment history and trauma-specific predictors of parenting stress in new fathers.” Infant Mental Health Journal 44(1).
- Wallace, P. A. (2020). “Parental Experiences of Men Raised Without Fathers or Father Figures: A Phenomenological Study.” American Journal of Qualitative Research, 2024 Vol. 8 No. 2, pp 63-84.
- Pleck, E., & Pleck, J. “Fatherhood ideals in the United States: Historical dimensions.” In: Lamb, M., Editor. The Father’s Role in Child Development (3rd edition). New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997.
- University of Columbia. A qualitative exploration of the intergenerational transmission on fathers’ discipline methods and involvement in child rearing. Columbia Academic Commons. May 23 2024.
- Pew Research Center. “Almost 1 in 5 stay-at-home parents in the U.S. are dads.” Published: August 3, 2023.
