What difference can fathers make? Early paternal absence compromises Peruvian children's growth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Considerable evidence suggests that fathers' absence from home has a negative short- and long-term impact on children's health, psychosocial development, cognition and educational experience. We assessed the impact of father presence during infancy and childhood on children's height-for-age z-score (HAZ) at 5 years old. We conducted secondary data analysis from a 15-year cohort study (Young Lives) focusing on one of four Young Lives countries (Peru, n = 1821). When compared with children who saw their fathers on a daily or weekly basis during infancy and childhood, children who did not see their fathers regularly at either period had significantly lower HAZ scores (-0.23, P = 0.0094) after adjusting for maternal age, wealth and other contextual factors. Results also suggest that children who saw their fathers during childhood (but not infancy) had better HAZ scores than children who saw their fathers in infancy and childhood (0.23 z-score, P = 0.0388). Findings from analyses of resilient children (those who did not see their fathers at either round but whose HAZ > -2) show that a child's chances of not being stunted in spite of paternal absence at 1 and 5 years old were considerably greater if he or she lived in an urban area [odds ratio (OR) = 9.3], was from the wealthiest quintile (OR = 8.7) and lived in a food secure environment (OR = 3.8). Interventions designed to reduce malnutrition must be based on a fuller understanding of how paternal absence puts children at risk of growth failure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".