The Relationship between Father–Child Rough-and-Tumble Play and Children’s Working Memory

Father contribution to human resilience

Fathers have been an important source of child endurance and prosperity since the dawn of civilization, promoting adaptation to social rules, defining cultural meaning systems, teaching daily living skills, and providing the material background against which children developed; still, the recent reformulation in the role of the father requires theory-building. Paternal caregiving is rare in mammals, occurring in 3-5% of species, expresses in multiple formats, and involves flexible neurobiological accommodations to ecological conditions and active caregiving. Here, we discuss father contribution to resilience across development. Our model proposes three tenets of resilience - plasticity, sociality, and meaning - and discussion focuses on father-specific contributions to each tenet at different developmental stages; newborn, infant, preschooler, child, and adolescent. Father's style of high arousal, energetic physicality, guided participation in daily skills, joint adventure, and conflict resolution promotes children's flexible approach and social competence within intimate bonds and social groups. By expanding children's interests, sharpening cognitions, tuning affect regulation, encouraging exploration, and accompanying the search for identity, fathers support the sense of meaning, enhancing the human-specific dimension of resilience. We end by highlighting pitfalls to paternal contribution, including absence, abuse, rigidity, expectations, and gender typing, and the need to formulate novel theories to accommodate the "involved dad."

Proximate and Ultimate Mechanisms of Human Father-child Rough-and-tumble Play

The aim of this contribution is to attempt to understand the adaptive functions of father-child rough-and-tumble play (RTP) in humans. We first present a synthesis of the known proximate and ultimate mechanisms of peer-peer RTP in mammals and compare human parent-child RTP with peer-peer RTP. Next, we examine the possible biological adaptive functions of father-child RTP in humans, by comparing paternal behavior in humans versus biparental animal species, in light of the activation relationship theory and the neurobiological basis of fathering. Analysis of analogies reveals that the endocrine profile of fathers is highly variable across species, compared to that of mothers. This can be interpreted as fathers' evolutionary adjustment to specific environmental conditions affecting the care of the young. Given the high unpredictability and risk-taking features of RTP, we conclude that human adult-child RTP appears to have a biological adaptive function, one of 'opening to the world'.

Play fighting and the development of the social brain: The rat's tale

The benefits gained by young animals engaging in play fighting have been a subject of conjecture for over a hundred years. Progress in understanding the behavioral development of play fighting and the underlying neurobiology of laboratory rats has produced a coherent model that sheds light on this matter. Depriving rats of typical peer-peer play experience during the juvenile period leads to adults with socio-cognitive deficiencies and these are correlated with physiological and anatomical changes to the neurons of the prefrontal cortex, especially the medial prefrontal cortex. Detailed analysis of juvenile peer play has shown that using the abilities needed to ensure that play fighting is reciprocal is critical for attaining these benefits. Therefore, unlike that which was posited by many earlier hypotheses, play fighting does not train specific motor actions, but rather, improves a skill set that can be applied in many different social and non-social contexts. There are still gaps in the rat model that need to be understood, but the model is well-enough developed to provide a framework for broader comparative studies of mammals from diverse lineages that engage in play fighting.